Swing Banditry

When I watched Swing Shift recently, it was a ~98-minute movie put in a two-hour time slot, so there was rather a good deal of time left over. TCM filled that with the appropriately-titled one-reeler Swing Banditry.

George Stoll plays a bandleader trying to get an interview with radio executive Royal Cummings. They waylay a man in an elevator thinking he's Cummings, but the man claims to be a fellow musician. It's a lie, however, and when Stoll finds out, he has his band effect a false arrest and assault a worker in the building, in order to get a studio orchestra out of the building for Stoll's band to replace them. Amazingly, this doesn't get Stoll arrested, but instead their orchestra gets the job!

This being a one-reeler, of course there's next to no plot, just a couple of songs (and a Franklin Pangborn sighting). The songs include the then current Sing, Sing, Sing (With a Swing), a song you'll definitely realize even if you didn't know the name (which I didn't). Louis Prima released the original in February 1936 and this short was released in September of the same year.

As with all these bandleader shorts, I always find myself looking up the bandleader to see just how much of a success they really were. That's interesting in this case, since Stoll was really a house conductor/composer/arranger at MGM, a career that started, ironically, after this short. Stoll notably worked on The Wizard of Oz, and would win an Oscar for his work on Anchors Aweigh.

As a short, Swing Banditry isn't much to write home about, but it's an interesting piece of musical history. It got a DVD release as part of Volume 2 of the Warner Archive's Classic Shorts from the Dream Factory.