Trumpeters in Competition
Second Chorus (1940), directed by H.C. Potter (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House), starring Fred Astaire, Paulette Goddard, and Burgess Meredith, with additional lousy acting by Artie Shaw, who nonetheless plays a great clarinet in several scenes, ranks as an enjoyable light entertainment containing no war propaganda, since Hollywood was still a year away from suffusing a great percentage of its cinema with too many reminders of the Great Struggle.
Astaire and Meredith play two swing band trumpet players, college students (!) who've been living the campus life for seven years, coasting along on shitty grades and a national situation not yet calling for them to learn how to throw a hand grenade. Astaire unexplainably dances like Fred Astaire, clearly a stronger ability than his trumpet playing.
Meredith and Astaire vie for the attention of Paulette Goddard. Jerks, they get her fired from her debt collection agency job so she'll work for them as band manager. Even though Astaire and Meredith engage in a reprehensible connivance to get her fired, she accepts their job offer. Goddard's charm boosts the band's chances. She even gets Artie Shaw to come to town to check out the two trumpeters.
Shaw, uninterested in the men's playing, hires Goddard as his secretary. Throughout the film, incredibly, Shaw, a man who married eight times and dated numerous fancy women, doesn't care to take his new secretary to bed.
Astaire and Meredith go to excessive lengths to get into Shaw's band, but their competition blows their chances. At their tryout before a nightclub audience, Meredith rewrites Astaire's music sheet, causing the latter to blow his horn discordantly, leading to a disgusted Artie Shaw walking away. A funny moment, the dissonance sounds like ten seconds of off key contemporary industrial music.
Shaw wasn't an actor--it shows. He's stiff. He needs to have Paulette Goddard in lingerie walking around his office. Everybody who thinks Paulette Goddard was hot needs to see that happen.
She was Charles Chaplin's wife for a time, acting in his comedic masterpieces, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Sparkling in every screen appearance, delightful and beautiful, bright-eyed and graceful, she's a treat for viewers today as she was eighty years ago.
The more handsome (?) of the two trumpeter competitors, Astaire, wins Paulette in the end as they kiss in the back of a cab. Burgess Meredith, the Penguin from the Batman TV show, got me thinking as I watched, about this trumpeter as the young Penguin: non-traditional college student barely passing classes; plays a mediocre trumpet, overshadowed in music and love by his debonair pal, Fred.
The two, falling for the same woman, become more and more hostile with each other. Young Penguin learned his underhanded second nature from this Fred-Paulette-Burgess love triangle. Years later, with that and several other crushing disappointments in his life, he becomes one of the scourges of Gotham City.
This deviation from discussing Second Chorus indicates how I see it as a two out of five star film I lost interest in even as I wrote about it.
Vic Neptune
Second Chorus (1940), directed by H.C. Potter (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House), starring Fred Astaire, Paulette Goddard, and Burgess Meredith, with additional lousy acting by Artie Shaw, who nonetheless plays a great clarinet in several scenes, ranks as an enjoyable light entertainment containing no war propaganda, since Hollywood was still a year away from suffusing a great percentage of its cinema with too many reminders of the Great Struggle.
Astaire and Meredith play two swing band trumpet players, college students (!) who've been living the campus life for seven years, coasting along on shitty grades and a national situation not yet calling for them to learn how to throw a hand grenade. Astaire unexplainably dances like Fred Astaire, clearly a stronger ability than his trumpet playing.
Meredith and Astaire vie for the attention of Paulette Goddard. Jerks, they get her fired from her debt collection agency job so she'll work for them as band manager. Even though Astaire and Meredith engage in a reprehensible connivance to get her fired, she accepts their job offer. Goddard's charm boosts the band's chances. She even gets Artie Shaw to come to town to check out the two trumpeters.
Shaw, uninterested in the men's playing, hires Goddard as his secretary. Throughout the film, incredibly, Shaw, a man who married eight times and dated numerous fancy women, doesn't care to take his new secretary to bed.
Astaire and Meredith go to excessive lengths to get into Shaw's band, but their competition blows their chances. At their tryout before a nightclub audience, Meredith rewrites Astaire's music sheet, causing the latter to blow his horn discordantly, leading to a disgusted Artie Shaw walking away. A funny moment, the dissonance sounds like ten seconds of off key contemporary industrial music.
Shaw wasn't an actor--it shows. He's stiff. He needs to have Paulette Goddard in lingerie walking around his office. Everybody who thinks Paulette Goddard was hot needs to see that happen.
She was Charles Chaplin's wife for a time, acting in his comedic masterpieces, Modern Times and The Great Dictator. Sparkling in every screen appearance, delightful and beautiful, bright-eyed and graceful, she's a treat for viewers today as she was eighty years ago.
The more handsome (?) of the two trumpeter competitors, Astaire, wins Paulette in the end as they kiss in the back of a cab. Burgess Meredith, the Penguin from the Batman TV show, got me thinking as I watched, about this trumpeter as the young Penguin: non-traditional college student barely passing classes; plays a mediocre trumpet, overshadowed in music and love by his debonair pal, Fred.
The two, falling for the same woman, become more and more hostile with each other. Young Penguin learned his underhanded second nature from this Fred-Paulette-Burgess love triangle. Years later, with that and several other crushing disappointments in his life, he becomes one of the scourges of Gotham City.
This deviation from discussing Second Chorus indicates how I see it as a two out of five star film I lost interest in even as I wrote about it.
Vic Neptune
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