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her only known film captivates audience at memorial concert
When the Photophone Moving Picture Company in 1925! selected Bessie Smith to play the lead in a movie short entitled "St. Louis Blues," it had no idea that their selectior was to be of singular importance to the Latter Day followers of the Empress of the Blues.
To those of us too young to have seen Bessie in persor| the showing of the picture at the recent Town Hall Memorial Concert for Bessie Smith was a never-to-be-forgotten event She was a strikingly beautiful woman. Her own physica beauty is intensified in this film by a highly sensitive portrayal of a gal-done-wrong by the no-account man she loved All of the depth of feeling of a broken hearted woman pours forth as she leans on a bar, fingers a glass with superbl) delicate hands and, half turned from the screen, proceeds' to cry out the lamenting St. Louis Blues.
As she sings, antiphonally accompanied by a negro chorus led by J. Rosamond Johnson, the camera slowly turns, taking in all of the interior of a typical old colored section saloon As the lens focuses on the band stand we are startled to sec all the old favorites : James P. Johnson, Happy Cauldwel and the late Kaiser Marshall and Joe Smith. Interesting!) enough, Thomas Morris who also appears with the group and who will be remembered for his work on early Wallei discs, is now playing his trumpet in Father Divine's Heaven As the camera returns to Bessie she turns toward it anc powerfully projects the last of the Blues to end the film.
Bessie's records always have stood by themselves at the top of the heap marked Blues. But after having seen thisoverwhelming personality one listens with a new understanding and new respect.
There was always talk that Bessie had made a film, bu no one seemed to know what it was or who had made it. O
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