The first thing I do when the schedule for the mothership Noir City Film Festival in the Bay Area is announced is make the count. How many of these films have I not seen? This year’s roster, with its focus on music and musicians, held the promise of a bounty of obscurities. To my surprise, only two titles out of twenty-four were new to me.
Naturally, they’re among the films not piling into the bus and making the drive up for the next gig at SIFF Cinema, where yours truly will be serving as weeknight emcee. Tracking them down was part of my limbering up process for hosting duties. It’s a pity they won’t be screening here in Seattle, because both B movies tie into the festival’s theme nicely.
Face the Music (1954, known as The Black Glove in the US) comes from UK’s Hammer Films, best known for its horror fare, and its jazz-loving kingpin Michael Carreras. Terence Fisher, who directed Hammer’s late 1950s relaunches of Frankenstein, Dracula, and the Mummy, is behind the camera here; he’d already made his share of noirish fare like So Long at the Fair (1950) and Stolen Face (1952).
American trumpeter James “Brad” Bradley (Alex Nicol) ducks out on the opening night bash of his headlining gig in London in favor of some shuteye when he hears the dulcet tones of nightingale Maxine Halbard (Ann Hanslip). Brad jumps in on the jam session as a slick meet-cute. Maxine takes him home for a spaghetti dinner and they coyly court each other in verse. But Brad’s jetlagged and Maxine has a beau, so maybe they’ll just be pals and professional colleagues. He heads to his hotel, but—whoops!—leaves his trumpet behind.
That itinerant instrument is why Scotland Yard comes calling when Maxine is found dead. The notion that Brad needs to clear his own name is a reed so slender you couldn’t use it in a clarinet, but I’m not complaining. He skips his publicity engagements to play amateur sleuth, probing the seedier depths of London’s jazz demimonde. Among the suspects are a record studio magnate (Geoffrey Keen, who would become a mainstay in Roger Moore-era James Bond films), and Maxine’s jealous sister, also a thrush, played by Eleanor Summerfield. She’s the best thing in the movie; the same year she’d appear in Blackout, aka Murder by Proxy, another Hammer noir directed by Fisher with a Yank for a lead (in this case Dane Clark), and she’s the best thing in that picture, too.
The plot hinges on one of Maxine’s demo recordings and whether someone faked a name pianist’s signature style on it; music providing a crucial clue is one of several reasons why I wish this curiosity was screening in Seattle next week.
Face the Music isn’t noir. It’s practically a jazz-infused vicarage mystery, with Brad the outsider dropped into an incestuous cabal of characters and having to ferret out their grudges and secret connections. Ernest Borneman’s script, from his novel, doesn’t play fair, with Brad glimpsing evidence withheld from the audience. But it’s fun. Fisher keeps the enterprise tooling along briskly, and Nicol tackles a rare lead role with a light charm reminiscent of Dennis O’Keefe.
Universal’s The Crimson Canary (1945) is allotted just over one hour compared to Face the Music’s leisurely 84 minutes, so it dispenses its exposition in a fashion so telegraphic it can seem like a few messages went astray. More than once during the set-up, I said “Wait, what?” aloud. A jazz quintet that apparently formed on the fly after two members muster out of a navy hospital (wait, what?) plays their last date in Los Angeles before heading to San Francisco. The vocalist sitting in is hellbent on going north with them and threatens to make trouble if she doesn’t. During a rendition of “China Boy,” troupe leader Danny (Jim Rockford’s dad Noah Beery Jr.) wanders off the bandstand while drummer Johnny (Danny Morton) guzzles booze (wait, what?). Post-set, the group finds the titular slain songbird backstage, and Danny suggests they light out before anyone else discovers the body (wait, what?). Helping this ill-advised plan along is the fact that no one else knows the names of the combo’s players (wait, what?), so all jazz-loving detective Quinn (John Litel) has to go on is the sweet sound of Danny’s horn.
We’re primed to think one of the five musicians is guilty, but three of them, including noir stalwart Steve Brodie and Jimmie Dodd from the original Mickey Mouse Club, fuck off immediately, so there goes that premise. That leaves us with Danny and his pal Johnny, who hasn’t fully recovered from his wartime injuries, the character prefiguring one played by William Bendix in The Blue Dahlia (1946). Did Danny slay the singer because she threatened to torpedo his engagement to schoolteacher Lois Collier? Or does he suspect lovestruck Johnny did the deed and is determined to protect him? Or—hear me out—could it be someone else? Noir aficionados will clap eyes on another cast member and know the answer at once.
Once again, a jazz recording proves integral to the mystery, and Litel amuses as the detective who spends his days off listening to his collection of sides. But one sequence elevates The Crimson Canary above the level of crackpot if amiable programmer and transforms it into a must-see.
The action, which had been lurching along anyway, stops dead when Danny and Johnny pause at a club offering an extraordinary bill. Josh White sings the funny yet sad folk song “One Meat Ball,” and saxophone legend Coleman Hawkins takes the stage all too briefly, backed by Howard McGhee on trumpet, Sir Charles Thompson on piano, Denzil Best on drums, and Oscar Pettiford on bass. As amazing as it is to see rare footage of Hawkins, it’s the amount of ash on the cigarette between Pettiford’s lips as he works the bass that made an impression on me.
The versions of Face the Music and The Crimson Canary available on YouTube aren’t of high quality, but they’re watchable. These titles may screen in far better shape at Noir City fests later this year. A reminder that the Seattle installment kicks off on Friday, February 13.
What (Else) I’m Watching
Tickets for the first Seattle screening of The Donn of Tiki (2024) went so quickly that I missed out. When a return engagement was announced, I didn’t hesitate. That show also sold out. Directors Alex Lamb and Max Well are currently four-walling their partially-crowdfunded documentary about Donn Beach, aka Don the Beachcomber, pioneer of tiki culture, at venues around the country. Cocktail fanatics should keep their eyes peeled.
Beach led an extraordinary life, trotting the globe, brushing shoulders with celebrities and mobsters as he spread the gospel of tiki. Lamb and Well assemble an impressive array of experts to tell his story, including Jeff “Beachbum” Berry, holding forth at his excellent New Orleans bar Latitude 29; Martin Cate, founder of the excellent San Francisco bar Smuggler’s Cove; and rum historian Wayne Curtis. They also smartly use animation to recount Beach’s exploits. Stop-motion gives life to a vintage interview, while different styles are deployed for various eras of his life. The 1930s sections, including a risqué story involving regular customer Marlene Dietrich, are rendered in a manner that calls to mind the Fleischer Brothers, while the 1940s and ‘50s scenes more closely resemble the Warner Brothers palette.
It turns out the only thing holding together the mélange that is tiki—Cantonese food, Polynesian atmosphere, and Caribbean cocktails—is Donn Beach himself; the grub only became an element when he moved the original Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood to a larger Chinese restaurant space across the street and couldn’t be bothered to change the menu. Tiki drinks are being rebranded as tropical cocktails given the valid charges of cultural opportunism, so it was interesting to hear AAPI scholars praise Donn for presenting and preserving authentic Hawaiian culture when many powers that be were intent on showing how true-blue American the islands were in the Eisenhower-era press for statehood.1
The Donn of Tiki returns to Seattle for a third show on February 16—hey, that’s during my Noir City stint!—with additional screenings and cities to be announced.
Last year at Noir City I introduced Hell’s Half-Acre (1954), filmed on location in Hawaii, with Donn credited as technical advisor.
Got me all interested in movies that I’d otherwise ignore completely, and thanks for the screenshot of Hawkins and Pettiford!