The Leaders of the Bands

When popular bandleaders became the new American heroes, Hollywood jumped on the bandwagon. True to American motion-picture tradition, these musical heroes were white, mostly pleasant young men looking for a special sound and finding it with an amiable, supportive woman.

None was more popular than The Glenn Miller Story (1954, 116 minutes) now available on MCA videotape and laser video disc with a newly restored stereophonic-surround sound track and a sharp, color-perfect picture (especially impressive on disc).

The film was popular because Miller was one of the best known bandleaders of the Swing Era, and the audience came in humming his familiar songs: “Moonlight Serenade,” “String of Pearls,” “Pennsylvania 6-5000,” “Tuxedo Junction,” “In the Mood,” “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “Little Brown Jug.” Also, Jimmy Stewart played Miller and June Allyson was his perky wife. The fun is in seeing how the songs fit into the romanticized biography roughly based on his life.

In The Fabulous Dorseys (1947, 88 minutes, Republic tape and disc), Tommy and Jimmy played themselves-two bickering brothers-with Janet Blair as the girl caught between them. A contrived jam session featuring Ziggy Elman, Ray Bauduc, Charlie Barnet and Art Tatum is the film’s highlight along with such familiar hits as “Marie” and “Green Eyes.”

After the Dorseys, Hollywood decided that actors would take over the parts. The Benny Goodman Story (1955, 116 minutes, MCA tape and disc) starred Steve Allen as Goodman and Donna Reed as his best girl. Goodman himself dubbed Allen’s playing, and the supporting cast of musicians (including Harry James and Lionel Hampton and Teddy Wilson) were admirable.

Another sentimental biography to be released on home video is The Five Pennies (1959, 117 minutes) with Danny Kaye as trumpeter Red Nichols and Barbara Bel Geddes as his patient wife.

Louis Armstrong and a batch of fine jazz musicians play cameo roles, and when they are on the screen the music is first-rate. Sal Mineo gives a dynamic performance in The Gene Krupa Story (1959, 101 minutes, “CA/Columbia tape) that at least didn’t ignore his drug addiction. The most dramatic and best-acted music biography was only “inspired” by the life of Bix Beiderbecke and featured Kirk Douglas (with Harry James playing) as the Young Man With a Horn (1950, 112 minutes, Warner tape and disc). Doris Day was the wholesome girl and Lauren Bacall acted the bad girl in this work of fiction.

It wasn’t until later that the lives of black jazz artists came to the screen, but these films also were blatantly dishonest in their music and biographical facts. Most failed to capture the struggle of blacks trying to overcome white control of the music industry.

Lady Sings the Blues (1972, 144 minutes, Paramount tape and disc) with Diana Ross as Billie Holiday was pure soap opera with one cliche after another. Even Richard Pryor’s Piano Man didn’t help much.

Perhaps the best musical biography yet produced came out in 1988 and told the story of Charlie “Bird” Parker, the brilliant jazz saxophonist who, like so many other African-American musicians, steadily disintegrated under the pressure of a white-dominated society and drug addiction.

Bird (161 minutes, Warner tape and disc) has a bravura performance by Forest Whitaker and one of the best sound tracks ever put together-it features Parker’s own solos recorded three and four decades ago cleverly mixed into newly recorded settings.

Director Clint Eastwood captures the man and his music better than any other jazz film biography, and does a commendable job in showing the pervasive racism that forced a superb musician such as Parker to hire a white trumpeter to front the otherwise all-black group. Even so, most of the cliches of the musical film biography remain intact even up to the faithful woman, Chan, played by Diane Venora, the mother of Parker’s two children and the key dramatic figure in the film.