Watch Boardwalk Empire S04E09 Online Marriage and Hunting.‘The Jazz Age’, they called it. The term came to mean rather more than music, but, like so much of culture, songs were at the heart of things. It was the era of Duke Ellington, Fats Waller and Louis Armstrong; the decade of George and Ira Gershwin, Scott Joplin, ragtime, the Charleston and of course, the blues. It was the age of Bessie Smith and Chalky’s beloved Ma Rainey, whose Farewell Daddy Blues will yet resonate through our fictional world.
In that world it’s also the age of Daughter Maitland, whose exquisite, sensual performances have become standard features of this current run of episodes. Part of Boardwalk Empire’s success as a period piece has been achieved through an evocation of mood that has been powered by the use of music. It’s been an essential element of the show since the beginning, from when the Onyx Club was still Babette’s, and when we were treated to repeat visits by Eddie Cantor, whose speaking voice carried the rhythm and cadence of song. It’s small wonder that the show has, so far, spawned two official soundtrack compilations.
The addition of Maitland has been a well-made one, not merely because of Margot Bingham’s musical talent (that’s her own singing you’ve been hearing) but also her acting and the emotional tension she has brought to her character’s duplicitous mission. Her scenes with Chalky have taken on such an intimacy and tenderness that her violent shift to his defence, effectively a betrayal of her master, feels natural and earned. The sudden intervention of the third person in the room trick appears so frequently in fiction that it’s become a rather hoary trope, but here it works, especially because the groundwork has been put in over the past five episodes.
Structurally speaking, it shows just how well Terence Winter and his team are using the extended running time that TV affords. Emotional weight is added over several patient hours, while tiny deviations in allegiance are given room to shift and develop. It also means that we’ve got plenty of room for Daughter Maitland’s performances. These songs are not merely entertaining in isolated terms, they also add to the period mood, deepening the focus on entertainment as a key source of power and money (even its racially-tinged texture) but above all else they reveal the important of performance to the show itself.