Artistic Temper

Housewife Ruth Whitney (Ruth Etting) is a singer at heart, but her husband Dr. Jim Whitney does not approve. He hates show people. She sings a song to time her three minute egg. She invites a group of performers home and he confronts them. She has had enough.

This starts at an Automat-type eatery and that's a fun place. Ruth Etting sings her torch songs. The story is a defense for the lower art forms. The cast of characters has a few circus people and some bad magic. In the end, this is mostly about Ruth Etting singing her songs and that's fine for an eighteen minutes short. That's a half dozen eggs.

"Artistic Temper" is a most enjoyable Vitaphone short. And, unlike many Vitaphone shorts, particularly the early ones, this one actually has a story and is much like a short movie.

Ruth Etting plays Ruth White, a housewife who is married to a doctor who, inexplicably, hates show people. He does not want her going on the stage and has told her he doesn't want show people hanging around their home. Why? I have no idea. Regardless, the doctor is called away on a case and Ruth lets her piano player friend bring his Broadway friends for a visit. However, the idiot husband arrives early and throws what amounts to as a big temper tantrum...and Ruth leaves. Soon, she's on the stage and over the years she becomes famous. But what about her ex-husband, the doc?

I enjoyed Etting's singing quite a bit...it was very smooth and relaxing. I also liked the story....even if I did think the husband was a real wiener! Overall, very well done for a Vitaphone short...and well worth seeing.

Although singing legend Ruth Etting did not make too many feature films, she did however make quite a number of musical shorts such as Artistic Temper which she did for Warner Brothers.

She's showing a certain stiffness in her performing here and I don't think it was a lack of talent. She never gets truly involved in her role as a wife and I tend to think that was as a result of a jealous husband offstage. If anyone saw the film Love Me Or Leave Me we all know how that one ended.

In Artistic Temper Etting plays a doctor's wife who has a real singing talent, but her husband Wilfred Lytell doesn't like show business or show business people. They come to a parting of the ways when she has her piano accompanist and several other performers over for a little informal gathering where she sings and wows the crowd with her voice. That's before the husband unexpectedly comes home.

But the film is about Ruth Etting's singing and she does do several numbers that include Lovable, What A Life, and That's What Heaven Means To Me. They do exhibit her homespun and intimate style of singing.

In the end show business and medicine do combine in a not so unusual way and everyone gets what they want.

For a look at the real Ruth Etting after seeing Love Me Or Leave Me, you could do far worse than Artistic Temper.

A troupe of performers runs into an old friend at the Automat, and gets invited to visit his current gig, playing the piano for Ruth Etting. She wants to go into show business, but her husband is a doctor and a snob about show people.

It's all an excuse for Miss Etting to sing three songs over the course of two reels. She was a major Broadway star, who made several attempts on the movies, but rarely got much further than the Vitaphone studio in Brooklyn. Given her performance here, it's not hard to understand why. It looks like the director has told her to tone down her performance from the stage, and it's been so toned down she seems a amateur except when she sings.