Good intentions do not make a good film, and unfortunately this jazz musical drama is an artistic failure from the start. It appears to be emulating the recent success of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" in presenting story on film in a different manner, utilizing opening credits that deals with the actors as in front of the camera and the people behind the scenes as back of the camera, never indicating who did what. The film is episodic from the start, and the real success in there is the use of the jazz music taking the story back and forth between New Orleans and Chicago. Adolph Menjou give his usual elegance performance as a struggling Southern gentleman who longs to see his children succeed as jazz musicians. The story focuses on his daughter, played by Bonita Granville, who moved to Chicago and found romance with a struggling trumpet player played by Jackie Cooper. Of course, there's a criminal element involved, and the story loses its itself in misguided melodrama that never seems to hold interest. The film tries to reach back to its artistic beginnings, bur continuously fall short of its goal.
There is a sequence at the very beginning with the extraordinary gifted Hall Johnson choir, and they are singing some heavenly spirituals. They truly are the highlight of the film, which unfortunately means that the first 10 minutes which is uneven anyway ends up being more memorable than the remaining 80. I truly wanted to love this film, but I just found it torturous and tedious, mostly as a result of its constant mood swings, acting like many a brooding jazz musician whose lives were documented in many films of the Jazz Age.if only the film had tried to just capture one mood and not move into so many different directions, it would have been tremendously more successful. It is lavishly filmed, and the dubbed musicians on screen do a great job in pretending that they are actually playing whatever instrument happens to be in their hand.
The film certainly deserves an A for effort, but I can't see the teeny boppers of the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney era making it through this without yawning, and I couldn't see the adults dealing with the jitterbug and jam sessions that this put in in spots where the writer seem to think that the younger crowd might be getting restless. So ultimately, in trying to please so many different types of audiences, my guess is that this pleased very few, making this an artistic flop and a missed opportunity that needed a better sense of direction and a more consistent theme.
There is a sequence at the very beginning with the extraordinary gifted Hall Johnson choir, and they are singing some heavenly spirituals. They truly are the highlight of the film, which unfortunately means that the first 10 minutes which is uneven anyway ends up being more memorable than the remaining 80. I truly wanted to love this film, but I just found it torturous and tedious, mostly as a result of its constant mood swings, acting like many a brooding jazz musician whose lives were documented in many films of the Jazz Age.if only the film had tried to just capture one mood and not move into so many different directions, it would have been tremendously more successful. It is lavishly filmed, and the dubbed musicians on screen do a great job in pretending that they are actually playing whatever instrument happens to be in their hand.
The film certainly deserves an A for effort, but I can't see the teeny boppers of the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney era making it through this without yawning, and I couldn't see the adults dealing with the jitterbug and jam sessions that this put in in spots where the writer seem to think that the younger crowd might be getting restless. So ultimately, in trying to please so many different types of audiences, my guess is that this pleased very few, making this an artistic flop and a missed opportunity that needed a better sense of direction and a more consistent theme.