King of Jazz

"King of Jazz" is a 1930 American Pre-Code color film starring Paul Whiteman and his orchestra. The film title was taken from Whiteman's self-conferred appellation. At the time the film was made, "jazz", to the general public, meant the jazz-influenced syncopated dance music which was being heard everywhere on phonograph records and through radio broadcasts. In the 1920s Whiteman signed and featured white jazz musicians including Joe Venuti and Eddie Lang (both are seen and heard in the film), Bix Beiderbecke (who had left before filming began), Frank Trumbauer and others. There is a possibility that one of the people appearing in the film was the great-uncle of Kurt Cobain (the late vocalist and guitarist of Nirvana).

King of Jazz was filmed entirely in the early two-color Technicolor process and was produced by Carl Laemmle Jr. for Universal Pictures. The film featured several songs sung on camera by the Rhythm Boys (Bing Crosby, Al Rinker and Harry Barris), as well as off-camera solo vocals by Crosby during the opening credits and, very briefly, during a cartoon sequence. King of Jazz still survives in a near-complete color print and is not a lost film, unlike many contemporary musicals that now exist only either in incomplete form or as black-and-white reduction copies.

In 2013, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

By 2026, This film along with all others from 1930 will be in the public domain.

Plot
This revue presents its numbers around the orchestra leader Paul Whiteman, besides that it shows in it's final number that the European popular music are the roots of American popular music, called Jazz.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) It has done a great tribute to The Roaring '20s.
 * 2) Bing Crosby (who was part of the Rhythm Brothers at that time; in his first appearance) and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (Despite Walt Disney not being involved) were featured in this film.
 * 3) Good catchy soundtrack.
 * 4) The Rhapsody In Blue scene was awesome. Which had people playing on a giant piano with the orchestra inside.
 * 5) The Dancing was amazing by Talented actors as it feels like it was a real musical.
 * 6) The last scene was beautiful and amazing.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) It looked roughly colored because it was on the Two-color Technicolor progress which gave a rather unnatural look of only red and green hues in the color palette.
 * 2) The clip when a person opens a book showing the title card of a scene is repetitive.

Reception
Universal expected this revue to repeat or surpass the box-office performance of a musical entitled Broadway which it had released in 1929. That lavish film had included Technicolor sequences and had been a success. Unfortunately, delays in beginning the filming of King of Jazz caused its release to occur after two unforeseen developments. First, the public had tired of the flood of movie musicals that began as a slow trickle with The Jazz Singer in late 1927 and rapidly became a torrent after the success of The Broadway Melody in early 1929. In particular disfavor were operettas set in bygone eras, musical comedies which were unimaginatively filmed Broadway stage productions, and plotless "revues" such as King of Jazz. Second, although the ripple effects from the stock market crash in October 1929 had not yet produced the full-blown depression which would soon be painfully obvious, people were already spending less freely and the effects were starting to be felt at the box office. During its national release, King of Jazz cleared less than $900,000. Around Hollywood, the movie came to be called "Universal's Rhapsody in the Red". Because of poor box-office receipts for the film and the cancellation of his lucrative nationally broadcast radio program by its sponsor in April 1930, Whiteman had to let ten band members go and cut the salaries of the remaining band members by fifteen percent.

Trivia
Delbert Cobain, one of the singers in the film, is notable as being the great-uncle of musician Kurt Cobain.

Videos
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