From the start, "Jazz Heaven" veers off the beaten track in agreeable ways. After opening with a lingering shot of the famous Flatiron Building on Manhattan's 23rd Street, followed by another lingering shot of a side street perpendicular to Central Park, Clyde Cook ambles past brownstones wet from a morning hose-down. He pauses to pick up a cat which he carries on his shoulder to his stoop where he pours milk from a bottle outside the door. Only then does the story kick in.
You see, Cook, the night watchman of a piano store, also runs a boarding house with his wife (Blanche Friderici). She is angry with one of the tenants, a struggling young songwriter (John Mack Brown) who has been playing the same melody on the piano all night, disturbing the other tenants. Brown's next door neighbor (Sally O'Neil), spontaneously starts humming loudly along with the melody; he overhears her, prompting a meeting which quickly turns to love. She happens to work for a music publishing firm run by two Jewish men (Joseph Cawthorn and Albert Conti) who seem like caricatures of the Shubert Brothers, a famous team of theatre owners who were known to bicker. They operate out of one of those buildings that gave the Alley its name, filled with cubicles in which songwriters or their song pluggers banged out their new tunes for potential buyers. The publishers spend as much time insulting each other or arranging dates with showgirls as they do picking potential hit songs. Several minutes are taken up with their linguistically fractured arguments, which amount to the insertion of vaudeville routines.
The oft-repeated song in question is "Someone," a charming composition by Oscar Levant (who also gave us "If You Want the Rainbow, You Must Have the Rain" and "Loveable and Sweet," to name just two, in the early "talkie" era). Both Brown and O'Neil sing it at different points in the film.
If you excised all of the shtick (including the cat and milk bottle scene) the actual plot would fill perhaps 45 minutes.
