A Song Is Born

Howard Hawks amassed such a consistent, and
consistently fascinating, oeuvre by always making, with very few
exceptions, only the films he really wanted to make. In an era when
directors had very little power or prestige in Hollywood, Hawks was
notable for working largely independently, outside of the usual studio
system; he moved from studio to studio, breaking contracts and going
elsewhere when he couldn't get his way. Hawks thus earned a reputation
as a director who seldom bowed to the pressure of producers, who always
stuck to his own vision. One of the few exceptions to this independence
was A Song Is Born, which Hawks made at the insistence
of Samuel Goldwyn, who got Hawks to say yes to the project by, quite
simply, offering him an exorbitant amount of money. The resulting film
feels like the work of a man who's just earning a paycheck, too. It's
not so much a remake of Hawks' Ball of Fire as it is a
shameless pilfering of the earlier film, barely bothering to alter the
example set by its predecessor; the film basically counts on fresh
audiences who hadn't seen Ball of Fire. Hawks of course was
famous for such pilfering and recycling. If a bit worked in one film, he
wasn't afraid to translate it into a new context, and late in his
career he kept remaking the basic scenario of Rio Bravo,
riffing on its relationships and structure in interesting ways. This is
nothing like that: A Song Is Born simply repeats, by rote, the
best lines and moments from the earlier film, barely bothering to offer
anything new. It's stale, and dull, and comes off as the one thing Hawks
otherwise never made: a formulaic flop.

The basic set-up is
taken right from Ball of Fire. Seven professors, six old
bachelors and a younger man named Hobart Frisbee (Danny Kaye), are
researching an ambitious musical encyclopedia that would chronicle the
entire history of music, with accompanying recordings of various musical
forms. In the earlier film the professors needed to learn about slang,
but in any event the film's plot is triggered by Frisbee's realization
that he's out of touch, that he needs to go out into the world and get
refreshed on current events in his field, folk music. In other words, he
needs to learn about jazz. The film's enduring appeal — indeed,
virtually its only appeal — comes from the inclusion of musical
appearances by some of the great jazz musicians of the era, including
Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Mel Powell, Lionel Hampton and many more.
At its best, the film is merely an excuse to throw all these musicians
together into massive jam sessions. It's fun stuff, and Hawks thankfully
put his foot down by refusing to segregate the black and the white jazz
musicians, one of the few stands he took on a picture he otherwise
didn't seem to care about at all.

The jam sessions and the
scenes at jazz nightclubs thus incorporate both white and black
musicians, refusing to ghettoize the black players or maintain a racist
separation. The notoriously conservative Hawks was at least enlightened
enough to recognize that such attitudes would have been as out of place
in the free-wheeling jazz milieu as they were in the lily-white Song
of the Thin Man, which was shot the year before and similarly
tried to chronicle the jazz scene, but with no black musicians at all.
Hawks' film is thus notable for acknowledging the music's black roots —
one number explicitly chronicles the nascent origins of jazz in slave
spirituals — and the importance and talent of black musicians. The whole
crew reportedly wasted a lot of time simply jamming and listening, both
on camera and off, but not much of this no doubt lively atmosphere
really makes it into the film. A lot of the music is infectious and
enjoyable, but there's not enough of it to distract from the rote
dullness surrounding it.


Part of the problem is Danny Kaye, who Hawks
was saddled with since the film was conceived by Goldwyn mainly as a
vehicle for the MGM comedic star. There's also the problem of Virginia
Mayo, taking on the Barbara Stanwyck role from the earlier film, as
singer and gangster's moll Honey Swanson. Mayo doesn't have Stanwyck's
side-of-the-mouth toughness, or her edgy sex appeal, just as Kaye
doesn't have the earnest goofiness that Gary Cooper brought to the role
of the stiff professor in Ball of Fire. Instead, Kaye's Frisbee
just seems stiff and boring, which is fitting for a stuffy, starched
professor but doesn't leave much wiggle room for his eventual
realization that he loves Honey and wants to be looser and freer. Hawks
can't coax the comedic performance he got out of Cooper from Kaye, nor
can he get Mayo to give Honey quite the edge she requires. Mayo's
actually fine here, radiating a cheery girl next door quality, and she
infuses the best patter from Ball of Fire — like her veiled
naughty allusions when trying to convince Frisbee to let her stay
overnight — with just enough zing to get them across. But she lacks the
slight dangerous quality, the realistic vibe of a been-there-done-that
kind of gal, that Stanwyck naturally brought to the role. If there
wasn't that precedent to compare her against, Mayo would probably seem
perfectly okay.

So in one sense, the only real problem with A
Song Is Born is coming second. If it weren't for the familiarity
of it all — and a majority of the film is outright stolen, line for line
and sometimes shot for shot, from the earlier film — A Song Is Born
might be a slight but enjoyable musical comedy. Unfortunately, as it is
it's impossible to avoid the comparison, and A Song Is Born
can't help but seem especially wispy in relation to its source. There's
just no imagination here, none of the playfulness that Hawks so often
brought to his best works. Kaye is allowed to simply be a dreary
killjoy, rather than being lovably shy and naïve. And unlike in Ball
of Fire, Hawks never manages to do much with the gangster subplot
that takes over the film for its finale, as the gangster Tony Crow
(Steve Cochran) arrives to claim Honey as his girl. The whole thing just
seems rote, so much so that Hawks even skips over the great gag where
Frisbee, confronted with fighting Crow, quickly teaches himself boxing
from a book before pummeling the thug. Hawks skips the joke and just has
Frisbee pounce on the gangster and beat him up.

That's the
film's dominant aesthetic: cutting corners, recycling earlier bits but
without the edge, without the humor, without the unpredictable chemistry
of fine actors bouncing off one another. The basic elements are all
there, the framework of the fine film that Hawks had, in fact, already
made just seven years earlier. This time around, the framework is all
there is; it's never filled in with any of the warmth and excitement
that would've been needed to make this one of Hawks' more creditable
attempts at a remake, like the way in which El Dorado riffs on
the central conceit of Rio Bravo. Instead, Hawks took his money
and turned out a generic film that's only enlivened by its sporadic
bursts of music and its status as a Hollywood record of the era's jazz
scene.