Keep Your Shertzinger On!

The name Victor Shertzinger (1888-1941) has not withstood the test of time but once you learn of his accomplishments you may wonder why it hasn’t. He was not only a movie director, but also a movie composer, a producer, and a songwriter. His best remembered movies today are the first two Hope and Crosby “Road” pictures Road to Singapore (1940) and Road to Zanzibar (1941). He wrote the tune to the standard “Tangerine”. Y mucho más.

Shertzinger was of Pennsylvania Dutch stock. By four he was recognized as a violin prodigy. By eight he was touring the U.S. with the musical ensembles of important nation figures like Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa. Throughout his teens he studied and performed in Europe.

One of Shertzinger’s first credits as a professional composer was some songs for L. Frank Baum’s The Tik-Tok Man of Oz (1914). In 1916 he was commissioned to write the score for Thomas Ince’sCivilization, and his career in cinema was assured. He started out directing a series of silent comedies starring Charles Ray. For Mabel Normand he directed vehicles like Jinx and When Doctors Disagree, both in 1919. Others included the Jackie Coogan features Long Live the King (1923) and A Boy of Flanders (1924), the 1926 version of Belasco’sThe Return of Peter Grimm, The Heart of Salome (1927) with Alma Rubens, and Redskin (1929) with Richard Dix.

In the talkie era, Shertzinger returned to composing, and became in a sense a total film-maker. Sometimes, as with The Love Parade (1929) and Wheeler and Woolsey’s Court Plastered (1931) he only did the score. But there were many cases where he directed, produced, and/or scored the same films. Some of these include Love Me Forever (1935) with Grace Moore, The Music Goes ‘Round (1936) with Harry Richman, and Something to Sing About (1937), one of Cagney’s few musicals. After The Mikado (1939), he did Rhythm on the River (1940) with Bing Crosby and Mary Martin, the two aforementioned “Road” pictures with Hope and Crosby, Kiss the Boys Goodbye (1941) with Mary Martin and Don Ameche, Birth of the Blues (1941) with Martin and Crosby, and The Fleet’s In (1942) with Dorothy Lamour from the Road pictures with William Holden and Eddie Bracken.

He also wrote scores of songs with top lyricists like Gus Kahn, Frank Loesser, Johnny Burke, and Johnny Mercer.

Surely you know what happened next, right? If you answered “fatal heart attack” you are correct. If you have some sense of how strenuous any of those jobs are: director, composer, or producer, and then take note of the fact that he often did two or three of those jobs on the same picture, it seems almost inevitable. He was only 53 when he died. Think of the movies he might have made over the next two decades. Pace yourself, man, pace yourself!

For more on the history of show business,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, for more on classic comedy please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube. And stay tuned for my upcomingElectric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.