by Gary Giddins
A great deal was made of the opening sequence, one of the most surreal in any American film of the period. Screenwriters Swerling and Connell created it as a throwback to the René Clair and silent-movie conceits Tuttle employed in The Big Broadcast. A doctor (Bing), policeman (Devine), Good Humor man (Sterling Holloway), and zookeeper (Rufe Davis) meet at night at the zoo, unfurl a banner proclaiming their fifteenth annual reunion of a relay race they won at P.S. 43, gorge on food and beer, sing the school song, strip down to running suits, and re-create the race around the seal pool. In the morning Bing, boozily blissful, sings “My Heart Is Taking Lessons” to birds in the park and is overheard by Carlisle, who tosses him a coin, while Devine dives into the pool and is bitten on the seat of his pants by a seal. Except for songs and grunts, the opening eight minutes of the picture are completely silent. Paramount boasted that Doctor Rhythm had less dialogue “than any American film in years” and claimed to have “evolved a new method of unfolding a story.” 68
The film becomes all too conventional when the dialogue kicks in, though the plot offers a twist on the usual Crosby formula: Bing loves the girl, but the girl loves a scoundrel, until one of Bing’s ballads, “This Is My Night to Dream,” brings her to her senses. Despite the title, rhythm is kept to a minimum. Yet Bing holds his own with Lillie in the concert parody, “Only a Gypsy Knows,” complete with a patty-cake bit and a mock ballet. 69 “Bing, who is a born athlete, leaped into the air and did a couple of entrechats,” Tuttle wrote. “I believe he was prouder of this accomplishment than of winning an Academy Award for Going My Way.” 70
Sing You Sinners was Claude Binyon’s baby. In the years since College Humor, he and director Wesley Ruggles had developed an enviable track record with a series of edgy screwball comedies that advanced the careers of Paramount players Claudette Colbert, Fred MacMurray, and Carole Lombard, notably The Gilded Lily, The Bride Comes Home, I Met Him in Paris, and True Confessions. As a result, Binyon worked as an equal with Ruggles, an A-list director. The younger brother of Charles Ruggles, Wesley entered the business as an actor, leaving high school to organize a minstrel troupe. Mack Sennett made him a Keystone Kop in 1914, and he soon graduated to editor and director, assisting Chaplin on his last six films for Essanay.
Ruggles and Binyon had been looking for an idea that would suit Bing, their neighbor in Toluca Lake. The writer suggested, “I’d like to do a story about Crosby as I see him at his home and as I’ve watched him at the racetrack.” 71 The director agreed, and Binyon came up with a story about three brothers who hate to sing but have no other way to pay the bills. Like princes in a fairy tale, the eldest is solid, responsible, and hardworking, and the second is a ne’er-do-well dreamer striving for a pot of gold and unwilling to settle for anything less. (The third brother is a boy caught between the two.) Bing was slated for the role of the no-account, who earns desperately needed money and squanders it on a racehorse. William LeBaron, who hoped to find a racetrack story for him, was pleased, as was Bing, who after reading the script remarked, “I guess I can act myself.” 72
The brothers, who live with their mother in the reduced circumstances of a working-class home stomped by the Depression, are Joe, David, and Mike Beebe, and the script was initially called The Unholy Beebes, a title Bing admired, though Paramount figured people would not know how to pronounce it and demanded a change. For a time the brass favored Harmony for Three.
Bing’s siblings were originally to be played by Don Ameche and Mickey Rooney, but Ameche fell out quickly and Fred MacMurray replaced him as David. Rooney remained with the project until shortly before shooting began in April 1938, when he was suddenly pulled by MGM. Ignoring Paramount’s casting department, Ruggles told his assistant director, Arthur Jacobson, “Find me another Mickey Rooney and we’ll start the picture.” 73 It so happened that Jacobson was scheduled to attend a benefit for the Motion Picture Relief Fund at the Biltmore Hotel, emceed by Bob Hope; in addition to movie stars, a few vaudeville acts were recruited to fill out the bill, among them the O’Connor Family, with its sparkling twelve-year-old wunderkind, Donald.
Jacobson made an appointment with O’Connor. “I asked him if he could act. He said, ‘If it’s entertainment, I can do anything. I can sing, I can dance, I can act.’” Asked if he could ride a racehorse, Donald replied, “No, but I’ll learn,” and did. 74 Jacobson asked him to listen to prerecordings by Bing and Fred and harmonize with them. Within days Donald knew the script cold. On Monday morning Jacobson brought him to see Ruggles, who immediately advised Paramount to sign him. O’Connor had been on the stage since he was three days old. He had played every kind of theater and circus. When he met Bing, he felt as though he already knew him:
I would see him on the screen in between shows and, like everybody else, I always thought he was a friend of mine. So when I met Bing, he was extremely nice. Had a wonderful smile. And he never said too much to me on the movie. He was very, very patient with me. I was a very small child at twelve and I was riding this big goddamned racehorse and I was scared to death of this horse. There was one scene down at the track, an exposition scene, where I tell him I’ve been bribed, I’ve got the money and I feel awful, I’m letting the family down. It’s a long scene and Bing is in front leading me on the horse and he’s pumping me and at the same time reassuring me not to be worried. We get right down to the end and I blow my lines. So we turn the horse around, all the way back, and it was a cold day at Santa Anita, and we have to start again with all the crying and everything. I blow the line again. We must have done that forty times. And Bing never complained, not once. I told him, “I’m so sorry, my mind just can’t get this.” He said, “Don’t worry about it, kid, you’ll get it, we have no place to go.” We had a lot of fun on that movie. He treated me like a pal. 75
Bing later said of O’Connor, “He could sing, dance, do comedy, do anything, thoroughly accomplished, thoroughly grounded in every aspect of show business because of his many years in vaudeville.” 76
Sing You Sinners was Bing’s sixteenth picture as a film star and broke the pattern of all he had previously done. Johnny Burke and Jimmy Monaco wrote three songs (a fourth was not used), of which “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams” was hugely popular; the interpolated “Small Fry,” by Hoagy Carmichael and Frank Loesser, as performed by the Beebe brothers in rustic drag, was also considered a highlight of the film. Yet strictly speaking, the picture is not really a musical, as Bing sings only one solo and all the songs emerge from the plot. For the first and only time (except when he played a priest or, late in life, character roles), Bing does not get the girl and for the first time since The Big Broadcast, he plays a lout, complete with a drunk scene in which he reaches his nadir by making a pass at his brother’s fiancée. “Sometimes I turn into such a heel, I surprise myself,” he broods as Fred MacMurray undresses him and puts him to bed. Bing tells him, “You’re the kind of fella I wanna be.”
For the part of Martha, MacMurray’s sweetheart, Artie Jacobson recommended an inexperienced seventy-five-dollar-a-week starlet named Terry Ray. Ruggles liked her but warned that she would have to be approved by Bing, per his contract. Jacobson brought her to Stage One, where Bing was prerecording, and, as she waited outside, told him about her. Bing said if he and Ruggles selected her, that was good enough for him. “He didn’t want to see her,” Jacobson said. 77 Artie had known Bing for years, mostly from luncheon encounters in the commissary. “I fell in love with the guy,” he said, although they had never worked together. “I can go on all afternoon and tell you about the virtues of Bing Crosby. He was a wonderful guy, but he had to like you. He wasn’t the easiest guy in the world to get to know.” 78 Jacobson told him, “Since you’re being so nice about it, you deserve the pleasure of seeing what will happen in her eyes when you tell her that she’s got the job.” He brought her into the stage and said, “Bing, will you tell this little lady something? Just say these words, ‘You have the job.” Bing deadpanned, “You have the job.” 79 She fain
ted.
After walk-ons or bits in a dozen pictures (including Rhythm on the Range), Terry Ray suddenly found herself a leading lady, as Ellen Drew. The studio changed her name a couple of times before settling. Bing joked that he was so confused by the name changes, he called her Ellen Terry, after the legendary dame of the nineteenth-century English stage. In a press release issued under his name, he expresses pleasure at not having to labor for her hand: “The only break I get in the picture is that I don’t get the girl — Fred gets her. And believe me that’s a relief. I’ve made enough love scenes in the past five or six years. And I haven’t got a one in Sing You Sinners. Whoopee! What a break!” 80
Artie Jacobson received a break as well. The roving head of the talent department was fired for auditioning female talent in hotel rooms. When a Paramount executive learned from Ruggles how O’Connor and Drew came to be in Sing You Sinners, he gave Jacobson the job.
The shoot was fun for Bing, not least because his costars included some two dozen of his horses; track scenes were filmed on location at the Pomona Fairgrounds and Santa Anita. On May 2 production on the soundstage was halted as a cake was wheeled out to salute Crosby’s thirty-fourth birthday. Ironically, the character he played, Joe Beebe, is identified as being Bing’s real age, thirty-five. As was the case with many of his previous pictures, Sing You Sinners overflows with biographical allusions, the kindest of which poke fun at Bing’s persona, the rest taking him to task with a severity befitting a singing sinner. In the first two shots, Ruggles and Karl Struss establish a neighborhood not unlike the one Bing knew as “the holy land.” As the willful Mother Beebe and her sons march to church and sing “Shall We Gather at the River,” Joe (Bing) irreverently chews gum. At dinner Mother makes it clear that Joe is her pet; since macaroni will make him fat, she cooks his favorite dish, pot roast, which his brothers detest.
Dave is engaged to Martha but uses Joe’s laziness and the family’s insolvency as an excuse to postpone marriage. He resents having to sing in a trio for ten dollars a night, echoing the view of the combative young men who heckled Bing long ago at Lareida’s Dance Pavilion. “I’m a man, doggone it,” MacMurray’s Dave says, “and I want to stay one.” Mike (O’Connor) similarly complains that he’s being turned into a Buster Brown. Bing, more than ever, embodies a version of Harry Crosby, the optimistic dreamer who never quite measures up. Mother Beebe (Elizabeth Patterson) observes, “His father was the same way. He just drifted along without a worry in the world until you boys started coming along.” Bing takes Martha to a roadside dance hall where the bandleader, Harry Barris, persuades him to get up and sing. Barris is as kinetic as ever. Bing is so cool that you can’t believe no one has advised him to go to Hollywood and become a star. He works the room, singing “Don’t Let That Moon Get Away,” dancing with customers, playing drums with cutlery on the bar, executing a nifty before resuming his seat.
The personal references keep on coming. Chagrined after making a fool of himself over Martha, he tells his mother, “I don’t fit in this town, so I’m going somewhere I can do the family some good” — Los Angeles with a hard g. Relocated, he bets two bucks on a horse named Toluca. In a beautifully executed routine with actor Tom Dugan as a tout, Bing captures the madness of gambling and winning as he trades one ticket for another, finally winning a substantial sum. He sends for the family and meets the train wearing plaids and stripes that outstrip even Bing Crosby’s hallucinogenic taste. The family is appalled to learn that he has invested all his money in a horse, Uncle Gus (played by Ligaroti and others). “Whatever you do, don’t worry,” he tells his mother, who is obliged to pay the cab fare. “Yes,” she says, “I’m afraid we all know each other too well.”
The study of a wastrel soon deteriorates into the familiar racetrack picture, but with a strange moral: long shots pay off better than dull jobs. The old-time revivalism of the title is nowhere echoed in the movie, but the combination of feckless optimism and family ties, bound within a veneer of realism, won over press and public. The New York Daily News implored Claude Binyon to devise a sequel, because the Beebes “are the sort of family, like the Joneses and the Hardys, that could continue indefinitely on the screen under Wesley Ruggles’s astute direction.” 81 Time conceded the picture was “tolerable comedy, jigging playfully from farce to melodrama like a kite with no tail,” while lamenting that it was “no preachment for the typically American virtues.” 82
Bing received splendid reviews — not just for his portrayal but for the character of Joe Beebe. Life ran a pictorial on the fight scene, noting, “Crooner Bing Crosby abandons the romantic roles for which his stocky figure makes him unsuited and takes a comfortable, happy-go-lucky part that fits him like a glove…. His Joe Beebe is a model of simple, unpretentious acting.” 83 Calling the picture “the funniest comedy on Broadway, including all the side streets,” New York Times critic Bosley Crowther was inspired to offer a groaningly awkward KMH-style Crosby joke: “The only noteworthy difference between reality and Sing You Sinners, at the Paramount, is that in the movies Crosby’s horse wins — an unprecedented thing which may be explained by the fact that Bing must have undoubtedly had a hand in the script.” 84 To which Jimmy Durante might have exasperated, “Everybody wants to get into da act!”
But then, everyone was in the act. The Times reviewer’s inclination to refer to Bing as he might to Stan or Ollie (as opposed to Mr. Cagney, Mr. Astaire, Miss Davis, et al.) implied an uncommon assumption of intimacy with the private identity of a movie star. “But you’ve got to know the character of Bing to appreciate the family comedy of Sing You Sinners,” Crowther adumbrated with a surplus of pronouns: “Bing is the type that’s lovable, but that lies around reading in hammocks, or goes out and drinks too much, and come homes pie-eyed, and that propagates a new scheme for getting rich quick every weekend or so.” 85 The New Republic’s Otis Ferguson agreed: “The main thing was the character of Bing Crosby, who can sing and also be a swell feller.” 86 Life could not distinguish between Bing on- and offscreen, even when it purported to be trying:
To see Harry Lillis (Bing) Crosby on the Paramount lot is to set him down as the most modest and easygoing of Hollywood stars. This appearance is deceptive. For though Bing is modest, he is also one of the most enterprising actors in the film city. When his acting chores are over, he loves to hop in his bright red Cadillac, skip down 118 miles to his 120-acre ranch where he breeds and trains a stable of racehorses…. Between times he broadcasts weekly over the radio, turns out popular Decca records, plays the drums for pleasure, acts as adviser to a third brother’s orchestra and raises his family of four boys including Twins Philip [sic] and Denis [sic]. 87
In short, when critics said that Bing plumbed new depths as an actor, they meant he was playing himself more credibly than ever before. His screen persona was not as ingenuous as Cooper’s, or as manly as Gable’s, or spirited as Cagney’s, or funny as Grant’s, but it had a matchless, overriding aplomb, a self-reliance that bordered on impertinence. It had always been there when he sang. Now it was evident when he acted. Bing retained the righteous assurance of silent-era movie clowns, vulnerable and impervious. Like Chaplin, he seemed most alone in a crowd. Small wonder Leo McCarey recognized in him the ideal movie priest. “There was a feeling from people that there was something much deeper about Bing,” Anthony Quinn remembered. 88 And Donald O’Connor mused, “I think you have a tendency to dismiss someone acting so very natural. With the Stanislavsky kind of school, you try to act natural but you’re acting. Bing was one of the finest natural actors who ever lived. To do that is a hell of an acting job. He studied that. The other person who was very close to that was Spencer Tracy, but Spencer was more dramatic than Bing. Bing was softer. Much softer. Came at you through the back door.” 89
Bing’s revocation of Horatio Alger’s school of gumption in Sing You Sinners represented a new turn in his persona. The ethical switch —from Hard Work, Pluck, and Ambition Conquer Adversity to Daydreamer Picks Winning Horse and
Saves Family — was a fantasy designed to salve more than Depression worries. Economic burdens were now rivaled by international chaos. In the weeks surrounding the August 1938 Sing You Sinners premiere at Del Mar, Germany and Japan conscripted millions of reserves; Italy expelled its Jews; President Roosevelt pledged that the United States would not support Europe against the Reich; Prime Minister Chamberlain threatened war over Hitler’s attack on Czechoslovakia, only to recant weeks later at Munich. Those stories vied with tales of native anxiety: on September 10, 55,000 hungry people trampled a Republican Party banquet in Pittsburgh; on October 30 Orson Welles staged a radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, and hundreds of people abandoned their homes to escape martians. A year later, as Hitler invaded Poland, Dorothy would refuse to surrender on the Yellow Brick Road.
So eager were people to dream a dream of good luck and better times, they seemed “inured to hardship,” as Barbara Bauer observed of the reception to Sing You Sinners and its “dispiriting soup kitchen and bread line atmosphere.” Money or the lack of it, she wrote, was at the center of every scene: “Life has music for the Beebes only because the three brothers must sing for their supper. And there’s something irredeemably pathetic about seeing a ‘small fry’ so heavily burdened by his family’s problems.” 90 Yet public and press roared at the pratfalls of the Beebes, trusting in Bing, whose existence was proof enough that hard times would pass. For a souvenir, one could bring home his ebullient recording of “I’ve Got a Pocketful of Dreams,” number one in sales for a month and second only to Ella Fitzgerald’s more clamorous fantasy “A-Tisket, A-Tasket” (also on Decca), as the year’s best-selling record.