Pete Kelly's Blues (1955) Considering who's the star and director of this colorful Jazz Age gangster opus, it left us happily surprised......
Jack Webb, a producer-actor-director famed for his monotone, clipped dialogue delivery and his single fixed facial expression, spent most of his career as the creator and star of the TV cop show "Dragnet".
Befitting TV, the show consisted almost entirely of close-ups, with Detective Joe Friday (Webb) conducting terse interrogations of suspects, crime witnesses and bystanders. After a long run in the black-and-white 1950's, Webb returned with a late 1960's color version of the show.....
(Normally confining himself to sentences of 5 words or less, a now legendary episode had a blue-painted LSD freak provoke Webb into a practically Shakespeare-ian monologue of righteous rage.......)
We bring all this up because you'd never think "Pete Kelly's Blues" came from a guy whose primary visual medium was small screen monochrome close-ups.......
This is a gorgeous film to look at in Cinemascope and color, filled with scenes and camera shots carefully composed for the wide screen to give the story maximum impact. Webb's command of visual storytelling here rivaled the propulsive style of the veteran pulp-masters like Don Siegel and Sam Fuller.
As a would-be screenwriter ourselves, we couldn't help loving the opening credit...."Jack Webb starring in a screenplay by Richard L Breen".......was there ever a screenwriter in Hollywood who got a credit like that? Who knows how many scripters gnashed their teeth in envy when they saw that billing pop up just before the film's opening sequence......
And what sequence it is, a beautifully rendered depiction of a New Orleans jazz musician's lakeside funeral, complete with a church choir.
In the midst of the Prohibition 1920's the late musician's cornet has fallen into the hands of Pete Kelly (Webb) who leads his own jazz band at a Kansas City speakeasy......where the crowds come for the band's hot jazz and the joint's illegal, watered down booze.
Kelly soon attracts the worst fan possible - Fran McCarg (Edmond O'Brian at his most crude and blustery), a vicious, murderous kingpin who forces himself on the band as their new agent-manager, with most of their pay coming to him......or else.
In one of the film's most vivid, unsettling moments, McCarg cruelly and publicly humiliates the stoic, tough-as-nails Kelly......so you know the threat he poses is lethal.
Kelly's unwilling servitude to McCarg puts a crimp in his budding romance with a flirtatious socialite (a nubile Janet Leigh)......and inevitably, given McCarg's boiling temper, one of the band members dies in a spectacularly staged back alley execution.
Webb puts all this across, the music, the action and the melodrama, in a swiftly paced 95 minutes, all of it immeasurably aided by Richard Breen's razor-sharp, rat-a-tat, noir-ish dialogue (Webb snaps at O'Brian : "They say you got rubber pockets so you can steal soup....")
And there's even more terrific stuff in here......Peggy Lee's Oscar-nominated performance as an alcoholic singer brutalized into madness by O'Brian, a wonderful guest musical appearance from Ella Fitzgerald....and the film's rich, evocative production design courtesy of Harper Goff, a Disney designer whom Webb borrowed for the film.
Watching this film's gaudy finale set-piece, a blazing shootout in an empty dance hall (complete with spinning mirrorball), we could only wish Jack Webb had tried his hand at more feature films.
You can make fun of Webb's' "Dragnet" all you want ( and yes, Dan Aykroyd poked enough fun at him in the 1987 feature film spoof), but don't even try to tell us "Pete Kelly's Blues" isn't a damn good movie.
Because it is. Webb had an eye for action, shot composition and right-to-the-point editing......and he got the maximum effort out of his talented cast, that also included a young Martin Milner (later the star of Webb's "Adam-12" series) and Lee Marvin.
In BQ's humble opinion, that's a 4 star (****) movie right there for you. And we say seek it out.
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