Why so much hype?

From my favorite movies..

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Songs by Milton Ager (music) and Jack Yellen (lyrics): "Music Has Charms" (played by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra, sung by The Rhythm Boys—Bing Crosby, Harry Barris and Al Rinker); "My Bridal Veil" (Whiteman and Orchestra, Jeanette Loff, Stanley Smith, The Russell Markert Dancers, Jeanie Lang and The Hollywood Beauties); "A Bench In the Park" (Whiteman and Orchestra, Jeanette Loff, Stanley Smith, The Rhythm Boys—Crosby, Barris and Rinker, The Brox Sisters, The Russell Markert Dancers, The Sisters "G" and The Hollywood Beauties); "The Song of the Dawn" (John Boles); "Happy Feet" (Whiteman and Orchestra, Jeanie Lang, The Rhythm Boys—Crosby, Barris and Rinker, The Russell Markert Dancers, The Sisters "G", Al Norman, Charles Irwin); "I Like To Do Things For You" (Whiteman and Orchestra, Jeanie Lang, The Rhythm Boys—Crosby, Barris and Rinker). Songs by Mabel Wayne (music) and Billy Rose (lyrics): "It Happened In Monterey" (Jeanette Loff, John Boles, The Russell Markert Dancers, The Sisters "G", George Chiles, Johnny Fulton); "My Ragamuffin Romeo" (sung by George Chiles, Jeanie Lang; danced by Don Rose, Marion Statler). Song by Billy Moll and Harry Barris: "So the Blackbirds and the Bluebirds Got Together" (The Rhythm Boys —Crosby, Barris and Rinker). Music by George Gershwin: "Rhapsody In Blue" (the Whiteman Orchestra conducted by Paul Whiteman. Piano solo by George Gershwin with The Sisters "G", Jacques Cartier, Markert Dancers, Hollywood Beauties). Song by Harry Barris and James Cavanaugh: "Mississippi Mud" (The Rhythm Boys—Crosby, Barris and Rinker). Song by Buddy De Sylva and Robert Katcher: "When Day Is Done" (interpolated in the "Bench In the Park" sequence). Medleys played by Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra including "The Melting Pot of Jazz" production number* were orchestrated by Ferde Grofe from the following: "Caprice Viennoise" by Fritz Kreisler; "Nola" by Felix Arndt and James Burns; "Linger Awhile" by Harry Owens and Vincent Rose; "Aba Daba Honeymoon" by Arthur Fields and Walter Donovan; "Ballet Egyptien" by Alexandre Luigini; "A-Hunting We Will Go"; "Rule Britannia"; "D' Ye Ken John Peel?"; "Santa Lucia"; "Funiculi-Funicula"; "Comin' Through the Rye"; "Vienna Blood" by Johann Strauss; "Fair Killarney"; "The Irish Washer-woman"; "Ay-yi Ay-yi-yi"; "Song of the Volga Boatmen"; "Otchichornia"; a couple of marches by John Philip Sousa; a parody, "Has Anybody Seen Our Nelly?" Another parody, "Oh, How I'd Like To Own a Fish-store!"eventually leads us into a very funny, if-not-suitable-for-children jest as Slim Summerville explains to Otis Harlan his "Pretty Lucky So Far." The delightful "I'd Like To Do Things for You" has now been restored to its rightful place. Most enjoyable! Who said film critics don't fulfill a useful function? Jeanie Lang romances Paul Whiteman, then Grace Hayes and William Kent have a bash, while Nell O'Day joins the Tommy Atkins Sextette in some show-stopping acrobatics.Whether you like Barbershop Quartettes (and parodies of same) will determine your appreciation of "Has Anybody Seen Our Nellie?" I found it awfully funny (but then I'm with Sinclair Lewis. I like kicking the boot into dead dreary Main Streets like Shamokin, PA). Incidentally the threesome that join our spellbinding lead vocalist are Laura La Plante, Walter Brennan and William Kent. Stiff-as-a-bored (yes, that's the right spelling) John Boles rejoins us at this point for "Song of the Dawn." Thanks, John. Thanks a lot! (The sound recording, incidentally, is absolutely wonderful here, as indeed it is throughout the entire picture. But just listen to that full-throated roar of the male chorus, as our John urges the dawn into the skies)!And now we come to what the producer intended as the musical highlight of the whole film, "The Melting Pot of Jazz". This title, of course, merely provides an excuse for a vast nationalistic pot of production numbers from England, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Mexico, France and Spain, with cartloads of singers and hordes of dancing girls. The showgirls, I must admit, are super-attractive as always, though their costumes in this final number are not nearly as appealing as the filmy creations previously on show. All the same, it's enough to make Busby Berkeley gnash his teeth in envy, (particularly as Anderson has anticipated Busby by occasionally employing Buzz's trademark overhead shots).Incidentally, Anderson's style, apart from these few overhead shots, is strictly proscenium point-of-view. There are no reverse angles. None at all. This doesn't worry me. What does surprise me is a review on a certain web site that complains of a sound track that "pops and hisses". Not on the print under review. Admittedly, the color looks a little washed-out in places, though the two-strip Technicolor remains never less than appealingly novel. Its few blemishes like over- exposure won't worry a soul. The sound track, however, can only be rated one hundred per cent plus. Not a crackle, not a pop, not a hiss. Absolutely brilliant. Turn the volume right up — right, right up — and it's still crystal clear. My only complaint is that the sound track, like the movie, ends somewhat abruptly. Admittedly on an end title. But surely the curtain didn't just ring down at this point? Surely Whiteman provided a few minutes of run-out music to cheer the crowds on their way? (If he did, it ain't there no more. A pity).Summing up: All told, I don't quite echo Mordaunt Hall's miraculously rave review in The New York Times. Not every vignette rates ten out of ten in my book. Every musical production number, yes. Every "comic" interlude, no. Nonetheless, I still think Mordaunt's definitely on the right wave length: "This sparkling extravaganza reveals John Murray Anderson to be a magician of far greater powers than one imagined, even from his stage compositions. A Technicolor potpourri of songs, dancing and fun, it is a marvel of camera wizardry, joyous color schemes, charming costumes and seductive lighting effects." Right on!

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."

They called Paul Whiteman the "King of Jazz" - only real enthusiasts knew he wasn't. He was big in every way and by 1922 was making a million a year and it was only natural that when movies found their voice Hollywood would beckon. That was Universal in 1929, Carl Laemmle was seeking a headliner band for a big budget musical. The "Whiteman Special" train bringing the band (including Bix Biederbecke who unfortunately didn't make it on film) from New York to Hollywood was highly publicized with public appearances at every stop but the story writers couldn't come up with a story so the band, who had sat around idle for months, temporarily went back to New York.Whiteman then suggested hiring John Murray Anderson, whose spectacular New York revues had made him Ziegfeld's closest rival and his futuristic and inventive influence made him the real star of the movie. There are so many tantalizing stories - Bing Crosby was all set to be the lead singer with the songs "It Happened in Monterey" and "Song of the Dawn" (a dazzler sang with a cowboy chorus) handed to him but he was involved in a drink driving incident in which he was sentenced to 60 days which was converted to a 40 day furlough but still saw the songs handed to John Boles who vocally was much better suited with his fruity tones. Years later in a documentary Crosby felt Boles carried the songs far better than he could have. Another story involved Jeannie Lang whose Helen Kane rendition of "Ragamuffin Romeo" and "I Like to Do Things For You" had preview critics raving but she had already been cut out of the soon to be released movie so editors had to quickly splice her back.The film begins with Bing Crosby singing "Music Has Charms" over the credits (one song that Crosby retained) and after an animated cartoon (the first in colour) showing how Whiteman became "King of Jazz" he steps out to introduce "his boys" - there's Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang playing a marvellous duet and a startling shadow looming down on banjoist Mike Pingitore as he strums "Linger Awhile". Then it's "the girls" turn and the marvellous Rockettes dressed in spangley peach and silver go into a precision formation dance and show why they became legends.Colour lends such a beauty to the "Bridal Veil" number with gorgeous displays of bridal gowns through the ages. Jeanette Loff (with the longest bridal train ever) looks as pretty as peaches and cream and sings very prettily too. Next are the fabulous Rhythm Boys who come out of the shadows of "Mississippi Mud" to sing a "super, super, special kind of production" (Harry Barris's words) of "When the Blue Birds and the Black Birds Get Together". Bing's sense of humour and comic timing is so spot on even though he was still only one of the Rhythm Boys. "A Bench in the Park" features Stanley Smith and Loff as a pair of lovers, joined in harmony by the Brox Sisters accompanied by the Rhythm Boys then "the girls" get together for a dance that was obviously the inspiration for "Pettin' in the Park". "Rhapsody in Blue" is just awesome, initially showing Jacques Cartier in a futuristic setting beating out rhythms on a huge drum. This sequence was supposed to have cost $500,000 with a huge centrepiece of a gigantic blue grand piano, the Paul Whiteman Orchestra inside, dancing girls on top of the keys, a kaleidoscopic effect of dazzling blue feathers and flowers. WOW!!Where do you start with "Happy Feet" - from a pair of dancing shoes, the Rhythm Boys giving it their unique interpretation (with plenty of piano banging) the Sisters G are shown singing with their heads reflected against a shiny silver surface below - very psychedelic, they then give an all too brief but spirited dance, then the Rockettes dance out of a New York skyline to do another precision tap, then Al "Rubberlegs" Norman takes centre stage to do another of his dazzling eccentric rubberlegs routine!! and lastly Paul Whiteman (or his double) has a go at a vigorous Charleston. "Ragamuffin Romeo" is another "eccentric" dance with Marion Stattler whose gymnastics have her being thrown around like a rag doll."The Melting Pot of Music" is almost too much with a succession of sounds and images, dances and countries (strangely no mention of the African American) which then blended into the finale. Interspersed throughout the film were comedy hot spots but unlike other reviews of the time, they were short, snappy and not labored and with the clear print you were able to recognise the stars (Laura La Plante etc). Another reviewer mentioned a preference to "Hollywood Revue of 1929" but I'm sorry for me there is no comparison. This was a true spectacle enhanced greatly by colour and showcasing legends of the music world, to say nothing of Paul Whiteman's ease in front of the camera, the other just relied on movie stars out of their comfort zones being able to bring in a curious public.Highly Recommended.

"The King Of Jazz" 1930, is a wonderful example of just what the movies could do in the late 20's early 30's if they put their mind to it. The technical achievement is extremely high, for a film of this period, and one wonders at how cinema audiences of 1930 must have been amazed by this picture. It is photographed in a system called "Two Strip Technicolor". (Full 3-strip Technicolor would not be invented until 1932). The 2-strip Technicolor system managed to capture Red and Green, but not blue. To get around this they would use dyes that were a kind of orange/red and aqua-marine/green to trick audiences into thinking there was blue on screen.In this movie the "Rhapsody in Blue" number is very convincing.There is no plot to "The King Of Jazz", it is just one mammoth musical number after another, and that adds to its unique charm. My three favourite numbers are "Ragamuffin Romeo", "It Happened In Monterey", and "My Bridal Veil".The "Bridal Veil" number utilizes one of the biggest indoor sets I have ever seen. A lot of money was spent on this picture, and it shows. The Bridal Veil itself looks to be about 100 feet long and the bride needs about 40 bridesmaids to help hold it up.The print that is currently in circulation of "The King Of Jazz" is sadly not in 100% excellent condition. It seems to be made up of pristine sections of print, and battered and scratched dupes. Its a real patchwork version that is probably in need of some restoration work. The title sequence, (with vocals over the titles by Bing Crosby singing "Music Hath Charms") is very clear and in good shape, but then halfway through cuts to an extremely battered dupe copy? The same occurrence happens during the "It Happened In Monterey" number, and also "Bench In The Park", we are given a beautiful print with rich colours and rock steady picture stability, only to cut variously to scratched beaten dupes. I cannot understand why certain sections of the film were preserved but others were not. I am eagerly awaiting the DVD release of this unique and wonderful film and hope it wont be too long before it gets its well deserved release. There don't seem to be any plans as yet and the only way to see this movie is on television or VHS. This is a true lost opportunity to DVD producers because the film has many wonderful Bing Crosby numbers in it and would be very popular with Bing's fans.