Set during the Golden Age of Jazz circa 1917, Arturo De Cordova stars as Nick, the proprietor of a Bourbon Street gambling joint, an artistic haven for black musicians who gather to jam from dusk ’til dawn. When he falls in love with an opera-singing socialite, Nick realizes that only through music will he gain respectability, and launches a campaign to thrust the disreputable music known as jazz onto the highbrow American stage.
Tag: 1940s
Hot Breath Harry is a hot trumpeter at a jazz club. He finds himself drafted into the Army, where he’s assigned to be the bugler of an African-American company. But everyone hates the bugler, because he blows reveille at the ungodly hour of 5 AM sharp. Sure enough, on his first day, Harry gets pelted with everything imaginable. He lands against a wall, where his trumpet falls on him. He plays a swinging wakeup that segues into the title tune, and nobody minds waking up to this. Everyone swings through the whole day, even when three soldiers march into a lake and two soldiers, followed by a grinning alligator, march out.
Unable to complete the deal by telephone, advertising executive Roberts sends his assistant Ann to Cuba to lure a Cuban band, led by Desi Arnaz, on to an American radio program. Attracted to Ann, Arnaz and his band come to New York but complications arise when the squeaky-voiced, addle-brained sponsor of the program decides she wants to be the vocalist on the program.
A professor invents a time sphere which takes a group of 1940s entertainers to Elizabethan London where they encounter Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and introduce them to jazz culture – They also meet Captain John Smith and a very heavy-drinking Pocahontas. The main female character meets William Shakespeare and feeds him some of his own lines, which he eagerly writes down. A costume-production, (many of which are immaculate), which makes extensive use of the Gainsborough wardrobe.
A landmark of both experimental and queer filmmaking, Kenneth Anger’s film is a bizarre, disturbing dreamscape of violation, rape, and homoerotic sadomasochism. The film opens with Anger, who made this film when he was only 17, awaking from a troubled dream and leaving his house to go on a stroll. He is confronted by a band of buff sailors who proceed to beat, manhandled, and molest him. Recalling other surrealist masterpieces such as Un Chien andalou and Meshes in the Afternoon, this film uses elliptical narrative structure and dream-like visual metaphors and puns.
In this musical, producers begin searching for a real southern belle to star in a Broadway production. The two are forced to hear a woman’s audition and agree to let her have the lead. She is soon fired, but is pursued by the producer who has fallen in love with her. Songs include: “Find Yourself a Melody,” “I’ll Never Let a Day Go Past,” “Kiss the Boys Goodbye,” “That’s How I Got My Start,” and “Sand in My Shoes.”
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey tells the story of a rickety bridge that has spanned a deep gorge for ages. When the bridge suddenly collapses–plunging five people to their deaths–the tragedy causes a wave of superstition to engulf the villagers as they believe they are destined for continued misfortune. Only a priest can find the connections to divine intervention that will quell the townspeople’s fears.
In this British crime drama, an honest railroad signalman finds himself sorely tempted when he witnesses a murder and later finds $20,000 floating in the harbor. The trouble begins when he decides to take the money and leave town with his daughter and a gold digger. Based on a novel by Georges Simenon.