Paulette Goddard, surely one of the most underrated stars of the classical Hollywood era, is Ellen Miller, is a smart, savvy woman who plays on Danny's vanity to great effect in the opening scene and goes on to manage their band to even greater effect. She shifts personas with every sales call and comes off just as dazzling with each role, more playful than mercenary as she applies her sex appeal to the art of making a deal. Under her management, their college swing band, Danny O'Neill's Perennials, becomes a hot regional favorite and the only thing that could ruin their success is graduating college, something they been able to put off for years. Sure enough, professional and romantic rivalry sends Danny and Hank sabotaging one another, first in school, then in auditions with Artie Shaw's band. Ellen is one of these sweet and sexy screen women whose affection for these tirelessly competitive and annoyingly (and unjustifiably) arrogant two men allows her to forgive the most juvenile, self-centered, and cruel behavior, but their feud finally pushes past her limits when they go about sabotaging her own life and career out purely selfish, short-sighted reasons.
That kind of brutal edge is nothing new to comedy partners out of the vaudeville tradition -- it's the foundation of such classic team-ups as Abbott & Costello and Hope & Crosby -- and Fred Astaire is no stranger to playing the cocky opportunist, but these boys (and these actors are playing men much younger than their actual years) are utterly self-centered, ruthlessly mercenary, and reflexively destructive. They aren't pals, they are unstable elements in a combustible relationship that explode upon contact with any outside object or force, be it success, opportunity, or a pretty girl. The only time they manage to work together is when they have mutual goals. In those instances they manage to double-team with the best of them, whether it's a dual onslaught of double-talk or a scheme worthy of con-artists targeting a patsy.
Artie Shaw, who has a sizable role in the film, isn't as wooden as many of the real-life bandleaders who appeared in Hollywood musicals as themselves, which is to say he's adequate to the task but hasn't the natural charisma or acting chops to suggest much personality to his character. But he's surrounded by a good cast that keeps the film moving and the patter rolling. Along with Astaire (the romantic), Burgess (the wild-eyed con-man), and Goddard (the born businesswoman) is Charles Butterworth as Mr. Chisholm, a would-be hep-cat of a middle-aged millionaire who adores music and stumbles over swing lingo like a doddering but harmless square. Butterworth plays him as a born sucker, guileless and utterly unthreatening, which allows Ellen to charm him into backing a "serious" concert by Shaw, another project that Danny and Hank trample in their reflexive scheming.
While this is more of a big band musical than the usual Astaire project, with Astaire miming trumpet solos from a bandstand (Bobby Hackett dubs his playing), the film manages to fit in a couple of dance numbers, including an easy duet with Goddard and a finale where he conducts the Artie Shaw band while tap dancing up a specialty number, and he sings a couple of songs as well. Shaw provides the music for the film and Johnny Mercer the lyrics to the songs, and the film earned Oscar nominations for Best Score and Best Song ("Would You Like to Be the Love of My Life?," sung by Astaire to Goddard). Mercer also receives a special credit for "contribution to screenplay," which is otherwise credited to Elaine Ryan and Ian McLellan Hunter. H. C. Potter, who helmed The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle with Astaire in 1939, directs the independently produced film on a budget tighter than most of Astaire's more lavish projects. Like many classic films produced outside of the studio structure, it fell into the public domain in the 1960s and has since shown up in scores of poor-quality editions on TV, VHS, and DVD.
The rise of Blu-ray has created yet one more opportunity for labels to dip into the public domain titles that once filled up the bargain bins of VHS and DVD, usually haphazardly transferred from second- or third-rate prints, many of them rough or damaged and many generations from the original. The difference with Blu-ray, however, is an expectation of superior quality. Those scratchy, hissy, blown-out editions of $3 bargain basement discs just aren't going to fly at 1080p.
Some labels are making an effort to rehabilitate the PD catalogue by seeking out good quality archival 35mm prints, making high-quality digital masters, and using software to digitally stabilize shaky images, clean up scratches and scuffs, and repair torn and damaged frames. The results aren't always top drawer, but many are quite good (Kino has been notably successful working with film archives and institutions) and even lesser efforts are invariably a significant improvement over previous incarnations.
Film Chest is among the newer players in the realm of PD on Blu-ray, boasting 2k digital scans of 35mm fine grain nitrate prints. Those prints aren't necessarily archival quality, mind you, as the restoration demonstrations show, and heavy digital clean-up is used to scour away the wear and tear of the image. Because of the 35mm source, the base image gives them something to work with, however, and Second Chorus is one of their better efforts. It's not a restoration in any real sense of the term -- some portions are cleaned to the point of removing film detail, there are some damaged patches that all the digital scrubbing can't repair, and some scenes have a tinny echo to the audio -- but it is still much cleaner and sharper than any previous version I've seen, and more sensitive to the original texture of the film than many previous Film Chest releases.
The Blu-ray+DVD Combo Pack features commentary by Hollywood historian Tom Santopietro and a trailer, plus a brief before-and-after "restoration demonstration" and a movie art postcard.
By Sean Axmaker
