mgconlan-1 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."

Alex da Silva This starts off as a very surreal and entertaining film. We have a storybook that opens up and shows us a cartoon of how Paul Whiteman became the king of jazz. It's set in the jungle and is amusingly animated. We are then introduced to the members of the orchestra who file onto a miniature set and then provide us with solo routines. Then the show starts with a song called "The Bridal Veil". It's actually quite good and contains some haunting moments. Except it contains ghastly, smiling children which ruins it in a matter of seconds. And this is where the film suffers. It's an array of good and bad acts. One minute, you are enjoying Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys while the next minute you are praying for some "comedy" singer to shut up and go away. Then you get another good song or Al Norman and his crazy dancing and you think "oh good!" but once again, the film removes your enjoyment in a second by shoving an unfunny drunken man routine in your face. And that's the film in a nutshell - some good parts and some not-so-good parts. However, the sets are excellent and this lifts it just above par despite the film being a little too long. Paul Whiteman looks like Oliver Hardy.

tedg Gosh, what an amazing artifact!I understand the context was a wild rush by all the powerful studios to make lavish song and dance movies, and this was Universal's. It differs from the others in the way it exploits cinematic tricks. Its why it flopped, they say. And its why it is such an interesting historical document.Superficially, it is 100 minutes of non-stop vaudeville show, often with the stage explicitly noted. This sort of entertainment was what the studios thought was safe, but as they went to extremes in all the ordinary ways, they went to extremes in converting the show to cinematic form.So we have magical appearances, superpositions, games with size. We have the show referenced as a giant book on stage. We have the band-leader played with. Now normally there is a folding where you have some sort of a skit or story about the band, and another level of show which the band supports. The first episode in this has the band-leader as a cartoon character, in Africa "earning" his crown as king of jazz. It has to be Africa, you see.We have the cinematic tricks echoed in much of the humor, which depends on misdirection and disguise. You can see that many numbers don't fit the overall scheme, because they must have been simply developed independently and inserted. But the big numbers still use camera tricks. I suppose the reason it failed was because it was "too experimental" for the ordinary audience.I'm having some dealings with Hollywood deciders at the moment, and get frustrated when they want to define the mass viewer as unwilling to advance even a little. This film should be watched if only to see what was too cinematic to swallow.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

bkoganbing Today's audiences could not possibly have any idea of how big in every way Paul Whiteman was during the 1920s. Radio was in its infancy and Paul Whiteman's band was the first orchestra to achieve popularity through that medium. Whiteman records were the biggest sellers of their time. And The King of Jazz was his auspicious debut in motion pictures.The King of Jazz was also how Whiteman billed himself. He was maybe taking a bit much on to himself with that one, he surely didn't have anything to do with the development of jazz as an art form. But he did help a great deal to popularize it with a wider {white} audience. That was primarily done with that famous jazz concert that Whiteman gave in the mid twenties where George Gershwin's Rhapsody In Blue made its debut. And Rhapsody is reprised here in the movie.Whiteman's greatest contribution may have been the training of the greatest group of musicians ever. At one time or other, the Dorsey Brothers, Benny Goodman, Bix Biederbecke and so many others were members of the Whiteman orchestra. And of course he was the very first band to hire a vocalist specifically for that role. Previously singers were just musicians who just stopped playing and sang a chorus or two. Whiteman hired a trio, the Rhythm Boys whose lead singer was Bing Crosby. They are prominent in the film and in fact Bing Crosby made his singing film debut here over the opening credits as he sang Music Hath Charms. He was Whiteman's biggest discovery.The film is just a musical review done in the style of some of the great musical reviews of the time like the Ziegfeld Follies, Earl Carroll's Vanities, George White's Scandals. Some of the acts are better than others, but's The King of Jazz encapsulates a great era in show business.The biggest song from the film was It Happened in Monterey sung by John Boles who was Universal's biggest musical star at that point. Boles also got to do the film's finale, The Song of the Dawn, when Crosby who was guzzling a little too much bathtub gin got himself arrested and missed doing the finale which he was scheduled for.Shortly after recording some of the songs from The King of Jazz the Rhythm Boys left Whiteman and broke up soon after that. Bing Crosby would be heard from again.For a wonderful piece of nostalgia and filmed in early technicolor at that as an added treat, you can't beat The King of Jazz.