Some years ago I invited guest writers to the blog, and published two pieces, one by Sofia Åkerberg and one by Barry Putterman. Now Barry is back with a new piece, about music, music videos, cartoons, and childhood memories, mixing it all together. Barry, who lives in New York, has previously written the book On Television and Comedy: Essays on Style, Theme, Performer, and Writer (1995), essays about Peter Bogdanovich and George Roy Hill to be found in American Directors (1983, edited by the late Jean-Pierre Coursodon), and earlier this year he published Pack Up Your Troubles: Some American Films from 1932, a massive three-volume project about Hollywood cinema in the year of 1932. His piece for me is less massive, and more autobiographical, so let's get on with it. I have decided to leave it as he wrote it so you will get the full Putterman experience, not conformed to my own style guide, such as it is.
One Has My Name – Scopitone
Recently, after finally getting a
respectable computer, I decided to take the plunge and begin exploring the
haphazard encyclopedia of movies and music known as YouTube. And the experience
soon turned into a stream of consciousness exercise where one stray thought
search led to the computer suggesting similar variations that in turn triggered
related thoughts that ultimately expanded into the kind of endless parade of
free associational connections that illustrates the way that the sights and
sounds of movies and music become poetically attached in the psyche to two
other m words, memory and mystery. There is no telling where the links in these
chains will lead you since, as Bernstein tells Thompson in CITIZEN KANE just
before recounting the image of a mystery woman he saw for one second on a ferry
boat, a fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he wound, and
they tend to reach the surface of your mind through unpredictable stimuli.
As a
child I was devoted to the “Rocky and Bullwinkle” television cartoon series and
faithfully watched the episodes in rerun for as long as they remained on the
air to the result that even now I can recite long passages of dialogue from the
stories using the same inflections that were used by the voice actors. Through
the years, experience has given me a deeper understanding of the cultural
allusions embedded in the jokes and the storylines but there were always a few
free-floating tidbits that while continuing to be funny remained inexplicable. For
instance, there was the singing competition for the affections of the 6-foot
Metal Munching Moon Mice between Bullwinkle and Boris Badenov that had Boris
singing excruciatingly awful parodies of rock and roll while Bullwinkle
answered with what sounded like ridiculously antiquated lyrics from actual
songs. He only sang two-line snatches of the lyrics, but they were strange and
they stuck in my memory even though I had no context in which to understand
them on a broader level. But on YouTube it only took a short stroll through
connecting sites to reveal original 1915 recordings of “Auntie Skinner’s
Chicken Dinner” and “There Must Be Little Cupids in the Briny.” Still, while the
mystery within the memory is inevitable when connected to history that precedes
your birth, it can also be retained from events you experienced in real time.
In 1965 a record called “One Has My Name (the
Other Has My Heart)” by Barry Young hit the Top 40 radio station I listened to.
Young was a completely unknown singer who had one distinguishing
characteristic, he sounded almost exactly like Dean Martin. The song was a
country and western tune that had been a big hit for Jimmy Wakely in 1948 and
told a typical C&W tale of a person tragically trapped in an emotional
cul-de-sac, this time a man who is married to one woman but in love with
another. The Wakely record had a straightforward vocal set to the traditional fiddle
and steel guitar backing of its genre. But Dot Records, a company that
specialized in mainstream cover versions, accompanied Young’s vocal with a
strings and chorus backing in an arrangement that imitated Martin’s then
current run of hits resulting in a record that sounded as if it was Dino’s most
recent release.
The ploy worked. “One Has My Name” became a
big hit. But the suspicion that this was a Dean Martin record in disguise never
quite left the popular imagination. There were pictures of Barry Young on
record covers so the theory that this was a hoax along the lines of The Four
Seasons releasing a version of Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright” as
The Wonder Who was discarded. But Young never appeared on any of the major popular
music television shows to perform and, sadly, he died of a brain abscess in
December of 1966 and so never established an identity beyond somebody whose
voice sounded like Dean Martin’s.
The mystery of Barry Young remained with me
until I stumbled over a YouTube site called Vintage Video Clips that advertised
a performance by Young of the song, so I quickly clicked on it in eager
anticipation. But I was entirely unprepared for what I was about to see.
As the opening strains of the record fill
the soundtrack, we immediately understand that this isn’t going to be a visual
document of a live performance but rather a narrative film dramatization as we
see what amounts to an establishing shot of the song’s story. In the foreground
Young is seated on a park bench between two women. The woman to his right is
chicly dressed, exudes the sophisticated hauteur of a fashion model, and has a
small dog on her lap. The woman to his right is more primly attired, is
scrunching up her face in concentration on her knitting and is indicated as
Young’s wife by a literal ball and chain to which they are both attached at the
ankle. Indeed, the elaborated insistence on this metaphor is sledgehammered
home by the additional layer of irony of having the words “Ball and Chain”
printed on the ball.
The comic overdetermination of the plot in
the foreground is then set against a painted backdrop in the rear and the
clashing spaces of foreground clutter and background artifice shot with such flat
compression that it all but shouts to the viewer that there is nothing in the
off-screen space besides empty sound stage.
As Young begins lip-synching to the record
he faces directly into the camera performing for the viewing audience, pausing
only once to flirtatiously glance at the other woman during the first two lines
of the lyrics. Then, in a close shot of him, Young’s face takes on a look of
childish disgust as he turns toward his wife while telling us that she has
brown eyes, which leads to two intense closeups almost worthy of Sergio Leone
as the wife’s eyes are contrasted with the blue eyes of the other woman. A
return to the master shot has Young and the wife both glancing down at the ball
and chain as he sings that he is tied to her which is followed by a repetition
of his flirtatious glance with accompanying tie straightening gesture as he
sings that he is true to the other woman.
Without transition, the scene shift’s to
Young’s home. He is still seated and singing directly into the camera but is
now at his kitchen table and is dressed in a casual sweater rather than a
jacket and tie. The wife is standing, indeed dancing behind him in a bright
housecoat and with a few curlers attached to her short hair in a half-hearted
attempt to denote drabness as she angrily slams a coffee cup, a coffee pot and
a box of Wheaties down on the table and Young winces as they land although the
only sound that the audience hears continues to be that of the record that he is
lip-synching for us. As the wife sits down at the table with an expression of
mopey resignation, Young finally rises and the camera follows him as he moves from
his seat at the center of the table to the left-hand corner of the kitchen setting.
He is finishing up the first verse of the song by reiterating his dilemma in
reverse order, now saying that one has his heart while the other has his name. And
as his voice mentions the other woman, we suddenly see her dancing around in an
unestablished location only to have it succeeded by a return to the wife in the
kitchen with Young no longer present as she whirls about, setting the table for
a different meal. These two shots at first seem only to correspond to the mentioning
of the women in the lyrics but it then turns out that they are flash forwards into
the next sequence.
As the chorus takes up the opening lines of
the second, and almost identical verse, we see that the other woman had been
dancing in her plush apartment, a stage setting once again accompanied by a
painted backdrop, this time of a city at night. Young is also in the apartment,
seated on the couch next to the small dog, now in formal attire but still
facing forward toward the camera waiting for the chorus to end the first two
lines of lyrics where he will pick up the singing of the story. The wife is not
in the apartment but remains in the shot as the apartment setting takes up only
about two thirds of the frame where it is cut off by a wall on the other side
of which is the wife in the kitchen, thus artificially creating the illusion of
a split screen.
The wife is wearing a different dress and as
she sets the table, checks her non-existent wristwatch and mimes distress
regarding the non-appearance of her husband as Young resumes singing while
stealing glances at his alluring companion as she abets her mating dance by
spraying the couch with perfume from an atomizer while in the kitchen the wife
is spraying the table with air freshener. The apartment then takes up the
entire screen in a tighter shot as the woman approaches Young, picks up and
hands him the dog, suggestively parts the long slit in her dress exposing her
undergarment and then slinks down next to him where the dog had been, revealing
her bare leg which the camera slowly pans in response to Young’s gaze.
But as quickly as that movement finishes,
the scene returns to the kitchen and Young is back sitting at the table while
still singing to us, this time wearing a different colored sweater (all three
characters seem to alternate bright reds and blues in their apparel). The wife is
now standing in front of the table ironing a shirt at an ironing board while
wearing an embroidered dress that accents her perky rather than sensual
personality. Alarmed at the results of her ironing, she dances over to Young
who again rises as she places the shirt against his chest and looks to the
audience with an expression of comic chagrin.
Finally, as he reaches the final two lines
of the lyrics, the only revision from the first verse, where he states that if
he could do it over again he would also be married to the woman he loves, Young
is now seen on the balcony of the other woman’s apartment. They are facing each
other and he is still in the same formal attire but she is in a less suggestive
dress as they return inside to a candlelit dinner, blowing out the candles to
simulate a fade to black as the music on the soundtrack ends.
While retrieving my jaw from underneath the
desk I ventured to reassemble my wits and make sense of what I had just
witnessed. Watching a narrative version of a popular song made in the mid-1960s
was astonishing enough, but a film that illustrated emotional conditions with
such strenuously literalized metaphors was practically unheard of outside of
animated cartoons. But ultimately, the most radical departure was that within a
culture that insists on advertising aspirational ambitions as visionary dreams
and an aesthetic that comfortingly telegraphs representations of dreams via distorted
focus, oblique camera angles and slow motion, ONE HAS MY NAME bluntly documents
with slam-bang compression the continuously disorienting shifts in time and
space and the disquieting sense of simultaneously existing inside and outside
of narrative events that characterize an actual dream state. (You can watch it here.)
So now the mystery changed from the nature
of the performer to the conditions of the performance. Who made this film,
under what circumstances and for what audience? Vintage Video Clips provided no
context but there was evidence of a title card at the front of the film that,
despite an attempt at erasure, still flashed for a fraction of a second. And a
search for an alternative posting of the film on YouTube provided the one-word
answer, Scopitone.
Scopitone, it turns out, was the 1960s
iteration of the 1940s Soundies. That is, visual presentations of popular
recordings made to be seen on video jukeboxes. There were individual gems among
the Soundies but they generally suffered from not only World War II material
shortages but also a paucity of filmic heritage on which to build. Beyond
localized stage performance, musical acts were primarily known to the general
public through the exclusively aural mediums of recordings and radio, and while
the then most popular dance bands and singers were shoehorned into both short
films and features, they were primarily looked upon by the film industry as
annoying intrusions into the narrative structure and presented without much attention
to discovering the visual dynamics suggested within the music.
By the early 1960s however, Scopitone had
the benefit of more than a decade of interior staging of musical acts for
television cameras, the spatial expansion of narrative film location shooting
for musical numbers first popularized by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s ON THE
TOWN and the more recent experimentations in discontinuous editing techniques.
The 1960s version of the jukeboxes were
invented in France and the entertainment industry there seems to have gotten
behind the project with full cultural force. As listed in Bob Orlowsky’s Scopitone
Archive, well over four hundred French films were made for the jukeboxes with
the participation of many of the leading figures in the country’s popular music
industry. And, based on the tiny fraction of those films that I have been able
to see, they appear to have taken full advantage of the stylistic advances,
ranging from the embryonic use of dynamic pools of space and light that would
soon become the signature look of the American rock and roll TV show SHINDIG in
Sylvie Vartan’s version of Ray Charles’ “What’d I Say?” to Francoise Hardy’s
singing of a song whose title translates into English as “All the Boys and
Girls” set amid outdoor amusement park rides.
When the machines came to the U.S. the
commitment seemed to become more ambivalent. Fewer than two hundred films were
made and the producers seemed to be trying to straddle the generation gap whereby
some of them featuring firmly established pre-rock television and nightclub
singers like Vic Damone and Jane Morgan while others starred artists who had
multiple Top 40 hits but never quite reached the front rank of pop music
stardom such as Dick & Dee Dee and Bobby Vee. The indecision regarding the
target audience may have had something to do with the venues since most of the
jukeboxes were placed in bars and nightclubs which led to what appears to be a
very conscious decision that a visual strategy of aggressive audacity was the
only means of holding a viewer’s attention in such an environment.
According to Orlowsky, the creative force
behind many of the American films was Harold Belfer, a choreographer with a
string of undistinguished credits at Universal-International in the 1950s but
for whom the particular limitations and opportunities of the Scopitone films seemed
to have stimulated heretofore unexplored contours within his id. Most often
this led to a vaguely unsettling sense of witnessing a well-oiled machine that
has slipped a few gears, sort of like viewing the results of Russ Meyer’s day
as substitute director on a beach party movie. But when the outlandish imagery
was more directly tethered to the song lyric’s narrative, the wackiness could
spin off in more dangerous directions.
The borderline berserk rendering of Jody
Miller’s “Queen of the House” comes immediately to mind in that regard but the
closest approximation to the dream state condition of “One Has My Name” that
I’ve seen is the film of singer/songwriter Gale Garnett’s “Where Do You Go to
Go Away?” The imagery here is more overtly abstract to harmonize with the more
internalized mindset of the protagonist and Garnett, who was also an
experienced actress, adds facial expressions and body gestures to her
performance that projects a sense of consciously creating her dream in contrast
to the more passive stasis that seems to carry Young through his. But the film
ends on the same kind of literalized metaphor that opens “One Has My Name” adding
the extra layer of ironic detachment that serves as mitigating deflection from
the somber mood embedded in both lyrics.
The most comprehensive introduction to
Scopitone on the web is “Scopitone A Go Go,” a seventy-five-minute compilation
of French and American films that includes all the artists and titles mentioned
above. Those still standing can then move on to the other clusters and
individual examples available on the internet with the Scopitone Archive serving
as your search engine.
One of the bonus features of watching
Scopitones on YouTube is that many of the films offer viewer comments underneath
the screening box. You get the expected run of gushy fan mail and
self-satisfied stabs at snark but also the slightly befuddled responses of
people who are objectively trying to reconcile their experience with their
expectations, such as Stephen Smith who wrote in reaction to the Nino Tempo
& April Stevens version of “Land of 1,000 Dances,” “kind of weird at
different levels.” I couldn’t have said it better myself.
