Murder with Music

This is a strange movie. The breaks in continuity, leaps of logic, robotic lines and random editing make it a surreal experience. Half a century later, bizarro director David Lynch would make a moderately successful career of it. Other aspiring filmmakers--like my 9- year-old nephew--would not be as lucky.

I genuinely found it engaging. All sarcasm aside, I had fun trying to piece together what was happening while at the same time counting the continuity missteps. It was a bit like that game in the Sunday funnies where you're supposed to find 10 things that are wrong with the picture. There's a shirt on a hanger... Now it's gone... Now there's a glass of milk... Now it has mutated into two empty glasses... At a certain point I became convinced that these "goofs" were deliberate, which is how Lynch fans defend such things. Maybe so. I also got a sense of a very "Airplane"-ish style of deadpan humour, as in the hilariously bizarre scene where a policeman is having a jolly time playing the piano whilst behind his back an escaped convict is pistolwhipping random strangers and forcing a few dozen people into a broom closet. The climactic scene (the titular "murder") is so fantastically contrived (and no less fantastically explained in one sentence) that you're left feeling like you just inhaled a mentholyptus cough drop ...up your nose and directly into your brain. What a trip!!

This film defies all ratings. You'll have to make up your own mind if it's a Lynchian masterpiece or a colossal turd (or both?). But I will say that the music is a real treat.

So is a movie worth watching when the direction is even clunkier than the acting, when the acting with only one or two exceptions is embarrassingly amateurish, when the plot is chopped up and dull, when the jokes and comedy relief aren't just flat they're concave, and when the murder in the title is barely squeezed in 55 minutes into the 58 minute run time? Yes, but just barely.

Murder with Music is one of the movies featuring black actors and entertainers that Hollywood cranked out to fill America's segregated (officially or de factor) movie theaters in the Thirties, Forties and early Fifties. The name of this game was minimal budgets and production values, but with lots of musical numbers. The plots are almost irrelevant. This one features Lola (Nellie Hill), a singer in the nightclub owned by Bill Smith (Ken Renard). Lola has suitors, including an escaped convict, a piano player and a reporter. With off-and-on flashbacks we see the comedy mix-ups and mistaken motives that are played mostly for laughs. As time passes, this plot becomes really tiresome. The acting doesn't help much. Nellie Hill evidently only made two movies. She was a fine-looking young woman with a bright and warming smile, a first-class vocalist and an awful actress. Ken Renard, who had a long career mainly in secondary roles, especially in television, carries the acting load. He's assured and competent. The movie's value is that in 58 minutes nine major musical numbers are squeezed in. We have songs by Hill, tap-dancing duos, a comedy song well sung by a large man I couldn't find a credit for, plus Noble Sissle and his orchestra in some fine swing numbers. There's a production number supposedly being shown on a primitive television set that is gobstopping: Chorus girls dressed mainly in bandanas and bananas dance and stomp about telling us to "flip your lip, I'm a bangie from Ubangy." There are, however, two first class (and totally forgotten) songs. "Too Late, Baby" by Sidney Easton and Gus Smith is a clever swing number and "Can't Help It" by Skippy Williams is a bluesy torch song with a fine melody...

It ain't right to love someone the way I love you like I do. It ain't right to love someone that don't love you.

I can't help it if I love you and you're cheatin' on me, too. It ain't right but I can't help it 'cause I do.

I'll wash and dry your dishes. I'll clean and make your bed. I'll work and slave around you 'Til my face turns cherry red.

I can't help it if I want to work and slave to be with you. It ain't right but I can't help it 'cause I do.

Murder with Music (1941)

** (out of 4)

Nellie Hill plays Lola, a wonderful singer who finds herself caught up with three very different men. Soon one of the men are murdered and we must determine who the guilty party is.

MURDER WITH MUSIC is another low-budget race film that suffers from various technical issues but all of them stems from the fact that the production just didn't have much money. With that said, if you're a fan of these movies then you'll find this one to be mildly entertaining thanks to everything going on except for the plot.

The actual plot dealing with the murder takes up very little of the running time. At just a hour there's not much of a running time to begin with but the majority of it is devoted to various nightclub acts where we see and hear some good musical numbers. There's obviously nothing here that you'd consider a classic but I still found the musical numbers to be entertaining in their own way.

The cinematography is a tad bit rough, the direction is soft and for the most part the performances are a bit rough. All of these things are to be expected but, as I said, the music makes the film somewhat entertaining.

Back in the 1920s into the 50s, America's movie theaters were often segregated...with black audience members either forced to sit in designated 'blacks only' sections or they were outright banned from theaters. Not surprisingly, this racism resulted in entrepreneurs in the black community opening their own theaters and producing their own movies. Some are rather entertaining but most are pretty poor when you watch them today...mostly because the budgets for the films were paltry. "Murder with Music" is one of those films designed for black movie theaters... if you are curious to watch it.

The story begins with a pushy and cocky guy barging into the editor's office looking for a job with the newspaper. Instead of telling him to get lost or hiring him, the patient editor tells the guy a story about another reporter...one whose cockiness got him in a heap of trouble. Interestingly, soon within this story the cocky reporter watches television*....so it becomes a story within a story within a story for some time! The lady in the editor's story, Nellie, is very pretty and very popular. When one of her old boyfriends is killed, the question is who did it and why. Confusing...huh?

So is it any good? Well, some of the acting is suspect--with quite a few scenes where the actors' delivery was poor. In more expensive productions, the directors probably would have re-shot the scenes...but most of the black films of the era simply didn't have the budget for re-shoots. I should point out that the editor, in contrast, was a pretty good actor and it's a shame Bob Howard didn't do more acting....with less than a half dozen credits to his name. There is also a lot of music and dancing in the film. Most of it looks VERY cramped as they pushed the performers into minuscule sets...possibly to save money. Despite this, some of the music was exceptional--particularly the band about 15 minutes into the film. At times, however, the music and dancing acts seemed like distractions from the plot...though a few were enjoyable distractions. My overall verdict is that compared to similar productions, this one is about average....though compared to the average cheap B-film of the era it comes up a bit short. Entertaining...provided you cut the film some slack.



*Televisions were nearly unheard of back in 1941 and were definitely in the early stages. Only a couple American cities had broadcasts and what they did broadcast was extremely limited. And, the early TVs were often the weird glass projected units like the one in this film. Also, the show on TV featured a mostly black cast...along with an actor in black-face! Such racism, surprisingly, did creep into some of these productions and I've seen black-face actors or Stepin Fetchit-type characters in these pictures. I also suspect the black-face actor actually might have been a black man posing as a white man posing as a black man!

To get it out of the way at the beginning, the film was made in either late 1946 or early 1947, not 1941. We know this for two reasons: (1) In the scene in the secretary's office, there's a poster on the wall for Stepin Fetchit's movie "Big Timers", which was a 1945 film, and (2) there was no "Nellie Hill" in 1941; Nellie Harrell didn't marry Charles Wesley Hill until 1942. The acting is horrendous; fortunately, the music is really good. Not a spoiler, but ask yourself this: "how, exactly, do you know the piano player is dead?"