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  • Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir by Jans B. Wager
  • Jon Gudmundson (bio)
Jans B. Wager, Jazz and Cocktails: Rethinking Race and the Sound of Film Noir Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017

The opening of the 1958 film I Want to Live! (dir. Robert Wise) seeks to establish the seedy, sleazy, depraved, and debauched world of its main character, Barbara Graham. Graham is a bad girl whose main mission in life, it seems, is to have a good time. Unfortunately, her bad choices in life eventually lead to a murder rap and a death sentence. To set the scene, then, in the opening minutes the camera shows a litany of vices going on, many of them taking place in a raucous jazz club, with a jazz combo furiously providing the accompaniment. The camera then drifts upstairs to a hotel room where Graham (played by Susan Hayward in a Best Actress Academy Awardwinning performance) is just getting out of bed with a client. She steals a glance at her customer's open wallet, spying in it his family photo. When a vice cop arrives to bust the john, Barbara takes the rap, showing the viewing audience that she may be a bad girl, but she has a heart of gold. Bronze, at least.

Author Jans B. Wager, referencing Jazz Noir author David Butler, points out in Jazz and Cocktails, that the director of I Want to Live!, Robert Wise, used jazz not only in the usual Hollywood way, as a kind of shorthand to paint a grimy, underworld scene. The use of jazz does indeed help to establish the world in which Graham lives, but it also serves to bring out her humanity. One reason the American public were shocked by the Graham case (the movie was based on actual events), was the sordid nature of the crime (one witness recounted Graham having savagely pistol-whipped a widow during a robbery), but another factor was simply the idea of Graham's being the first woman to be put to death by our government for a capital crime. Another disturbing aspect of the case was the thought that this woman just might not be guilty of the murder, but only of covering for others, as she (as portrayed by Hayward) had done with her prostitution client in the opening minutes of the film. In Jazz and Cocktails, Wager explores the various ways that jazz music supports the visuals, overtly or subtly, and sometimes is at odds with the visuals in a selection of classic noir movies.

In Jazz and Cocktails, Wager examines the use of jazz in film noir and the role and treatment of race in these films, with an eye especially for the effects of Afromodernity and the alienation effect. While many films are discussed, including proto-, early and neo-noir (I Want to Live!, among [End Page 266] them), Wager spends more time on a selected handful of movies, including Odds Against Tomorrow (dir. Robert Wise, 1959), Anatomy of a Murder (dir. Otto Preminger, 1959), and Sweet Smell of Success (dir. Alexander Mackendrick, 1957). Referring to these films, Wager writes, "For me, [they] illustrate a vibrant and fleeting moment when Hollywood film noir and jazz made remarkable and unique meaning together, a moment when the primacy of the visual relinquished a measure of dominance to aural interpretations."

An added bonus to the book is a chapter about the jazz and race scene in Ogden, Utah. At first, this might seem an odd choice to include in a book about jazz music in film noir, but it makes sense for at least a couple of reasons. For one, Wager is a professor of film studies at a university in Utah, so she has ready access to Ogden and its colorful history. More importantly, the author uses the very lively Ogden scene of the 1940s and 1950s to illustrate African American and Jazz and movie-going life at the time, in microcosm. During the years that people crossed the country mostly by train, just about everybody had to pass through Ogden, Utah. As a result, the part of town near the train...

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