by Douglas Messerli
Bob Caver, Eddie Coleman, and Gus Simons (performers), Josef Berne
(director) Faust / 1945
The singing group of Day, Dawn, and Dusk, appearing in one of over 300
Soundie short films featuring black performers from 1940-1946, begin with a rendition
of Gounod’s opera Faust, with Bob Caver at the piano, Gus Simons playing
Méphistophélès, and Eddie Coleman performing as Marguerite in drag. When
Marguerite actually begins with the rendition of her famous aria as she refuses
to join Méphistophélès, sung beautifully in French, Simons sings a
pastiche of several silly patter songs to accompany her in what was originally
a trio.
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Finally rid of both, the devil and
Marguerite join in the lively popular song, “Let’s dance, big boy, let’s dance,”
Coleman still in drag costume.
As film historian Derek Le
Beau points out: “He [Coleman] is wearing a tuxedo beneath the dress. It
becomes a way for the singer to hold onto his masculinity without being too
‘feminine’ and it works to draw attention to the fact he’s playing a part. It
can also be argued that it does the reverse as well; by drawing attention to
his masculinity while he’s singing about wanting to cozy-
Coleman sings out: “Let’s
dance, big boy, let’s dance,” to which the other two respond, “Whatcha waiting
for tall skinny momma?”
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The Soundies, basically focusing on black
entertainers not able to participate in the Hollywood films, were also, as Le
Beau points out, not subject to the tight restrictions of the film code: “In
Soundies, Black performers had more freedom to use their own stage acts and
even appear in roles that didn’t fall into the usual tropes and stereotypes
usually seen in mainstream films.”
One might observe that
Joseph Breen and his committee probably simply didn’t care much about these
shorts, given their racist and sexist attitudes, and the 3-minute programmers,
mostly made for black audiences, simply flew under the radar.
In this work
the performers certainly seem to have more fun than most of the singers of the
standard Hollywood film musicals.
Day, Dawn, and Dusk also
did a short film on the opera Rigoletto, but apparently did not appear
in drag in that work. But they did play with the notion of a female baby in
their famous Sleep Kentucky Babe, also of 1945, which I review below.
Letterboxd lists the
director of Faust mistakenly as being William Forest Crouch, who was the
executive producer.
Los Angeles, February 19, 2024
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (February 2024).
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