Director Roy Mack out-did himself with "Swing Cat's Jamboree."
Not only does he get -- surely only as expected -- some wonderful musical performances from the iconic Cab Calloway and other singers and players, but he gives some fascinating silhouette shots and camera angles, meaning this was not just a throw-away time-filling programmer.
So far as I can tell, these musical shorts were generally intended as throw-away time-filling program padding, and apparently generally had minuscule budgets, but in "Swing Cat's Jamboree," Mack used every penny to advantage -- our advantage.
The opening of "Swing Cat's Jamboree" reminded me a bit of a recently presented Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle feature on Turner Classic Movies: The star is wasting time in his mama's kitchen while she is slaving away doing laundry. Fatty, of course, just makes a mess, but Cab is heard by a passing church deacon who, in my opinion strangely, has a wife who reads tea leaves.
He invites Cab down to his wife's place and she forecasts, among other things, that he will indeed have an orchestra. Which he does in a dream-like cutaway -- really just an excuse to present a musical number, for which I am and you should be grateful -- and then Mack cuts back to Cab, the deacon, and the tea-leaf reader as she offers another prediction.
Still, it's a story and a more reasonable premise than most of the other musical shorts I've seen.
Frankly, I had never before admired and liked Cab Calloway as much as I obviously should have. In this short, he sings and displays his personality and his ability so even I now understand just why he is an icon, a real classic character of the Big Band era.
He deserves every drop of adulation we can give him.
"Swing Cat's Jamboree" is an excellent musical short, and I do hope you get to sit and watch and listen.
