That's the Spirit

One of the movies I recently watched off my DVR after it aired on TCM had enough room for a one-reeler. That short was an early Vitaphone musical, That's the Spirit.

The opening title card most prominently mentions Noble Sissle, an early black bandleader, but this isn't one of those static shorts where they stuck a camera in front of a band or singer and had them perform. Instead, there's an odd establishing story. Miller and Moreland (I hadn't heard of Miller, but the latter is a young Mantan Moreland) were apparently a vaudeville pair are walking down a street, where Miller tells Moreland he's gotten Moreland a job as a night watchman in a pawn shop. However, the shop turns out to be haunted, as various items start moving of their own accord, serving as segues to the musical numbers.

After a more traditional jazzy number, we get a flying washboard, and dissolve to a small combo that does a musical number involving playing on a washboard. Next up is a fur coat talking to a man's coat, which leads into a musical number complete with an energetic lady, Cora La Redd (another singer I hadn't heard of) who also dances. One interesting thing is that while it would be wrong to call her fat or even overweight, she's certainly not as petite as later singers would seem to be. After one final song from the band as a whole, it's time for the finale.

This finale is an odd one, as the two men, scared of all the stuff in the pawn shop that comes to life, want to leave. Miller has no problem, but Moreland's shoes won't seem to let him leave. So he jumps out of his shoes, at which point we learn that the shoes have come to life too but don't want any part of this pawn shop either!

The framing story to That's the Spirit is bizarre, but the songs are pretty good on their own and an excellent time capsule of what might have been popular among audiences in the early 1930s. I'm not certain whether the short was intended for black audiences (I can't recall much that the studios made expressly for black audiences, after all), or more likely for those whites who wanted to go slumming or whatever virtue signally would have been called 90 years ago. (I was going to say it didn't exist back then, but remembered that there have always been "do-gooders".) Either way, it's nice that the music was preserved on screen and not just on records.