Synopsis
Queen of the Blues
In this all-black cast short, legendary blues singer Bessie Smith finds her gambler lover Jimmy messin' with a pretty, younger woman; he leaves and she sings the blues, with chorus and dancers.
St. Louis Blues
1929 Directed by Dudley Murphy
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Theatrical
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USA
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USA
08 Sep 1929
- Theatrical
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1st Dudley Murphy
There was a clip from this in the Bix Beiderbecke documentary I saw yesterday, and I was so impressed by the quality of Bessie Smith's singing that I thought it would give it a watch. Likely made for black-only movie houses, St. Louis Blues takes the-then popular song and expands it out into a brief narrative of Smith's lover being a general rat and using her money to entertain other men. It's from this tale as old as time that Smith sings her song of woe, the tinny microphones of 1929 barely managing to capture the rich tones of her despair in the main sequence set in a speakeasy. Though Smith never addresses the camera, instead turning…
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Bessie Smith’s voice is so powerful I think it blew out the microphone a few times. Unbelievable singing. Conclusion from this short: MEN ARE TRASH
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So THIS is where the hockey team got their name from.
(Weird that given that this is only 16 minutes, it feels like it's taking too long to get to the fireworks factory, if you get my meaning? All I can tell you is that the first six minutes DRAAG but then, when it gets to the meat of the film, the big musical number, it takes off, and it's a shame that last ten minute isn't an hour longer. The fact that this is Bessie Smith's only filmed appearance adds an extra layer of importance here, but even if you've never heard of Bessie Smith, that music MOVES. -
Music video circa 1929. Bessie belts her way through an old blues standard backed up by a good band and choir. Cool to see an all black cast from this era. It don't redeem him but damn Jimmy the Pimp can dance!
Would recommend.
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The only time "Queen of the Blues" Bessie Smith is caught on film. What a shame. Not that she was an actress, but man, that voice. If you can get past the old style and the quality of the recording, just listen to that voice! This is a depressing sixteen minute tale of poor Bessie losing her man to a St. Louis woman. "Twasn't for powder and the store-bought hair/The man I love wouldn't go nowhere." What a great line! W.C. Handy, sometimes called "The Father of the Blues" because he was the first to start writing them down when he heard them, was the choral director and producer. On Criterion.
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astoundingly modern. the verbal patter exchanged in the opening minutes feels instantly looser and more naturalistic than any other dialogue i've heard from the era. the fact that it's spoken by an entirely african american cast makes it even more remarkable. i don't want to give too much credence to the authenticity of this short, considering it's still helmed by a white director, but it's nonetheless surprising.
part of what makes this feel ahead of its time is bessie smith's performance. as other reviews have identified, she has this tremendously powerful presence - yet she's also startlingly vulnerable and messy in her heartbreak, forming the mould for countless pop stars decades later. like, the whole song is about how much…
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bessie smith had quite a wonderful voice, although i can't help but wish that we had footage of blues women performing in a more rural idiom (how electrifying footage of lottie kimbrough or memphis minnie might have been!), and this is a surprisingly excellent showcase for her talent and the talent of the black performers joining her. unlike in the ellington and rogers musical shorts i've seen recently, the awkward contrivance of the frame-story coheres a bit better to the image the music is trying to convey. one of the most frequent critical misapprehensions regarding early blues is that it was necessarily autobiographical ("honest", "wrenching", "plainspoken" etc) when in reality singers were often working from a mish-mash of traditional verses,…
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Picking back up with the 'Jazz Shorts' series on Criterion Channel. This is indispensable as historical document alone, the only film appearance of blues queen Bessie Smith (whom I've heard of but don't know much about). It also works as entertainment thanks again to Smith and some inventive staging for 1929, her big number doesn't start until seven minutes into the short but it's worth the wait, it's amazing how naturalistic a performance she gives, mostly leaning up against a bar, compared to the over-the-top mugging you often see in screen music performance from this time. And perhaps the generic framework of the blues allows for a more authentically downbeat storyline than a lot of musical shorts were allowed to have.
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Don't mess with Bess! This is Bessie Smith's one and only film appearance, so it's nice to see it show up on the Criterion Channel along with several other early jazz and blues shorts.
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The only footage of Bessie Smith, the Empress of the Blues, in existence, this is again a vital piece of jazz and music history, but also a film that has deeply problematic elements. Featuring Smith's incredible performance of the titular song, the film provides a dramatization of the song, with Smith in the lead. After finding her man Jimmy with another, Smith begs him not to go. Moving to a speakeasy, Smith sings the St. Louis Blues, with the band and the entire speakeasy providing background vocals. But Jimmy returns just long enough to steal her money and leave her again(which interestingly is punctuated with Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue). Here we have a tragic story, but one that features the…
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Invaluable as the only real film record we have of Bessie Smith performing, though it's a shame that the early sound equipment available for this low-budget short wasn't up to capturing the full richness and phrasing of that extraordinary voice.
Once Smith, ostensibly playing herself, arrives on screen after some minor set-up, this becomes a visualization not only of the famous standard, but of every blues trope established by 1929, yearning for a worthless man and all.
While we'd view Bessie as a victim of abuse today in a way that wouldn't have occurred to contemporary audiences, I was surprised to see that the instances of physical violence here aren't soft-pedaled, in a (lengthy) cultural era that almost always presented such…
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Bessie Smith's man does her wrong, a perfect pretext for singing the blues. This short features an interesting blend of naturalism and heightened melodrama in both acting and structure. Bessie sings at the bar, hunched over a glass and dead to the world, while a full jazz band and chorus blare directly behind her. 1929's audio recording technology was no match for Bessie's pipes, but the point comes across.