Outside Counsel

Scrolling around the other night I came upon "The Benny Goodman Story", which I'd never seen. It was late, but I got sucked in by the credits, which promised that a lot of Goodman's cronies would be appearing, and then because John Hammond was a prominent character. I'd forgotten that Goodman was Hammond's brother-in-law, which is awesomely cool. Hammond is a thread that runs through jazz and the blues to Dylan and Springsteen (among many, many others). He'd be an excellent subject for a movie bio. So would Benny Goodman, actually. Although "The Benny Goodman Story" got the music right, and even made a couple of interesting points about the way popular music was distributed back then, the movie failed to point out that Goodman was an important racial pioneer, even as it was making a schmaltzy point about Goodman's Jewish mother and his shiska future wife. On the other hand, the musicians promised in the credits delivered. Teddy Wilson was prominent throughout, as were Gene Krupa, Buck Clayton and Lionel Hampton. Stan Getz is supposed to be in there, but I didn't spot him. They all got to play, and they frequently got to play entire numbers, which made the stuff in between (the "plot" for want of a better word) seem like annoying filler. Steve Allen seems to have been cast by reason of a superficial resemblance to Goodman which was apparently mostly that they both wore glasses. I guess glasses were a defining facial feature in the 30's, which explains how Clark Kent fooled Lois for so long. Allen was a capable piano player, and was therefore musician enough to mime the clarinet bits, which were dubbed Goodman, natch. Unfortunately, air clarinet, and a bit of business putting the cap on over the instrument's mouthpiece was about the limit of Allen's ability to act the Goodman role. Goodman was, to put it kindly, a reserved personality (except to the extent that he was not an utter martinet), so the blame can't all fall on Allen, but it is still peculiar to see a stand-in among the actual artists, and it's too bad that they didn't just make a straight documentary.