Popular Culture Review Vol. 1, December 1989 | Page 53

earlier jazz films seems very much in order.
Until recently, the cinematic treatment o f jazz has resulted in
for the most part, unremarkable, sometimes amusing, but mostly
fictional movies. Young Man With A Horn, The Benny Goodman
Story, The Gene Krupa Story, and the abysmal Lady Sings The
Blues are but a few examples.(3) It was not until a 1985 film, The
Gig, a small budget, carefully crafted picture by jazz buff and writer
Frank Gilroy that any attempt was made to capture the essence of
the music or its musicians. Although jazz and film began life at
aproximately the same time, jazz was suffered the worse fate. A
1941 article in Down Beat magazine called Hollywood, “Jazz’s
deadliest enemy.”( 4 ) Distorted facts, exaggerated truths and little
regard for the music were the rule, and until recently, little has
changed. While Hollywood flourished, “jazz,” as another critic
observed, “lived on the outskirts of town.” Jazz on film is a history
with a checkered past.
The Jazz Singer, (1927), a vehicle for A1 Jolson, featured jazz
of a sort. It was remade twice, the second time in the 1970s with the
same name but with pop singer Neil Diamond in the leading role.
This version had nothing to do with jazz and probably did more to
confuse the jazz buying public about the music than did the later All
That Jazz, a semi-biography of choreographer Bob Fosse. Sound
tracks to both these films are, unfortunately, often found in the jazz
bins o f record stores.
Paul Whitman, the self-proclaimed King of Jazz, made a film
of the same name in 1930. Grossly misnamed, King o f Jazz
contained at the most about ten minutes of jazz and totally ignored
black musicians roles to the point that they were conspicuous by
their absence. Hollywood, however, was quick to capitalize on the
words jazz and swing in bringing audiences to theatres, and titled
a number o f films in this manner.
The forties and fifties film link with jazz was generally a crime
theme or a horribly miscast, mistold story. In 1949, Dorothy

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