Till the Clouds Roll By

I had some more movies that were about to expire from YouTube TV's cloud DVR, so I had to make a point of watching them to do a review now. The latest is the musical "biopic" Till the Clouds Roll By.

The movie opens with one of those old-style forewords informing us that the action begins on December 27, 1927, the opening night of the musical Show Boat. The music was written by Jerome Kern (played here by Robert Walker), a composer who had already had a string of Brodway hits in the 1920s, although getting to the top wasn't easy. On his way back home after the show, he asks the cab driver to detour and look for a particular brownstone. Since the movie opens up at the height of Kern's career, we know that we're about to get an exceedingly original plot device... the flashback to the beginning of the subject's career.

This time, we go back around 20 years (the real-life Kern got his start fairly young, around age 20 in 1905). Young Jerome is a budding composer, but he doesn't know so much yet about lyrics or good arrangements. To that end, he's been sent to the brownstone that older Jerome asks the driver to stop by. There (in 1905) lives an arranger, James Hessler (Van Heflin). Now, this leads to why I put the word "biopic" in sneer quotes above. James Hessler is the other main character of the movie along with Kern, but Hessler is a completely made-up person! Hessler is an arranger who would like to be a symphonic composer. He's also a widower with a young daughter Sally (grown-up Sally is played by Lucile Bremer). In any case, Hessler becomes Kern's mentor.

Kern writes good music, and would like to write for Broadway, but when they try to get a foot in the door, they learn that it's still the fad on Broadway to import revue-type shows from the UK and that the music of London is more popular to the Broadway crownd than the new American sounds bubbling up. So it's off to London.

Kern eventually meets British producer Charles Frohman (a real-life person, and his death along with Kern's tangential relationship to that being more or less accurately portrayed), and is able to sell one of his songs to Frohmann's London Gaieties. This also leads to Kern getting hired to write more songs for a show that's going to open in New York. Also while in the UK, Kern met Eva (Dorothy Patrick), the woman who would become Mrs. Kern.

Kern goes back to America with the Hesslers and Frohman, and I'd guess it was the US being out of the Great War for a couple of years while the European powers were fighting it that really boosted the careers of composers like Kern. Sally, now grown up, has always considered Jerome like an uncle, and wants to follow Jerome into musical theater. To that end, Jerome even writes a song for a musical that would give Sally her first solo even though she's not going to be the star of the show. The producer, however, thinks the song would be a better fit for the show's star, Marilyn Miller (another real-life person, played by Judy Garland). Sally has a hissy fit and... runs away!? Dad, by now ill with heart problems, wants Jerome to find Sally, but Dad dies before father and daughter can be reunited.

Jerome, like a lot of other composers and lyricists, went off to Hollywood once sound comes to movies, and wrote more memorable songs for movies in addition to adapting some of the old musicals for Hollywood. The last 10 minutes or so is a montage of various MGM stars doing numbers of a bunch of different songs, giving MGM a chance to put those stars into a big-budget musical if they hadn't already been used in a production number earlier in the movie.

If you like the Great American Songbook, you'll love Till the Clouds Roll By. The songs are unsurprisingly quite good. There's a reason why things like Show Boat or the song "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" from Roberta endure. The production numbers MGM did, at least up until the finale which is a bit more bland, are also very well done. The dramatic story, however, is something best not discussed. To be fair to MGM, however, the real life Jerome Kern story was mostly something not cinematic or dramatic enough for a biopic. But that's part of why Till the Clouds Roll By is a bit of a mixed bag.

If you like the Freed Unit, then Till the Clouds Roll By is definitely for you.