BLUENOSINOUS -- A NEARLY OBSOLESCENT PUBLIC CAUSE

A good many memorable events took place throughout the 1930s, undoubtedly the most prominent dealing with Hitler’s and Stalin’s rapid rise to power, all of which eventually kicked off the long-anticipated second world war. Devastating though they were, this writer’s recollections still focus on numerous matters of considerably lesser world-shaking effect, yet significant in certain respects. The actual theme of this piece is show business, mainly films, radio broadcasting, and popular music.

We probably wouldn’t be far wrong in labeling the 1930s as the Decade of Bluenose Reign. Perhaps the same breed of people who had previously equated National Prohibition with excellence ten years earlier were now carrying on to the fullest extent feasible by imposing severe censorship and other controls on the entertainment industry. Wherever legal restrictions couldn’t prevail, the capability remained of expressing widespread consternation over apparent flagrancy from the moral corruption standpoint. We can readily cite several outstanding examples.

On December 12, 1937, a regular Sunday afternoon radio show sponsored by Chase and Sanborn, one of the era’s leading coffee producers, featured a brief dramacomedy skit where Don Ameche and Mae West – the latter being the raciest double-entendre female exponent of her time – portrayed Adam and Eve’s legendary submission to the serpent’s proferred apple.

This writer, then but a towheaded youth, heard this particular broadcast, reflecting the famous Westian heavily exaggerated “come hither” delivery style, which came across as sheer harmless cornballia. However, no more than a day later a loudish coast-to-coast hue and cry arose over the excessive vulgarity, suggestiveness, blasphemy, and whatever else seemed fitting. The lady, if we may be so blatantly presumptuous in using such term for her, was accordingly banned from radio, not to return until twelve years later. We’ve been personally asking why ever since, more than seven decades afterward. There seemed to be so little to get excited about, other than a couple of her typical borderline remarks.

Those, however, were power-wielding days for the bluenosed gentry. The slightest word or deed coming remotely close to supposed immorality would be subject to virtually explosive reaction.

In that same year of 1937, a rising popular music world star named Maxine Sullivan turned out an immediate hit record, singing Loch Lomond to more than the customary semi-gloomy lugubrious beat. Wow! Did this ever give our bluenose friends an open opportunity to condemn the girl’s “swinging of an old favorite”! Having quite recently acquired a latter-day copy of that very number on CD, the writer finds it sounding absolutely normal, really more conservative in tempo than many lyrical outpourings we’re forced to endure today. Once again, though, the do-gooders had chosen to make a mountain out of a molehill for reasons of so-called sanctity.

Oddly enough, the pace of Miss Sullivan’s 1937 recording was identical to that churned out one year later by Martha Tilton, who sang the same tune at Benny Goodman’s fabled Carnegie Hall Concert. We recall no comparable shouts from the cheaper seats at that time. The bluenoses had evidently cooled down.

Not much, however. Among 1938’s “jazz band” output was Larry Clinton’s orchestral presentation, wherein romantic lyrics had been written and sung to Debussy’s Reverie. “Horrors!”, came the shouts. “Now they’re swinging the classics! How offensive can things become?”

Happily for Clinton, his vocalized My Reverie became a big hit, in spite of the snorts and yelps. Listening to the very original rendition today remains a pleasure.

Moreover, that number seems to have set the stage for a minor trend, as works initially composed by the “Old Masters” came to be either lyricized or played in a bouncy manner. This practice continued for many years, and the most fortunate related aspect is that we remember no outcry over Woody Herman’s Woodchoppers’ Ball (Quartet from Rigoletto), Les Brown’s Marche Slav (Tchaikovsky) or Bizet Has His Day (L’Arlesienne Suite) or Mozart Matriculates, plus various classical themes with complementary vocal wording.

Also in 1938, the Andrews Sisters added another big seller to their list, belting out idiotic lyrics to a forgettable tune called Hold Tight. No opposition arose to the song, inane as it happened to be, until the “beloved” Walter Winchell reported that the words “foo-ra-de-acka-saki” which it contained meant something vulgar in Swahili. So what was the result? The bluenoses succeeded in having the song taken off the air, unless the “dirty” stuff was substituted for. Good Lord!

Famed bandleader Jan Savitt recorded a song about that same time entitled WPA, whose lyrics were judged to be disparaging (as they truly were) to that governmental body created to help ease the severity of the Great Depression’s unemployment problem. For such stated reason and no other, the disc was completely suppressed from further production or radio playing, the U.S. Constitution notwithstanding.

Jumping now to the movie industry, people the world over can promptly identify with the heroic icon John Wayne. It happens that the film which catapulted him to fame and fortune was Stagecoach, released in 1939. The story depicted a trek by such a passenger vehicle through hostile country with, naturally, a redskin onslaught woven into the script to accompany the other usual western boiler plate.

What chiefly stands out in this at-the-moment young lad’s recollection was not the Duke’s spectacular hurling himself onto the fear-laden team of horses pulling the stagecoach, thus helping avoid a disastrous runaway amid the Comanche or whatever attack. Instead, it was having one of the female characters being roughly 8.99 months pregnant in the opening scenes, but with a stomach as flat as a pancake. That’s right, the bluenose rules of propriety permitted bulging bellies only for aging male actors overly indulgent as eaters or beer-consumers.

Another early scene in that same production showed Thomas Mitchell playing the town drunk role, whose impending permanent departure from the town stagecoachwise featured him about to raise both hands to thumb his nose farewell at the assembled do-gooder lady standers-by. Since this gesture is alleged to convey the message, as they say in Spanish, “Besa mi culo”, it could not be fully carried out on the silver screen, so the camera had to switch immediately to the shocked expressions on the offended women’s faces. To quote the classic little boy Charlie Brown on this score, we have to say “Good grief!”

Those were also moviedom days when couples playing husband and wife roles, a common scene back then, had to be filmed sleeping in twin beds, with full pajama sets on the male and floor length, high-cut nightgowns adorning the missus.

The earliest of the Weissmuller-Sullivan Tarzanesque flicks had both Johnny and Maureen sporting costumes so brief, especially for the feminine mate, that the viewer could see just about everything except Trafalgar Square. From there on, in that and any other King of the Jungle series’, the heroine’s garb was forced take on a relatively more Whistler’s Mother appearance.

Doesn’t this all amount to frightening hypocrisy, especially when MGM mogul Louis B. Mayer owned a Hollywood brothel, which his male stars were virtually commanded to frequent, purportedly to avoid forbidden interstellar “sackbound” affairs with the fairer sex – which it most certainly never did?

We’ll now cease our delving into the 1930s age mockery by jumping to the 1972 Italian-produced film with a middle-aged Brando’s Last Tango in Paris lead role, offering absolutely no plot other than one bordering on unadulterated pornography. Ironically, that was the same year when Marvelous Marlon mumbled his way into Oscar entitlement and tinseltown immortality as Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

The sole point we’re endeavoring to establish in the above paragraph is “Look how disastrously the bluenose doctrines collapsed between the 1930s and 1972!” By then, and even more so today, our vanquished friends must have slowly sunk into a state of chronic near-regurgitational trauma. God bless them, everyone.

Looking back upon earlier days once more, the skies did manage to continue their brightness a little over Bluenoseville for a short while. We remember how, during the late 1940s post-war years, the well-known group singalong number Beer Barrel Polka could only be played over the sacrosanct radio waves with the announced title restricted to its last two words. Specific reference to that terrible hops and barley beverage had become a no-no.

That was the same age during which film stars Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman were branded with outright condemnation for having given birth to children without benefit of clergy, the bluenose euphemism for the dirty word illegitimacy. To say that overall public opinions have since changed can only be the grossest of understatements.

1948 as well saw Frank Sinatra having done something typically offensive to the prevailing false morality codes (we can’t remember exactly what any longer), and thus judged unfit to be cast as a priest in the movie Miracle of the Bells. However, he did play the role, and with reasonable adequacy.

Never allowing itself to die completely, the omnipresent Bluenose Brigade still had enough breath left to criticize Jimmy Stewart, Lee Remick, et al for appearing in the now classic 1959 Anatomy of a Murder, because the plot focused on such tsk tsk unmentionable matters as rape, sexual climax, and other non-niceties we’re supposed to omit from public conversation.

About all we can add in closing is the question as to how the bluenose folk might be faring today, at least in light of the film industry’s prevalent focusing on “between-the-sheets” scenes, supplemented by frequent once totally forbidden dialogue use. Have they resorted to donning blindfolds and earplugs, so as to hide in the sand, or simply limited their attendance to Disney productions? Perhaps they indeed deserve the heartfelt sympathy of us more liberal-minded types.

However, even though our social feeling has progressed in giant strides from 1930ish until now, have we perhaps advanced just a bit too far? To what extent should the rubber band be allowed to stretch? Maybe the never-ceasing-yet-drastically-decaying do-gooder crusade did and does possess some degree of merit.