It is an intersection of film and pop music histories that many have forgotten.
For a majority of the 1940s, soundies were a popular way to see and hear both famous and up-and-coming musical acts, and each performance only cost a dime. Viewable on special jukebox-like devices called Panorams that were deployed in restaurants, bars and the like, soundies were three-minute long musical performances, with eight soundies edited into a loop making up the weekly changed repertoire
Over the span between 1940 and 1947 – the years that Panorams were in operation – over 1800 soundies were produced, quickly and on a very low budget. Now thanks to a recently released four-disc, 200 film set from Kino Lorber, Soundies: The Ultimate Collection, music and film fans can dive into this nearly forgotten piece of entertainment history.
And although soundies have been shorthanded by some with the descriptor of being a forerunner of the music video, Susan Delson, the film historian who curated the collection for Kino Lorber alongside penning two of the four essays in the set’s accompanying booklet, would disagree.
“I don’t personally think of soundies that way but I can see where some folks might,” states Delson in a recent interview with FilmBuffOnline. Instead, the film historian takes a wider view, with an eye on the intention of the creators of soundies.
“The folks behind soundies thought that they were inventing a new cinematic form,” Delson explains. “Back then remember movies were thought of as disposable, except the one asterix being Gone With The Wind. People only saw most films once, and after they finished their runs they basically disappeared. The Soundies Corporation saw soundies as something different. They really saw soundies as the cinematic equivalent of jukebox records in the sense that instead of seeing them once, people would want to play them over and over like jukebox hits.
“I also think that soundies had a different position in the popular culture than music videos had starting in the 80s. For one thing, soundies were made during wartime on mostly shoe string budgets. They were just cranked out week after week. Music companies did not put money into soundies, nobody put money into soundies. So you don’t get the big budget spectacle that you would get with even 1980s music video. Soundies makers had no time or money to fix their mistakes, so they developed what we might call a glitch esthetic, a lot more like what we see on our phones today. It’s no surprise that there are soundies all over YouTube. They were made for a small screen and they’re fun to watch on a cell phone.”
The soundies in the set are arranged around central themes – life on the homefront during World War Two, how musicals styled changed across the decade, etc – with a number of supplemental materials that help put the these musical shorts into context. Each disc also closes out with a recreation of an actual eight-soundie film loop, giving viewers an insight into the variety of musical genres that would be featured every week for customers.
“I was given a pretty free hand to develop the programs,” states Delson. “Brett [Wood, the disc set’s producer] just said ‘I want to see what you come up with.'”
Being a product of the 1940s, though, there are a number of soundies that contain some depictions that we would definitely consider problematic today, chiefly among depictions of racial minorities. It was an issue that Delson did not ignore when putting together the set, though she also wanted to use them to contrast how subversive of these attitudes some soundies could be.
“I knew that the first disc had to be introducing the soundies,” explains Delson. “Bret and I were in agreement that right in disc one we had to have a program that squarely deals with how problematic some soundies are. I just wanted to get some offensive stuff right out there, but also at the same time do that turn and introduce some films I thought did an interesting job at undermining the dominant trend of thought.
“The first four films in that set are really supposed to make you go a little ‘Ew,'” Delson continues. “That’s because my motto for this whole programming package is ‘The good, the bad and the ugly,’ but in different proportions. I wanted to include everything but not dwell on it. The other reason to do it right up front is because there are things that continue to slip in in the margins throughout the four discs. You’ll see some backdrop that has some horrible racist caricature on it or some lyric that is really insulting and palmed off as totally natural. We wanted the viewer to know that we see this and we acknowledge it, but we didn’t want to leave it out.”
Moving through the four discs of Soundies: The Ultimate Collection, one sees a number of familiar faces and names of established stars of the era as well as those just on the edge of their imminent stardom like Duke Ellington, Nat King Cole, Liberace, Jimmy Dorsey, Les Paul, Louis Jordan, the International Sweethearts of Rhythm and an impossibly young Ricardo Montalban. There are also a number of musical acts that have been virtually forgotten, with their soundies being some of the few records of their talent such as the Kim Loo Sisters, Garcie Barrie and Borrah Minevitch and his Harmonica Rascals.
But no matter what rung of the show business ladder the soundie performers were on, Delson regards them all as pioneers, paving the way towards a new style of performance for a medium they probably didn’t realize was right around the corner.
“I see soundies as a training ground for performers who are learning how to work with the camera,” she explains. “You have musicians who were mainly working in recordings or in radio or live touring, they may never have had a chance to relate to a camera before. And especially in early television, there was an informality in the way people would look into the camera. It’s like the fourth wall almost dropped entirely. You’ve got performers addressing the audience through the camera. It was not like what you had in Hollywood. Almost before TVs got into living rooms, there was this living room-style intimacy. Soundies actually pioneered that style, that way of connecting with the viewer.
Dorothy Dandridge is a master at connecting with the viewer through the camera,” she continues. “We also see in Nat King Cole’s soundies, he is working at developing that. Doris Day, in the soundie ‘Is It Love Or Is it Conscription?,’ is a teenager there. She’s a vocalist with Les Brown and His Band of Renown, she’s already got a killer smile but is still figuring out how to relate to the camera. Same with Liberace. He went on to host his own TV show in the 50s, but again here he is just learning to figure out how to work with the camera.”
