A simplistic tale of how iconic old-time US songwriter Stephen Foster drank himself into an early grave because of a faithless fiancée and a nagging wife. A superb, memorable portrayal of our hero by Douglass Montgomery, who starts to look like Nicholas Cage in the later, grubby scenes. The portrayal of the contemporary lot of black people is outrageously sentimental - this was 1935 - but the middle-class parlours and chiselling impresarios are a little more accurate in a Dickensian, caricatured way.
Foster wrote the song 'Old Black Joe', among many other standards and classics which are still performed today. I saw Eric Clapton and his band do the song a few years ago and it's still borderline racist, but Foster was turning out catchy, moving ditties apart from his 'plantation songs' long before Irving Berlin got started.
Make allowances for the cultural and commercial context and it's no worse than many other Tinseltown biopics. Montgomery, though, is a revelation, and the two female leads are no slouches either.
Freely available at the Internet Archive and well worth 90 minutes of your life if it's raining, you're snowbound, or you're an alcoholic songwriter in need of admonition. Odd title though.
Foster wrote the song 'Old Black Joe', among many other standards and classics which are still performed today. I saw Eric Clapton and his band do the song a few years ago and it's still borderline racist, but Foster was turning out catchy, moving ditties apart from his 'plantation songs' long before Irving Berlin got started.
Make allowances for the cultural and commercial context and it's no worse than many other Tinseltown biopics. Montgomery, though, is a revelation, and the two female leads are no slouches either.
Freely available at the Internet Archive and well worth 90 minutes of your life if it's raining, you're snowbound, or you're an alcoholic songwriter in need of admonition. Odd title though.