Henry Busse and His Orchestra

Henry Busse & His Orchestra (1940)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Here's another entry in the Warner/Vitaphone series that took popular musicians and put them in front of a camera. This time it's Henry Busse, a well-known musician from the 1920s onward who offers up a couple of his own tunes (Wang-Wang Blues, Hot Lips) as well as a couple covers (Along the Santa Fe Trail, Huckleberry Duck). For the most part I found this to be entertaining even if I wasn't completely blown away by any of the numbers. At just 9-minutes the film is too short to really be boring and as I said, the songs are good enough to at least keep you entertained. The highlight music wise was clearly Huckleberry Duck, which really jumped off the screen and certainly delivered the true meaning of jive. Director Jean Negulesco appears to have spent a little more time on this one compared to others in the series as there are several stylish shots where Busse is leading his band while the band themselves only appear as shadows on the walls. This certainly wasn't ground-breaking but it added a nice touch to the music.

This is one of the later Vitaphone shorts--known as a "Melody Master". These later musical shorts generally were more straight forward and had simpler sets and no real story to tie it all together--just a famous band of the day doing their stuff.

Henry Busse and his band were a bit unusual in that one of the featured instruments in the first number is a bassoon! Apart from that, the songs they performed seemed pretty ordinary--if not a bit bland. The one exception was "Huckleberry Duck"--which sounded quite nice. The one that surprised me was "Beside the Santa Fe Trail"--as it really didn't sound at all country western--just very, very, very smooth (too smooth actually). The use of shadows in the short was very nice and it's pleasant if undistinguished overall.

Back in the Twenties Henry Busse played a mean cornet for Paul Whiteman's Orchestra and as did many of the sidemen who played for Whiteman like the Dorsey Brothers and Benny Goodman, Busse went out and formed his orchestra. He had some success although not as famous as those I also mentioned.

Busse's cornet is featured on this one reel musical short of his orchestra in two of his own compositions, Hot Lips and the Wang Wang Blues. He was also doing a little publicity for Warner Brothers by featuring Along The Santa Fe Trail in this short to promote that feature with Errol Flynn, Olivia DeHavilland, and Ronald Reagan in this short. Not a memorable film song although Bing Crosby did a nice record of it over at Decca.

This short provides a nice glimpse at a man who only real jazz aficionados remember today.