The Annotated Conundrums

At the turn of the century, competitive horse racing was the exclusive purview of the wealthy. Racing horses were simply too expensive for the average American, and few would have had the leisure time to train and race them anyway. The only animals most citizens could afford were dogs, cats, talking pigs, and goats, but none of these animals could sate their New World lust for racing.

Enter: the monkey.

Fig. 3 – The market for tiny helmets exploded in the early 1900s

Monkeys were first introduced to America in 1870, by traveling Brazilian samba instructors, who used them as partners in their sidewalk demonstrations. It didn’t take long for circus promoters to discover the tiny, furry, people-like animals, and they began to pop up in demonstrations and foot races. From there, it was hardly a leap to use them as jockeys, and monkey-goat racing was born. Finally, the Sport of Kings was accessible to the working man (though, colloquially, monkey-goat racing was known as “The Sport of Disgraced Viscounts”).

[Via Boing-Boing]

* Most of Whistling Jack Smith’s performances have long since been burned or disavowed, but this rare clip, from the 1967 film Wet My Whistle (released in Europe as Hippie Whistle Party) was recently discovered in the wall-safe of deceased ’60s super-producer Al “Goldy” Silverstein.

Just two years after this video was made, Smith was found shot to death in his Malibu home.  His lover, Whistling Roddy Young, was convicted of the murder and is still serving out his term in San Quentin.

* As we mentioned earlier, To Have and Have Not (1944) was the first full-length Hollywood movie about whistling, but before then there had been countless short films made on the subject — “whistling pictures,” as they were known, or Whistlers.

The most popular subgenre of whistling pictures was the whistling hero, films devoted to the exploits of one man (never a woman, for reasons previously discussed), who solved problems and defeated evildoers with the aid of his above-average skill as a whistler. Whistling heroes have their roots in vaudeville, and on screen they had their heyday in the silent era; traditionally, a single black card would appear on the screen, with the inscription “(whistles)” whenever the protagonist did his thing.

In addition to the serialized adventures of the eponymous hero of The Whistling Boy (1904) these early silent Whistlers included The Whistling Wit, a middling adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s life story, from 1912, and Whistlin’ Town, about a town overrun by a gang of no-good whistlers, and the whistling cowboy who must chase them out.  The latter paved the way for countless whistling tough guys: Whistling Jim, Whistling William, Whistling Hiram, Whistling Ty, and Whistling Dick were just the most popular.  (Dick — played by a young Dick Powell — showed a softer side in the hit 1917 revue Whistling Dick’s Christmas Stocking.)

Fig. 36 – The “Whistling Banker” from the 1920 film of the same name

The advent of sound actually hurt the genre, and whistlies never caught on quite the way talkies did.  This may have had something to do with early recording and playback technology, which would have made the soundtrack shrill and unpleasant for movie-goers.  It wasn’t until To Have and Have Not and the rise of the full-length whistling picture that America once again got to fall in love with whistling.  These full-length whistlers used the extra time and budget to introduce speaking roles, non-whistling-based dramatic action, and love stories, to appeal to a broader audience, giving rise to a slew of post-war imitators.  Whistling in Dixie, a whistling-based Gone With The Wind rip-off, was a hit in its own right and inspired Whistling on the Plain, The Parisian Whistle, and Whatever You Do, Don’t Whistle, an Oscar-nominated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary.

Of course, that was a long time ago, and whistling pictures have since largely disappeared from the American cinematic landscape.  There was a period in the late ’60s when Hollywood producers wrongly associated whistling with the hippie craze, and a few forgettable films starring Whistling Jack Smith came and went.  There was also a brief renaissance in the 1970s, when Whistlesploitation films paired whistling with the gritty drama of murder and drugs in the inner city, but since then only a handful of films have attempted to reclaim the early success of the silent Whistlers, all without success.