There's kind of an odd moment in Jolson Sings Again, in which Al Jolson remarks that people don't really want to hear his kind of music anymore because they're listening to the kind of crooning Bing Crosby does. Now, I had never thought of Bing Crosby and Al Jolson as even occupying the same universe. I think perhaps I imagined Al Jolson as a kind of relic of vaudeville and thought of Crosby as a fifties movie crooner – this is decidedly incorrect. But this became even more obvious to me while watching Elliott Nugent's She Loves Me Not last night.
Crosby, on the other hand, has not yet figured out his sound, or at least has not settled into the kind of sound he would adopt later. He is doing a little trill thing in his songs that sounds really silly. If memory serves, he left off doing this after awhile. But more to my point about Jolson, Crosby actually sounds like he's singing songs written for Jolson in this. The songs were written by Harry Revel and Mack Gordon ("Straight from the Shoulder" and "I'm Humming–I'm Whistlin'–I'm Singin'"), Arthur Schwartz & Edward Heyman ("After All, You're All I'm After"), and Ralph Rainger & Leo Robin (for their Oscar-nominated tune "Love in Bloom".) It's the Schwartz & Heyman tune that sounds especially Jolsonesque to me. Anyway, this is not a scientific examination of Jolson and Crosby, and I'm not a musicologist, but I've never heard this in Crosby's voice before, and all of a sudden in She Loves Me Not I did.
This is a cute little movie with a couple of fine songs; it's funniest when it's doing its madcap farce routines starring the brilliant Miriam Hopkins.
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