Jack Buchanan
Walter John Buchanan[The Third Round (film)|] was a British theatre and film actor, singer, dancer, producer and director.
Born to a comfortable middle-class family in Scotland, Buchanan attempted to follow his father into auctioneering, but conceived a strong desire to be a performer. After a calamitous début as a stand-up comic, he moved to London and between 1912 and 1917 built up a performing career in the chorus or small parts in musical comedies before achieving leading roles in West End shows and remaining at the top of his profession for the rest of his career.
He was known for more than three decades as the embodiment of the debonair man-about-town in the tradition of George Grossmith Jr., and was described by The Times as the last of the knuts. Among his leading ladies in West End, and, later, Broadway, shows were Binnie Hale, Gertrude Lawrence, Beatrice Lillie, Jessie Matthews, Phyllis Monkman and – the partner with whom he was most associated – Elsie Randolph.
Buchanan directed, choreographed, and produced many shows, and ran theatres and a film studio. He made several British films, often adaptations of his stage successes, but his best-known film was the Hollywood musical The Band Wagon in 1953.
Life and career
Early years
Buchanan was born on 2 April 1890 in Helensburgh, near Glasgow, the son of Walter John Buchanan, a prosperous auctioneer, and his wife, Patricia McWatt. He was intended for Edinburgh's leading private school, Fettes College, but his father's sudden death in 1902 left the family in reduced circumstances, and he was educated at a state school, the Glasgow Academy.After a brief attempt to follow his father's profession once he left school, he appeared a music hall comedian under the name of Chump Buchanan, making a disastrous début in 1911: he later recalled that he must have set "a world record in getting the bird" twenty-four times in his first week. After that he decided to pursue a career in London.
Buchanan made his West End début on 7 September 1912 at the Apollo Theatre, as M. Deschamps, the French dancing master, in a comic opera, The Grass Widows. He was billed in advance as "Mr W. Buchanan", but by the first night he had opted to appear as Jack Buchanan. His role was a minor one, but he attracted mild praise from the theatrical papers The Era and The Stage. The piece ran for only six weeks, after which Buchanan had only one brief engagement until April 1913, when he joined the chorus of a new revue, All the Winners at the Empire, Leicester Square as understudy to two of the principals. During this time he supplemented his income working as an extra in silent films. When the show closed after two months he was out of work for several months before securing a dancing role in a pantomime in Birmingham and then a principal part in a West End revue, A Mixed Grill, which opened in March 1914.
File:To-night's the night.jpg|thumb|George Grossmith, Jr as Dudley Mitton, with Julia James in To-Night's the Night. Grossmith cast Buchanan as Mitton for a British tour.
Buchanan's health was not robust, and when he attempted to enlist for military service at the start of the First World War he failed his medical examination. He joined a touring production of The Cinema Star understudying Jack Hulbert and then auditioned for the actor-manager George Grossmith, Jr, who cast him in the leading role in a touring production of the highly successful musical comedy, To-Night's the Night. Grossmith himself had played the part on Broadway and in London, and gave Buchanan helpful advice about performing. The tour was successful and lasted for two years. A reviewer commented, "As Dudley Mitton, Mr Jack Buchanan plays with confidence and enthusiasm that is infectious, and his share in the popular 'They didn't believe me!' was valuable indeed, and the grimmer humour of 'Murders' was well handled".
In 1915 Buchanan married Saffo Arnau, a singer professionally known as Drageva. It may have been a marriage of convenience for her benefit: she was a Bulgarian national and therefore liable to internment as an enemy alien during the war if she did not acquire a British husband. She vanished from Buchanan's life while they were both on separate British tours and the marriage was annulled in 1920. Buchanan did not allude to this brief marriage later, preferring to maintain his public image as an eligible bachelor.
West End star
Buchanan's first starring role in the West End was in André Charlot's revue Bubbly in 1917. Hulbert had been the leading man for the first few weeks of the run but was about to be conscripted into the army. The leading lady of the show, Phyllis Monkman, and her actress sister suggested Buchanan as replacement, and he co-starred with Monkman in Bubbly and Charlot's next revue, Tails Up, in between which he appeared with Violet Lorraine, Nelson Keys and Alfred Lester in Round the Map, an American revue rewritten for British audiences.In Charlot's 1921 revue A to Z, Buchanan achieved front rank stardom. The theatre historian W. J. Macqueen-Pope writes that the show's title was appropriate:
For the rest of the 1920s and 1930s Buchanan was famous for, as The Times put it, "the seemingly lazy but most accomplished grace with which he sang, danced, flirted and joked his way through musical shows.... The tall figure, the elegant gestures, the friendly drawling voice, the general air of having a good time."
At the same time as establishing himself as a leading musical comedy star, Buchanan moved into management, which he pursued, with varying degrees of success, throughout the rest of his career. His first venture in that capacity was Battling Butler, which opened at the New Oxford Theatre in 1922. With music by Philip Braham and lyrics by Douglas Furber, it was billed as "a musical farce in three acts", and was co-directed by Dion Titheradge and Buchanan, who choreographed the dances. It ran for 243 performances in the West End, and then toured, with Arthur Riscoe taking over from Buchanan in the lead role. Buchanan followed this success with another musical farce, Toni, by Furber and Harry Graham and Hugo Hirsch, which opened in May 1924 and ran for 250 performances.
Broadway and West End, 1924–1939
Charlot revised A to Z for the Broadway stage as André Charlot's Revue of 1924, which opened at the Times Square Theatre in January of that year. Buchanan co-starred with Lawrence and Beatrice Lillie, and according to his biographer Andrew Lister, the show introduced the American public to "the distinctive charms of the intimate revue" as opposed to the Ziegfeld spectaculars. In December 1924 Buchanan played Lord Algernon Kenilworth in Boodle, in a pre-London try-out in Birmingham and then in the West End. In this piece, described by The Stage as "something more than a musical play... in parts, really excellent farce", Buchanan's character was obliged to disguise himself as a clown and later as a barmaid: a reviewer in the Birmingham Daily Gazette commented, "Ah! if all barmaids were half as interesting, the whole country would take to drink". His leading lady in this production was June, but in a subsidiary role was Elsie Randolph, who became Buchanan's best-known stage partner in later productions. Despite good notices, the piece had a modest run of 94 performances.Buchanan appeared in five British films made in 1924–25: The Audacious Mr Squire, The Happy Ending, Settled Out of Court, A Typical Budget and
Bulldog Drummond's Third Round, and returning to stage revue he appeared, co-starring with Lawrence, in Charlot's 1925 production at the Prince of Wales's. He starred in, choreographed and directed an American production of the show at the Selwyn Theatre, New York. It included one of his most celebrated sketches, "The Fox Has Left His Lair", in which he portrayed a last-minute substitute to a male-voice quartet, who is frantically attempting to keep up with his fellow singers in a hunting song that gets faster and faster and ever more complicated. On his return to London he appeared at the Hippodrome in October 1926, when he produced Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein's Sunny, which ran for 363 performances. Buchanan played Jim Demming, with Binnie Hale as Sunny and Elsie Randolph as Weenie Winters. He interpolated the hunting song sketch into the production. At the same theatre in June 1928, after a pre-London tour, he produced That's a Good Girl, in which he appeared as Bill Barrow with Randolph now in the leading female role. Their duet, "Fancy Our Meeting", was recorded by Columbia and became well known. In his 1978 biography of Buchanan, Michael Marshall comments, "this haunting tune is played and sung whenever Jack and Elsie's long partnership is recalled". In the words of Buchanan's biographer Andrew Spicer:
After this, Buchanan's West End and Broadway appearances were mainly in revue and musicals. In his entry in Who's Who he singled out That's a Good Girl, Stand Up and Sing, Mr Whittington and This'll Make You Whistle among his inter-war productions in the West End. In all these he was partnered by Randolph. He appeared on Broadway again in 1929 in C. B. Cochran's revue Wake Up and Dream, heading a cast that contained Tilly Losch and Jessie Matthews. "Fancy Our Meeting" was interpolated from There's a Good Girl, and as Buchanan and Matthews did not get on well, this affectionate duet cost them both some effort. Buchanan starred in two early Hollywood talkies, Cole Porter's Paris, with Irene Bordoni, and Monte Carlo directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
In 1932 Buchanan accepted an invitation to star in George and Ira Gershwin's Pardon My English in the US. When the production opened it was plain to audiences that he was uncomfortable in his dual role as an English aristocrat and a German gangster. At considerable personal expense he bought himself out of his contract and left the cast. The show closed soon afterwards and he did not return to Broadway for six years. His last Broadway show before the Second World War was Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz's Between the Devil, with Evelyn Laye and Adele Dixon, in which he played an inadvertent bigamist.
Buchanan starred in several British films during the 1930s. Some were straightforward adaptations of his stage successes, including That's a Good Girl and This'll Make You Whistle for Herbert Wilcox's British and Dominions Imperial Studios. Goodnight Vienna, in which he starred opposite Anna Neagle, was based on a BBC-commissioned radio operetta. The Times remarked on how hauntingly Buchanan sang George Posford's songs for the piece. Spicer comments that films more in keeping with Buchanan's image as "the affable playboy" were Brewster's Millions and Come Out of the Pantry. The latter includes one of Buchanan's best-known songs, "Everything Stops for Tea".