A Song is Born (1948)

A Song Is Born (also known as That’s Life), starring Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo, is a 1948 Technicolor musical film remake of Howard Hawks‘ 1941 movie Ball of Fire with Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. This version was also directed by Hawks, based on the story “From A to Z” by Billy Wilder and Thomas Monroe, adapted by Harry Tugend (uncredited) and produced by Samuel Goldwyn and released by RKO Radio Pictures. – Wikipedia

Mild-mannered Professor Hobart Frisbee (Kaye) works and lives with seven fellow musicologists at the Totten Foundation’s Victorian mansion in New York City. They have been immersed in work on a massive encyclopedia of music for 9 years, apparently without a radio and seldom if ever going out. Their window washers (Buck and Bubbles), needing help with a radio quiz, wise them up to the hip new sounds that have appeared during their isolation—swing, jive, jump, blues, two-beat Dixie, boogie woogie, bebop (“man alive”)—that they know nothing about. Hobart, the expert on “folk music” goes out and explores this music scene, visiting a range of New York nightclubs and jazz rooms, and inviting various musicians to visit the Foundation to help them with their work. One of them is a nightclub singer, Honey Swanson (Mayo), who’s involved with a gangster and… well, hijinks ensue.

This movie is a large part of why I got interested in jazz at a young age—and in Louis Armstrong and Benny Goodman in particular.

It’s a Howard Hawks film, and those are always—always—worth watching, but when you add in Louis Armstrong in one of his better film performances, albeit brief, all the other great jazz and swing musicians playing themselves (with the exception of Benny Goodman who plays one of the professors), some glorious Technicolor and Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo… It’s not a serious film, not a great film, but it’s seriously great fun.

A Song is Born on Wikipedia, Amazon, YIFY (P2P), and at the library – DVD and streaming.

For more about Howard Hawks, check out Howard Hawks by Robin Wood or Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy.

Filed under: Movies, Classic Films, favorites, Film, jazz