In my recent review of Charlie Chaplin’s painful misfire Monsieur Verdoux, I paid brief homage to “Martha Raye’s memorable performance as the grasping, guileless Annabella Bonheur, the one woman Verdoux can’t kill. I’ve always found Martha’s act hard to swallow, but it seems churlish here to deny her her one moment of glory.”
Well, let’s make that two moments, because over at the New Republic, David Hajdu has unearthed this splendid serendipity, Martha scattin’ to beat the band with the previously unknown to me Francis Faye (and, yeah, that’s Bing in the corner):
The clip, pretty damn blurry but still hep, as we say in the business, is from the 1937 flick Double or Nothing, which is available through Netflix, and can also be purchased as part of the “Bing Crosby: Screen Legend” budget DVD package, which probably explains the low quality of the clip. The plot? F Gwynplaine MacIntyre, who operates out of Minffordd, North Wales, fills us in capably here. Bing and Martha are backed up by both Andy Devine and William Frawley (talk about must see!). Martha plays a stripper who starts taking off her clothes whenever she hears the tune “It’s On, It’s Off!”
Going back to the clip, the bandleader who joins in the scat is Barry Harris, who worked with Bing back in the early days as part of the “Rhythm Boys” with the Paul Whiteman band, featured in the fantastic 1930 two-color Technicolor film King of Jazz, still available only on VHS.
