Murder with Music

The script makes no sense, the direction is just strange, the editing very poor, there's some terrible acting and poor miming, yet it's oddly watchable.

Highlights: spot the band members who have never played an instrument before, the moment a tap dancer keeps being shown off-screen in sound only, a lady pretending to take phone calls who says all her lines but leaves no spaces to hear the other half of the conversation she's supposedly reacting to, and strange moments of selective deafness by some of the cast as others share lines right in front of them that they apparently can't hear.

There's some great music, and that's about it's only real saving grace.

This is a strange movie. The breaks in continuity, leaps of logic, robotic lines and random editing make it a surreal experience. Half a century later, bizarro director David Lynch would make a moderately successful career of it. Other aspiring filmmakers--like my 9- year-old nephew--would not be as lucky.

I genuinely found it engaging. All sarcasm aside, I had fun trying to piece together what was happening while at the same time counting the continuity missteps. It was a bit like that game in the Sunday funnies where you're supposed to find 10 things that are wrong with the picture. There's a shirt on a hanger... Now it's gone... Now there's a glass of milk... Now it has mutated into two empty glasses... At a certain point I became convinced that these "goofs" were deliberate, which is how Lynch fans defend such things. Maybe so. I also got a sense of a very "Airplane"-ish style of deadpan humour, as in the hilariously bizarre scene where a policeman is having a jolly time playing the piano whilst behind his back an escaped convict is pistolwhipping random strangers and forcing a few dozen people into a broom closet. The climactic scene (the titular "murder") is so fantastically contrived (and no less fantastically explained in one sentence) that you're left feeling like you just inhaled a mentholyptus cough drop ...up your nose and directly into your brain. What a trip!!

This film defies all ratings. You'll have to make up your own mind if it's a Lynchian masterpiece or a colossal turd (or both?). But I will say that the music is a real treat.

The story is told with the wraparound gimmick of newspaper editor Bob Howard on the phone, trying to get the story of the murder in time for his edition. He appears occasionally to remind the audience that, yes, this is a murder, and not just the story of Nellie Hill, trying to break into show business, with men anxious to hellp her make connections/ The actual murder takes place a couple of minutes before the end credits, and is promptly solved.

It's an excuse for the second part of the title, with good performances by Noble Sissle and his band, ad a couple of good, energetic dancing acts. Like many race movies of the era, it's not much as cinema, but is a lot of fun showing off contemporary musical acts.

To get it out of the way at the beginning, the film was made in either late 1946 or early 1947, not 1941. We know this for two reasons: (1) In the scene in the secretary's office, there's a poster on the wall for Stepin Fetchit's movie "Big Timers", which was a 1945 film, and (2) there was no "Nellie Hill" (or "Nelle" as it's misspelled in the credits) in 1941; Nellie Harrell didn't marry Charles Wesley Hill until 1942. The acting is horrendous; fortunately, the music is really good. Not a spoiler, but ask yourself this: "how, exactly, do you know the piano player is dead?"

This movie was originally shot as "Mistaken Identity", although it's unclear if it was ever released at the time. It was then cut up, some new scenes filmed, and reassembled as "Murder With Music" (the scenes from "Mistaken Identity" were intercut as flashbacks).

Interesting to see a movie made for a black audience with an all-black cast at a time of segretion in the U. S. Some very good singing and dancing, especially Skippy Williams and his Orchestra. Clunky editing and acting and a not-good script, but interesting to see an early television which, at the time would have cost arond $395 (nearly one-third of the all male annual income - black men earned 0.6 of the white wage in 1940), and well out of the range of most Americans, let alone the target audience. The singer was clearly doing VERY well. Overall, best missed except for the historical context.