Product: Birth Of The Blues/Blue Skies - Double Feature (1941)
Rating: 5.0
Bing Crosby in top form; don't take the plots too seriously
BIRTH OF THE BLUES (1946) is a somewhat skewed but nonetheless well-intentioned retelling of the history of jazz. Bing Crosby and Jack Teagarden lead the Basin Street Hot Shots, the (fictional) first all-white jazz band in New Orleans. Implicit in the plotline is the idea that it took an all-white band to really make jazz find a mainstream audience... Goofy and slow in parts, a bit stilted, but good clean fun, with Bing still looking pretty young. Lots of weird racial stuff -- buck-and-wing dancing, eye rolling and the like... Still, there are some great performances and it's worth it all just to hear Mary Martin say, "I want to learn to sing like the colored folk." Yikes.In BLUE SKIES (1946), Bing sings and Fred treads in this sketchily-plotted musical, which pits Astaire and Crosby against one another, rivals for the hand of the blonde, domestically-minded Joan Caulfield. This frothy postwar frolic has a wild Techncolor exuberance, with crazy explosions all over the pastel-lined spectrum (and an odd tilt towards purple). The sad thing, though, is that this isn't a very good movie -- the plot is razor thin, barely a hint of an excuse to stage a bunch of great (and lesser) Irving Berlin tunes. Some numbers fall flat (and Billy DeWolfe's interminable, painfully unfunny drag routine brings the movie to a screeching halt)... Still, Fred Astaire's killer performance on "Puttin' On The Ritz" is the stuff that legends are made of: as he's angelically hoofing his heart out, a curtain parts behind him, revealing a phalanx of distant, miniature Astaires, keeping time with the big guy. A technical and aesthetic triumph! This flick might be worth it for that routine alone, although Bing gets in some choice vocal performances as well. A dud scriptwise, but it still has two of the greatest performers of the 20th Century, both still at their peak.