Il re del jazz

This has an animation and in-camera tricks introduction. The main body is a big musical presenting band leader Paul Whiteman as The King of Jazz. It's an early musical a few years after the introduction of sound. It's a series of musical numbers on a big stage setting. It's a large production but there is no overarching connecting plot. The main connecting device is a giant book that is flipped to get to the next chapter. It's also in Technicolor. There are comedic interstitial scenes. As a historical document, it is absolutely fascinating. It's almost Vaudeville on film in that it's just a lot of performers performing on stage. It is a movie of a bygone era. It's also the first film with Bing Crosby. It was a bit of a failure at the time which may be due to a flood of similar musicals. It's a scattershot of lavish musical scenes without much connective tissue. By the midway point, any novelty is worn out as it all becomes more and more of the same fascinating nothingness. It has no story and it's not concentrating on any single character other than Paul Whiteman who is mostly simply a face. This may not be a great film but it is a fascinating one.

"King Of Jazz" is a museum piece. Let's face it, anyone under 50 probably never heard of Paul Whiteman, and anyone under 40 only knows Bing Crosby from his Christmas album. That leaves the rest of us.

For The Rest Of Us, it doesn't get any better than "King Of Jazz". That, of course, was Paul Whiteman, rotund band leader of a bygone era who is the nominal star of this film. He was not an actor, and so the film is given over to actors and other entertainers. The accent here is on 'entertainer', as this movie is festooned with lots and lots of them.

Ever see Bing Crosby with his real hair? Ever see the Radio City Rockettes, thunder-thighed in the late 20's? Ever see George Gershwin in a movie? How about vaudevillian Al Norman with his rubber-legged dancing? It's all here, in a non-stop revue of old and almost-forgotten songs and dance numbers (there are 18 in all), interspersed with blackouts and comedy skits. Plus, it's in color (sort of) - actually, it's primitive 2 strip color.

I could go on and on but if you are a hard-core movie fan or a film historian, "King Of Jazz" is for you. The jokes are stale, the singers still trilled their 'R's, and the gowns in the bridal number are so out of style they are probably coming back. The overall effect was both sheer delight and visually overwhelming and I wished it would never end. It is available only on VHS and hasn't been seen on TV in years. It is a must for The Rest Of Us.

P.S. Ever see Paul Whiteman tap dance?

1930's King of Jazz is the strangest and most surreal of the early sound cycle of movie studio revues. Very few films shot completely in two-strip Technicolor survive - this is one of them. Warner Bros. probably made the most all-Technicolor films in the early sound era, but since most of them were Vitaphone the films have long since been lost in most cases.

The 1929 and 1930 early sound revues were made by the studios primarily to showcase their talent in an all-talking setting. MGM's "Hollywood Revue of 1929" started the cycle, and did a pretty good job. However, other studios lost sight of the goal and the revues that followed were often clumsily put together and didn't even showcase talent that belonged to the studio.

"The King of Jazz" is a surprise not only because it holds up so well with time, but because it is such a non-typical product for Universal Studios of that era. Universal of the 20's and 30's mainly made westerns for rural moviegoers with an occasional prestige picture and they were beginning to dabble in the horror genre for which the studio is most remembered. However, at this time they were also known for their thrift, which went out the window when they made this film. The film starts out with a cartoon showing how Paul Whiteman - who called himself The King of Jazz - discovered Jazz. What follows are a sequence of musical and comedy routines. This film doesn't make the mistake of trying to sew the numbers together with some maudlin backstage melodrama. It simply presents the numbers in sequence. Most of the talent here is not under long-term contract to Universal. Laura LaPlante is one of the rare exceptions to that rule. The musical numbers are a delight and it is great to see Bing Crosby at the very beginning of his career. The Brox Sisters light up this film just as they did MGM's revue with "Singin in the Rain". The whole thing is so lively and done with with such innovation and energy considering the static camera of the early talkie era that I can't believe Universal has never thought to put this on DVD. They made this one great musical and didn't really make another one until 1936's "Showboat".

My favorite number is "Song of the Dawn" featuring handsome John Boles with his piercing eyes in close up during most of the number belting out a song with that wonderful tenor voice of his. The most memorable number though has got to be "Happy Feet" with dancing shoes and the Sisters G as singing heads in a shoebox. This number also has the aptly named Al "Rubber Legs" Norman showing us the moon dance 28 years before Michael Jackson was even born.

Highly recommended for the fun of it all.

THE KING OF JAZZ (Universal, 1930), directed by John Murray Anderson, is the fourth and final of Hollywood's all star musical revues during the 1929-30 season, and ranks the most impressive of the four, outdoing MGM's THE Hollywood REVUE OF 1929 (1929); Warners THE SHOW OF SHOWS (1929) and PARAMOUNT ON PARADE (1930). Filmed in early two-strip Technicolor, it is fortunate to have survived after all these years considering how many early color movies are either lost or have survived in black-and-white format only. The title character goes to band-leader, Paul Whiteman, in his feature movie debut, but THE KING OF JAZZ is remembered today as the motion picture debut of Bing Crosby, who, in reality, mainly appears as part of the Rhythm Boys in some musical skits.

Virtually plotless, the revue begins with Crosby's off-screen vocalizing of "Music Hath Charms" during the opening credits. This is followed by Charles Irwin standing in as master of ceremonies who tells how Paul Whiteman became crowned "The King of Jazz." A cartoon segment follows (compliments of Walter Lantz, the creator of Woody Woodpecker), showing Whiteman himself hunting in darkest Africa being chased by a lion, to then sooth the savage beast by violin playing to the tune, "Music Hath Charms". After an elephant squirts water through its trunk on a monkey up a tree, the angry monkey throws a coconut towards the elephant, which, in turn, hits Whiteman's head, bumping it into the form of a crown. Then comes the introduction of the Paul Whiteman Band, presenting themselves individually playing tunes with their instruments. Production numbers and comedy skits follow. The most striking numbers are: "The Bridal Veil" the ten minute spectacle of Whiteman conducting his orchestra to George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," and the "Happy Feet" number, sung by The Sisters "G", with chorus girls descending onto a large-scale miniature of New York City, highlighted by the eccentric rubber-legged dancing by Al Norman.

Other songs presented include: "The Lord Delivered Daniel" (sung by the cartoonish Paul Whiteman) "Mississippi Mud" and "So the Bluebirds and the Blackbirds Got Together" (both sung by The Rhythm Boys: Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker); "It Happened in Monterey" (sung by John Boles); "Oh, How I Would Like to Own a Fish Store" (sung by Jack White); "A Bench in the Park" (sung by Glenn Tryon and Laura LaPlante, The Brox Sisters and the Rhythm Boys); "Ragamuffin Romeo" (sung by Jeanie Lang); "I Like to Do Things for You" (sung by Jeanie Lang to Paul Whiteman; Grace Hayes and William Kent; danced by Tommy Atkins Sextette with Nell O'Day); "Has Anyone Here Seen Nellie?" (sung by Churchill Ross, John Arledge, Frank Leslie and Walter Brennan with his wriggling ear); "The Song of the Dawn" (sung by John Boles); and the finale, "The Melting Pot Medley." Brief comedy skits include THE DAILY MEOW with Laura LaPlante, Jeanie Lang, Merna Kennedy, Grace Hayes and Kathryn Crawford; IN CONFERENCE with Glenn Tryon, Laura LaPlante and Merna Kennedy; SPRING TIME with Slim Summerville, Yola d'Avril and Walter Brennan; ALL NOISY ON THE EASTERN FRONT with Yola d'Avril, Slim Summerville, Walter Brennan, others; FOREVER MORE with William Kent as the drunk, and Walter Brennan as the butler; the risqué, A MEETING WITH FATHER with Slim Summerville meeting his future father-in-law (Otis Harlan) and how he feels about his bride-to-be, and so much more. There's also Joe Venito playing his wild violin to the tune, "Pop Goes the Weasal."

Unseen for many years, THE KING OF JAZZ was presented on television during the early years of cable TV circa 1984, and soon after distributed on video cassette, compliments of MCA/Universal with excellent visuals. For a while, THE KING OF JAZZ did enjoy frequent revivals on American Movie Classics (1989-1990) before color restoration and edited skits restored on DVD in 2018, the same 97 minute edition broadcast March 4, 2019, on Turner Classic Movies.

The biggest surprise about this revue is that it was released by Universal, the studio not known for lavish musicals. Aside from lavishness, it's quite advanced, especially with its camera angles/techniques which remains impressive even today. The comedy skits might seem out of date, but are just a reminder as to what vaudeville was like and the humor that made its audiences chuckle back in the day. Even similar comedy skits of long ago are still being used today, especially by stand-up comics or on current TV shows that try to make old material fresh and original.

One final note: the special effects. Although not a first in early sound cinema, the early portion of the film where Paul Whiteman introduces his orchestra by opening his suitcase, from which many tiny musicians emerge in front of the life-size face of Whiteman as he watches from behind, then growing to normal size, is quite impressive, considering the time frame this was made. Remember, this wasn't done by computers as it would be today.

THE KING OF JAZZ has many bonuses to impress a first-time viewer. The production gets better with each passing comedy skit and musical numbers. And for die-hard Bing Crosby fans, even if the famous crooner doesn't have enough screen time to call his own, there's enough entertainment here performed by others to go around. (***)

Universal spent over a year making this movie -- Paul Whiteman's band set forth for Hollywood on a chartered train called the "Old Gold Special" in January 1929 (Old Gold Cigarettes sponsored his CBS radio program) and arrived, ready to work, only to find that no one at Universal had bothered to come up with a script. Seven months later he headed himself and his band back to New York after telling the "suits" at Universal he wasn't coming back until there was a finished script and the film was ready to shoot. During the stand-down Whiteman lost the best musician he ever had, Bix Beiderbecke, to Bix's chronic alcoholism, and Universal lost the originally assigned director, Paul Fejos, when he had a nervous breakdown while shooting another film. By the time Whiteman returned, the Great Depression had hit, the Zeitgeist had changed and the American people weren't in the mood for lavish musicals anymore. So "King of Jazz" became a legendary box-office flop.

It's a fate the movie didn't deserve: though there are a few scenes in which director John Murray Anderson falls back on the typical long-shots of chorus lines that make them look like ants on a wedding cake, for the most part his direction is vividly imaginative, fully the equal of what Busby Berkeley was doing on his first film, "Whoopee," another all-color musical being filmed at the same time. Anderson gives us numbers from overhead, from side angles, and uses the swooping camera movements of the so-called "'Broadway' Crane" (invented by cinematographer Hal Mohr and director Paul Fejos for Universal's 1929 film of the hit musical "Broadway") to deliver dazzling images and splendors to delight the eye and avoid the static quality of many of the early musicals. Anderson had come to Hollywood from his experience directing most of the Ziegfeld Follies on stage and running an acting school that trained Bette Davis and Lucille Ball, and for this film he was given virtually unprecedented authority. "King of Jazz" should have been his ticket to a major film career, but instead after its failure he retreated to the stage and only worked on two more films, the 1944 Esther Williams vehicle "Bathing Beauty" (for which he staged the incredible final number, often misattributed to Berkeley!) and Cecil B. DeMille's circus drama "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1953). It's a crime against culture that Anderson wasn't given the job of directing "The Great Ziegfeld" (1936), since he knew Ziegfeld's style (indeed, had helped create it) and he knew how to make a movie; an Anderson-directed "Great Ziegfeld" could have been a masterpiece instead of the ponderous bore (redeemed only by the acting of William Powell and Myrna Loy) MGM and hack director Robert Z. Leonard actually gave us.

"King of Jazz" was one of the handful of revues (a Broadway term for a musical with no plot) filmed in 1929 and 1930, including MGM's "Hollywood Revue of 1929," Warner Bros.' "The Show of Shows," Fox's "Fox Movietone Follies of 1929," and Paramount's "Paramount on Parade." (There was also a British version, "Elstree Calling," in which the framing scenes showing actor Gordon Harker tuning in variety performers on an early TV were directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who didn't think the assignment was important enough to put the film on his official résumé.) But "King of Jazz" is better than all of them, even though Universal's list of contract players was far less illustrious than those of their major-studio competitors (the biggest "names" in this movie who weren't part of Whiteman's organization were Laura LaPlante and John Boles). It helps that the comedy scenes between the big musical numbers are kept to a minimum, and are short, genuinely funny and surprisingly racy for a 1930 film. The only thing that badly dates this movie (and led me to rate it 9 instead of 10) are the unfunny and badly dated novelty songs, including "Oh, How I'd Love to Own a Fish Store," "Has Anybody Here Seen Nellie?" and Wilbur Hall's performance of "Stars and Stripes Forever" on a bicycle pump.

"King of Jazz" is a towering musical masterpiece, rivaled only by "Whoopee" at the top of the heap for pre-"42nd Street" musicals. (The Lubitsch and Mamoulian films for Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald are in a separate category altogether.) The film is a tribute to the genius of its director, John Murray Anderson, though the one Academy Award it won was for its art director, Herman Rosse, probably the first individual ever to win an Oscar for an all-color film. "King of Jazz" is a music that will dazzle you with spectacular moment after spectacular moment, including the "Rhapsody in Blue" sequence that, along with the "New York Rhapsody" sequence in the 1931 film "Delicious," does more justice to George Gershwin's music than any sequence using it until the 1951 ballet in "An American in Paris."