Yours for a Song: The Women of Tin Pan Alley

This American Masters documentary by Terry Benes focuses on the careers of 4 female songwriters - Dorothy Fields, Kay Swift, Dana Suesse and Ann Ronell - with mention also made of Vee Lawnhurst, Doris Fisher and Ruth Lowe. If there isn't much depth in this 55 minute treatment, at least you get to hear the songs, which is the main thing.

Hosted and narrated by Betty Buckley, who performs 3 Fields songs - `I Can't Give You Anything But Love', `The Way You Look Tonight' and `I Feel a Song Coming On', there is also footage of Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, Perry Como, and Frank Sinatra, and some mediocre New York cabaret singers.

Benes' text is more episodic than chronological, though Benes does present the evolution of style via the 1920's jazz age, New York's Broadway, Hollywood to where songwriters fled after the Wall Street market crash, and then post World War 2 heartfelt, with some stretches into classical and event songs for The World's Fair and Billy Rose spectaculars.

Fields gets the most coverage since she is the most successful of the women covered, the only one to be caricatured by Al Hirschfeld, and the lyricist for standards like `On The Sunny Side of the Street', `I'm In The Mood For Love', and the musical Sweet Charity. Swift is credited for `Can't We Be Friends?', Suesse `You Ought To Be In Pictures' and `I Reach For You', Ronell `Willow Weep For Me' and Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf', Fisher `Put The Blame on Mame' written for the film Gilda, and Lowe `I'll Never Smile Again'.

The writer/director of this all too short documentary has presented a large body of primary research. The project was made daunting by a paucity of intelligent books about women in the song writing profession. In nine out of ten reference books, significant errors plagued every page, including wrong birthplaces, misspellings, and incorrect title attributions. The only hope for a worthy documentary relied on new, primary, previously ignored research. If this film seems too short, one must remember that public television has its limited time slots. It is clear that each songwriter in the film deserves her own documentary. The archival film clips of the songwriters helped to "put a face" on the names of these prolific tune-smiths. The care taken in creating this film will benefit researchers for years to come. User review by Peter Mintun