Lena Horne At Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: Ain' It The Truth Motion Picture Soundtrack Anthology

This is a must-have for Lena fans or fans of her film performances. In fact many of these film performances are in films that have not yet been released to digital or dvd, let alone vhs so this is the only place to hear them. This is also a great start for fans who want to get to know the legend that only just recently passed away at 92. Of course Stormy Weather is not here nor any songs from that film, as Lena was borrowed by Twentieth Century Fox for that film. Aside from that this is a great way to hear Lena from age 25 to 39 in excellent voice.

The audio quality could have been better.

Metro, smuggest of studios, deserves our qualified thanks for perfecting (but not inventing) the brightly lit, upbeat, original movie musical. The darker underbelly of the Metro story, however, is their mishandling of two (or more) of their larger musical stars, Jeanette MacDonald and Lena Horne. In MacDonald's case her comedic talents (carefully nurtured by Lubitsch and Mamoulian at Paramount) were suppressed, and she was corseted into badly dated costume operettas, none original, with unappealing singing partners. Miss Horne at least got one charismatic duet partner—Eddie Anderson—out of her Metro deal, but never a featured or starring role. Hers was the face, the statuesque figure, the voice, the unique personality habitually sacrificed to the cutter's shears. Profits-driven Metro nervously caved in to its tetchy Southern exhibitors, in a troubled era evoked in eyewitness Jonathan Rosenbaum's memoir MOVING PLACES: A LIFE AT THE MOVIES.Miss Horne's vocal tracks fortuitously survive archivally and are self-recommending for their artistic and historical value. Lennie Hayton's boutique arrangements sometimes rather swamp his wife, in the familiar and overblown Metro house style, and her personality and feistiness are less apparent here than in her later studio and live recordings. Her familiar Kern, Porter and Rodgers signature classics are included and are primo soundstage-soubrette Horne, but the three genuine keepers are her two duets with Eddie Anderson (especially "Solid potato salad") and Horne's final Metro solo, the devilish "You got looks" dropped from 1956's MEET ME IN LAS VEGAS—when the singer was approaching the studio's unofficial expiration date of age 40 and wisely abandoned her unrealized feature-film aspirations.I would cherish this compilation for "You got looks" alone, the wonderful but unused SHOW BOAT songs (like Irene Dunne, Lena Horne was born to sing Kern idiomatically) and for the great "Rochester" (a delightfully good soul jiver), but important bonuses here are collectable cover art, thorough documentation with glamourous film stills, and Rhino's digital restoration of the squidgy MGM sound process. (Several tracks are transferred in early experimental stereo from the studio notorious for the muddiest, most fussily overprocessed sound in Hollywood, for which we can only censure Norma's elder brother Douglas Shearer.)Gratifyingly—although Lena Horne had early on appropriated archrival Ethel Waters' signature song "Stormy weather"—that Arlen classic won't appear here since that was Horne's Fox song, and a wholly different chapter in studio politics. In a different world "You got looks" could have become Lena's proprietary signature song, and had La Horne become a contractual mainstay at more liberal Fox, we might today enjoy rediscovering original musicals headlined, not by June Haver, Vivian Blaine or Betty Grable, but by a fully empowered, uncensored, irrepressible, African-American superstar.

Lena Horne was an unfortunate victim of racism in Hollywood of the '40s and '50s. Her impeccable vocal stylings are well known, but she was also a fine actress and had very few opportunities to demonstate this in her days at MGM. Due to Southern theatre's racist attitudes her film appearances were set up in such a way that she could be cut from the films without affecting the storyline. The result was that she would appear as a novelty act or guest star, sing a song or two, and then disappear. What a shame. She should have been cast as "Julie" in the 1951 version of SHOW BOAT. Luckily she did appear in that role for "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man" in 1946's TILL THE CLOUDS ROLL BY. It's the only evidence we have of the power she could have brought to the role. This CD contains nearly every song she performed at MGM and a few outtakes, too. Her wonderful songs from CABIN IN THE SKY, the film in which she was actually a character in the story (it was an all-black cast) are all here including the fabulous outtake "Ain't It the Truth." Exotic and subltly erotic, Lena was and remians one of a kind.