LLttle-known vocalist Nita Norman is shown standing in a living room watching the clock & singing Mailman Blues (Looking for a Letter from You) (1942), a competent but uninspired performance of an adequate swing song.
The unseen back-up band is Frank Denning & His Orchestra, which was hardly more than a soundies house band.
The lyrics run in part: "I sit in the corner twiddling my thumbs/ Watching the clock until the mailman comes/ Why must I fret & worry like I do/ Looking for a letter from you."
Nita has a Ginger Rogers look & is acting up a storm interacting with the set, literally twiddling her thumbs, sitting, standing, setting the clock, cutting away to alternate sets, climbing out of the bathtub-shower, answering the front door with the mail man who sings a line to her flirtatiously, going to the post office where a a three-man harmony group sings about her not getting any letters.
The harmony group of mailmen look straight at the audience for an extended bit that goes in part, "If it's you or you or you/ Who's making this poor little girl feel blue/ Please write her a line or two/ Cuz we've got a lot of other work to do."
The implication is that she's waiting for a letter from a soldier, & a poster promoting the purchase of war bonds can be seen at the post office. Definitely not one of the the better soundies despite the complexity of the production.
Emery Deutsch & His Orchestra constituted a romantic string orchestra who made four soundies. In Love's Own Sweet Song (1941) they are shown performing in a trumped-up sitting-room for maidens in long flouncy gowns vaguely evocative of a European court.
Then a singing group of two men & two women in period costume begin singing "Oh let us come & dance with joy/ Since life & love are ours/ For youth is strong & blood grows warm/ Beneath the scented flowers."
Love's Own Sweet Song is the closing waltz number from a 1914 operetta musical, music by the Viennese composter Emmerich Kalman, English lyrics by C. C. S. Cushing & E. P. Heath. The setting was the Paris home of Count Irini.
It was old-fashioned when Kalman first composed it & was adapted in piano parlor songbooks as an old-timey number even when newly written. Emery Deutsch was himself from Hungary & doubtless welcomed this opportunity to perform his countryman's composition on film.
After the somewhat squally rendition of the lyrics, Emery Deutsch on lead violin plays to a brief scene of guests waltzing in their period costumes. The dancing does add a note of glamor to the setting, though this is otherwise a pretty lame production.
 Hungarian Dance (1941) was included on a cheaply, hastily, poorly dashed together collection of soundies & telescriptions, The Swing Years: Lullaby of Broadway (2004), as "Dance Gypsy Dance" by "Unknown." It happens to be Emery Deutsch & His Orchestra who made a number of rather classicist violin soundies.
Emery clad more or less as a gypsy could almost pass for an authentic gypsy captured on film, but his orchestra & the dancers were less skilled at faking it. It's instantly recognizable as a phony set-up when two "gypsy" couples begin dancing, wearing not gypsy costumes, but truly ugly-ass hodown outfits.
Then out jumps one of the most inept tambourine acts ever danced by a fake gypsy. When she leaps center stage with her tambourine, it sounds like a couple boxes of Christmas bells fell from a high shelf into a sack of shit.
The poor girl does whirl & jump nicely, & might've turned in a better dance if not for trying to incorporate the tambourine about which she has no clue.
That dancer, shockingly enough, is Beth Dean, a well-known ballerina who was born in Denver & trained with Leo Staats at the Paris Opera Ballet before setting out to many achievements as ballet dancer & choreographer. But from her one soundie you'd never guess she was anyone but a random chorus girl, & we can only wonder who convinced her to try her hand at something totally unrelated to her training.
Tony Pastor & His Orchestra provide the instrumentation as Tony shares vocals with Johnny McAfee & Eugenie "Jeanie" Baird. They sing the Irene Higginbotham & Fred Meadows composition That Did It, Marie (1942).
The number had been a hit for the Benny Goodman Orchestra with Peggy Lee a year earlier. As the soundies directors could rarely get the likes of Benny Goodman in their film studios, it was typical to pull together affordable talent to reproduce hits.
It opens with Tony on sax, then there are portraits of the rest of the band as they perform. Then Johnny McAfee steps down from the bandstand, & Eugene "Jeanie" Baird stands from her seat, & they begin their duet on the jazzy number with jiving lyrics:
"I was an ache he couldn't get in the groove/ Till this old band began to move/ Resist fifty, bye bye bye -- that did it, Marie.... Dig that sax, you jumpin' jacks/ Does that eighty-eighter send-ya/ Jump, jump, jump it to the trumpet/ Satch is gonna blow a batch o' riffs..."
Despite a boogie beat & an attempt to be cool, the vocal duet is mediocre & the song not much better even when Peggy Lee did it. A genuinely hep jump-jazz vocalist might've saved it, though none ever did. Tony Pastor's sax solo at least is pretty good.
A pair of dancers jitterbug at the musical instrumentation. When it gets back to the vocal, Tony joins in very briefly, & his rough voice is what would've been better suited to saving the number throughout.
 Glen Gray & His Casa Loma Orchestra back the duet of Eugenie "Jeanie" Baird & Bob Anthony in Sentimental Journey (1945).
It's a classic slow swing number well known to this day -- "Gonna take a sentimental journey/ Gonna set my heart at east..." -- but this duet doesn't do it a lot of justice. They're like a couple Lawrence Welk singers on a bad night.
They're attractive in a dullard way, & Bob Anthony's marginally a better singer than Baird, who for a while had a regular gig on the Bing Crosby radio show.
At the instrumental break, the singers rush off stage, & mustachioed Glen Gray conducts a perfectly decent arrangement. This would've been a better soundie without the singers at all. And it'd be fine for slow dancin'.
This soundie was included in the Official Films home-movie one-reeler Sentimental Journeys (1947) together with Sonny Durham & His Orchestra's Sleep Lagoon (1942) & the Dinning Sisters' holiday number Winter Wonderland (1945).
The Eton Boys came up with their name by spelling "Note" backwards. They were popular radio performers in their day, consisting of Earl Smith first tenor, Art Gentry second tenor, Jack Day baritone & Charles Day bass.
They did several soundies & a couple "follow the bouncing ball" sing-along cartoons with Fleischer Studios. But if they've left only a small legacy, it's because they deserved no big one.
A Bicycle Built For Two (1941) is sung on a sound stage tricked out to look like an outdoor scene. The Eton Boys start out seated in a park-like environment with their girlfriends, then are shown riding stationary bicycles built for two along with their gals in front of a rear-projection screen, passing split-railed pastures.
They wear the cliche barbershop outfits of striped jackets, & three of the guys sport handlebar mustaches. Their sound is nostalgia-based & cliche. The unseen back-up band is soundies house band Ray Bloch & His Orchestra.
The Eton Boys out in front of a barber shop in bowlers do the barbershop quartet standard My Gal Sal (1941), pretty much proving that if you've heard one barbershop performance you've heard a thousand.
The old tune has a certain sweetness, however, & I enjoyed listening to the Eton Boys sing it with tragedy in their voices. The only Eton without a mustach has a solo that's stronger than their barbershop harmonizing in general.
There's a jump-cut from their singing on the sidewalk to three guys indoors playing slap-bass, piano, & guitar, also mustachioed & in bowlers. These guys are the Claude Garreau Trio & they're musically much more interesting than the singers.
My Gal Sal was included in the Castle Films home-movie three-soundie compilation Gay Nineties Songs (1945) with two other pieces by the Eton Boys, namely I Want a Girl (1941) featuring Geraldine DuBois as the wanted girl like the one who married dear old dad, with the harmonists again backed up by the Claude Garreau Trio; & the barbershop chestnut A Bicycle Built for Two already noted above.
copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl
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