Hi-De-Ho and Boarding House Blues (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Jan 24, 2025
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
-
Director
Josh BinneyRelease Date(s)
1947/1948 (October 29, 2024)Studio(s)
All-American Entertainment/All-American News (Kino Classics)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: A-
- Extras Grade: B
Review
“Race films” were the 500 or so films made for African-American audiences from roughly 1915 through the early 1950s, most of which are lost. These films featured all-black casts and played in black neighborhood theaters in major cities and the segregated South. They had production values comparable to Poverty Row companies like Monogram and PRC, but often featured top names from the black entertainment world and, unencumbered by the Production Code, played more like Pre-Code films.
Such is the case with Kino’s Blu-ray release of two such films from the late-1940s, near the end of this phenomenon: Hi-De-Ho (1947) and Boarding House Blues (1948), the former starring the great Cab Calloway and other top acts, the latter featuring Jackie “Moms” Mabley, decades before she caught the attention of white audiences.
Both features have been restored in 4K by the Library of Congress, using the original 35mm nitrate camera negatives, though in the case of Hi-De-Ho, much lesser 16mm elements are utilized to fill in some gaps.
Hi Di Ho (no hyphens in the title) is a vehicle for Cab Calloway, the great jazz/scat singer and bandleader, a longtime headliner at the Cotton Club in Harlem, and who late in life was immortalized performing Minnie the Moocher in The Blues Brothers (1980). In this, he more or less plays a pre-fame version of himself, a rising talent whose new manager, Nettie (Ida James), makes longtime girlfriend Minnie (Jeni Le Gon) furiously jealous. He signs on with a new nightclub, prompting Minnie to approach gangster Boss Mason (George Wiltshire), who wants Cab to sign a contract with his rival nightclub—or else. When Cab refuses, Mason sends Mo the Mouse (James Dunmore) to gun him down.
The paper-thin plot is mostly just an excuse to incorporate Calloway’s music and other acts and, indeed, what story the film has is pretty much wrapped up 20 minutes before the film ends. A climatic shootout has the authenticity of an elementary school play, complete with cap-guns rather than Hollywood replicas with blanks.
Most versions of Hi-De-Ho run 63 minutes, including one linkable via Wikipedia, but this Blu-ray release runs a good 12 minutes longer. I suspect most prints were cut for reissues and television airings but, regardless, the restored version here looks razor-sharp (with minor damage) most of the time, but with 16mm, public domain-type inserts here and there, most likely accounting for the extra footage. It’s also entirely possible that the original negative was cut for later reissues of the picture.
Though the story and the actors within it are mildly interesting—Calloway’s not a bad actor, the plot has Minnie slapped around here and there, more politically-incorrect than anything else in the film—the real draw are the music and specialty acts. Curiously, though Minnie twice asks Cab to “sing that song you wrote about me,” Calloway’s signature number, Minnie the Moocher is never heard once, possibly due to legal issues.
Instead, Cab alone or with His Orchestra perform Minnie Was a Hepcat, St. James Infirmary, At Dawn Time, Hey Now, I Got a Gal Named Nellie, and The Hi-De-Ho Man. The band has its own share of stellar names, including Jonah Jones, Quentin Jackson, Sam “The Man” Taylor, Dave Rivera, Milt Hinton, and Panama Francis.
Other great black entertainers are given plenty of time for their specialty acts. Vaudeville comedian Clinton “Dusty” Fletcher performs the entirety of his Open the Door, Richard! routine, playing a muttering drunk trying to find his way home. (The nightclub audience’s amused reaction is obviously genuine.) Later, the refrigerator-sized Peters Sisters perform Little Old Lady from Baltimore and A Rainy Sunday. I’d never heard of them before, but they’re fine singers with a style and career trajectory not unlike the Andrews Sisters.
They’re followed by acrobatic tap dancers the Miller Brothers and Lois, who dangerously tap away on high, very rickety-looking platforms. It’s an impressive, tense act—it looks like any or all of them could shatter a pelvis or break a leg at any moment. Soon after their performance in Hi-De-Ho captured their act, the trio wisely retired for their own safety.
It’s rinse and repeat for Boarding House Blues which, like the Calloway film, hasn’t a story so much as a premise, an excuse to showcase various acts, in this case the last 60% of the 87-minute film. Moms owns a Buffalo, New York boarding house catering to black entertainers, including Dusty Fletcher from Hi-De-Ho. Broke, she needs to come up with $50 or everyone will be kicked to the curb by the heartless landlord, so they decide, Our Gang-style, to put on a show to raise the money.
So perfunctory is the plot, the landlord makes like Simon Legree and offers to forget the debt if one pretty border will marry him, a woman he apparently meets 10 seconds before making this offer. And while the entertainers are depicted as down-and-out nobodies in the plot part of the movie, during the Big Show they’re introduced as top stars will thousands, nay millions of fans.
My generation remembers Moms Mabley as a presence on late-‘60s, early ‘70s television, when she was old and toothless, her croaky speech at times incoherent. Just 25 years earlier, Mabley was doing essentially the same act, but in healthy middle-age. Her voice and performance style in Boarding House Blues is more like Isabel Sanford of The Jeffersons and films such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.
As with Hi-De-Ho, the bulk of the film consists of widely varied acts—big band orchestras, tap dancers, comics, etc., drawn from Vaudeville and the “Chitlin’ Circuit.” Highlights include Bull Moose Jackson with the Lucky Millinder Band singing Yes I Do, Stump & Stumpy performing We’ve Got Rhythm to Spare, and Anistine Allen singing Let It Roll. The most bizarre yet also impressive act is “Crip” Heard, a one-legged, one-armed dancer, without artificial limbs, performing with and without a crutch.
One other unique component of the film is Dusty’s acquisition of an ape named “Steggy.” As something of a connoisseur of Hollywood ape suits, I was fascinated by this heretofore unknown (to me) addition to pantheon of ape skins worn by Ray “Crash” Corrigan, George Barrows and others. Apparently played by John Riano, this costume is not a traditional Hollywood-imagined gorilla but rather something like a cross between a baboon and Japanese macaque, with Riano’s performance impressively realistic and animal-like. Late in the film Riano takes the headpiece off, revealing himself to Moms as a human being in disguise. One assumes the costume was made for stage appearances but, in any case, it’s really something.
Kino’s all-Region Blu-ray puts both black-and-white, 1.37:1 films on a single disc. As noted above, both were restored in 4K from the original negatives by the Library of Congress, with some 16mm film elements used to provide a complete version of Hi-De-Ho. Compared to long-available public domain versions, these are revelations and look great. The DTS-HD Master Audio (2.0 mono) is mostly good.
Film historian Ina Archer provides a good introduction to Boarding House Blues that runs just under five minutes. Also included are six Soundies musical shorts, three with Cab Calloway and three featuring Lucky Millinder.
Both Hi-De-Ho and Boarding House Blues have limited value as conventional movies, but if you’re interested in 1940s era black entertainment, these pictures are priceless, capturing acts that, in many cases, don’t otherwise survive on film. A few will leave viewers nonplussed from a contemporary perspective, but many are outstanding and this double feature disc, overall, is very worthwhile.
- Stuart Galbraith IV