It's a big old musical Hollywood fluff piece, based on the life story of a man I know little to nothing about.
Dick Walker plays Jerome Kern. A musical writer who focussed mainly on musical theatre.
He wrote what would become many of America's backbone cultural musical hits.
Or at least from the movies point of view he did.
For all I know in real life he may have stolen it all from a bunch of other people. But I'm not here to judge the accuracy of this man's life.
I'm only here to say if the film is entertaining or not. And in that regard it lands firmly in a positive area.
The whole thing is well structured with Richard Walker relaying he's character's life from his humble beginnings all the way up to his current day. Where he feels semi depressed about losing his lifelong friend and musical companion and kind of blending him self for letting he's friandes daughter run off to join a ''lowbrow'' musical performance somewhere down in Memphis.
The whole film is filled with colourful dialogue and Whimsical experiences. The first two acts of the film feel like you're walking through the clouds, as a very happy man goes about his days trying to sell his music to a bunch of American Broadway producers who are only interested in English acts.
So he moved to England to re-establish himself with his friend (who formally moved there himself) and then pretend to be English to try and get in on the good crowds. While there you'll meet the Future Love this life.
The third Act of the film gets a bit more dire with his friends Health declining, the daughter of said friends running away and things just turning a little sour as depression starts to see been on the man. But even then everything ultimately turns around as he discovers that the daughter is doing relatively well for herself and he's about to make a musical adaptation of Show Boat.
Peppered throughout the film are a variety of musical numbers and finally done dance scenes all supposedly based off of Jerome Kern' work.
And really this is the real reason you're going to watch a movie like this.
They're entertaining, well-paced, they bring a lot of charm to an otherwise decent; but ultimately basic biography of a man's life.
Now the songs technically commit the cardinal sin of not progressing the plot. As you could remove every dance scene from this movie and lose nothing in the general story.
But you'd be doing yourself a massive disservice if you were to lose the music and it would make the rest of the film come off as a lot more corny than it actually is.
Given the more lighthearted and fruity dialogue.
It all just culminates together really well.
The only negative I had here is the last 10 minutes of music; that you could cut with absolutely no ill effects to the movie.
There are nice little grouping of songs and they're well done in their own right. But they're pointless and in a way they almost filled kind of tacked on.
As they're just a bunch of people standing in a steel area and just singing.
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