a rock in the sea
by
Douglas Messerli
Dudley
Murphy (writer and director), performed by Bessie Smith St. Louis Blues /
1929
Dudley
Murphy’s 1929 two-reeler is the only film in which the great blues singer,
Bessie Smith appeared, a early cinema certainly worth watching for its brief 16-minute
duration. In 2006 this short work was included in The National Film Registry.
How the film came about is open to
question, some arguing that its composer W. C. Handy and Kenneth G. Adams
created a scenario for the musical which they then submitted to RKO, an amalgam
company made up of the FBO studio and the Keith-Albee-Orpheum chain of vaudeville
theaters. Murphy, who worked previously for FBO, would have a natural choice
for the director.
Yet Murphy himself argued in his memoir
that he had acquired the rights to Handy’s work and then convinced the composer
to create a special arrangement just for Smith.
In a sense it doesn’t truly matter since
the work Murphy and Smith together created took film musical theater in
entirely new directions from the Vitaphone originals of 1926. The early films
were simply face-on sound recordings by noted performers, but here, for one of
the first times—as critic Daniel Egan explains it—“Microphones were more
sensitive, cameramen returned to tracking and crane shots, and editors could
insert closeups and reaction shots without disturbing the soundtrack. Writers
and directors became more adventurous as well.”
Basically, this film is a dramatization of
Handy’s long song, centered on the blues-like heart of the work, with Smith fresh
off of her 1925 hit of the same song with its famous central lyrics, “My man’s
got a heart like a rock in the sea,” surrounded by the passages in the habanera
rhythm—providing it with what Jelly Roll Morton described as a “Spanish tinge.”
The tango-like rhythm is played in the
introduction and the bridge in which, after being double-timed by her boyfriend
(dancer Jimmy Mordecai) as he has ruthlessly taken up with another woman
(Isabel Washington), while Smith, suffering for her boyfriend’s sleights makes
her way to the local bar, where she stands drinking a beer where the patrons,
performed by the Hall Johnson Choir, James P. Johnson at piano, and Thomas Morris
and Joe Smith on cornet.
After repeating the lyrics at the heart
of the song, the choristers sing and dance up a storm before Jimmy the Pimp
arrives, seemingly to apologize to Smith for his bad behavior, romancing her
with a slow dance which gives him the opportunity to grab her garter and steel
her money before turning to the patrons and grandly tapping out a dance as he
parades off.
Whether Handy’s work is a traditional
blues song or not— T-Bone
Walker commented about the piece, "You can't dress up the blues... I'm not
saying that 'Saint Louis Blues' isn't fine music you understand. But it just
isn't blues"—its combination of jagged syncopation and spiritual-derived
songs made it the perfect song for Ethel Waters, the first woman to sing it in
public; Waters, in turn, declared she learned the song from Charles Anderson, a
popular female impersonator, who performed the song as early as 1914, the year
Handy issued it.
Yet, as she did with many a song, Bessie
Smith made it all her own, breaking off the ends of syllables as if her heart
were battling with the alcohol she was drinking to drown the lyrics somewhere down in her deep sea of a stomach.
Director Murphy quickly became known in
his career for his high experimentation, first directing The Soul of the
Cypress (1921), about the Orpheus myth before turning to Danse Macabre (1922),
featuring Adolph Bolm, Olin Howland, and Ruth Page. Also, before St. Louis
Blues, he paired with the French artist Fernand Léger for Ballet mécanique
(1924), and later directed Black and Tan (1929, with Duke Ellington and
his Orchestra), and Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1933, starring
Paul Robeson), another National Film Registry choice.
At the end of his life, from 1940 through
the 1960s, Murphy owned and ran the Malibu hotel, Holiday House, designed by
the great architect Richard Neutra.
Los
Angeles, July 21, 2020
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (July 2020).
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