PETE KELLY'S BLUES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 890, 24 August 1956, Page 16

PETE KELLY'S BLUES

(Warner Bros.) AZZ enthusiasts will have their own reasons for wanting to see this movie, which harks back to the hot two-beat tempo of the Twenties, includes a handful of songs by Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald, and music (at various points, generally out of camera range) by such practitioners as Joe Venuti, Dick Catheart, Matty Matlock and others whose names mean a lot more to the aficionado than they do to me. I was interested mainly to see how Jack Webb ("My name’s Friday; I’m a cop") would shape, as director and star, in a new milieu. As things turn out, the

milieu isn’t so different after all-in Prohibition. America _- crime seems to have kept breaking through whatever environment you picked — and Pete Kelly’s Blues, though its title would suggest something specifically musical to jazz addicts Gif not to our higher critics), is more a period thriller than the simple story of a speakeasy combo. Perhaps because I have’ been mildly infected by the current nostalgia for the rackety years in which I grew up, I enjoyed Mr.

Webb’s evocation of place and period," but to suggest that my enjoyment was exclusively subjective would be to deny the director credit for a good deal of painstaking work. The passion for accurate reconstruction which he has carried over from his Dragnet investigations ("This story is true; only the names have been changed to protect the innocent") has filled the background with authentic detail. His speakeasy shots

have an atmosphere which practically exhales the pungent aroma of bootleg hooch, the costuming (even of the women) is rigidly accurate, and the music, of course, is in large measure the music of the time. I could have wished, however, that Pete Kelly himself had looked a little less like Joe Friday; that Mr. Webb, in short, was a little less deadpan in his acting, a little more lively in his vocal delivery. Not that Pete Kelly hadn’t grounds for a restrained cyni-

cism-it must have been occupational for band-leaders paying protection to gangsters-but the creation of a new character isn’t helped by the retention of old tricks, Jack Webb as director interested me more. Indeed, I found myself enduring, in a milder degree, the same alternations of. pleasure and frustration which I had experienced during the screening of The Night of the Hunter. I don’t think Mr. Webb has quite the intellectual resources of Charles Laughton, but I had the impression of a determined and by no means negligible intelligence at woik. A good head, you might say, but one which had not yet quite found its feet in the new medium, The opening shots -in a prologue more than a shade too long--were superb, and the juxtaposition of Mississippi stern-wheeler and Negro funeral (complete with band) would have made an admirable frontispiece for any History of Jazz. The final sequence, too, with gangster chief and bandleader shooting it out in a deserted cance-hall, to the frantic music of a jazz orchestration, had its moments-though it reminded me of a somewhat similar (and better) finale to one of Orson Welles’s thrillers. In between, however, the film seemed too often to have been shot through the slot in the speakeasy door.