User Reviews

PETE KELLY'S BLUES (1955) has finally made it to DVD and a fairly enjoyable issue it is too but mostly because of the music - which I'm sorry to say there isn't an over abundance of either. From a lean enough screenplay by Richard L. Breen it is nevertheless well directed by the picture's star Jack Webb. The light plot has cornetist Pete Kelly (Webb), leader of a Dixieland Jazz band in 20s Kansas, going up against racketeer Fran McCarg (Edmond O'Brien) who wants a "piece" of the band. Trouble follows when Kelly's drummer Joey Firestone (Martin Milner) objects and pays for his objection with his life (In classic old Warner gangster movie style he is mowed down with a Tommy gun in a back alley by a passing Limousine in the teeming rain). A stoic Webb tells Rudy, the nightclub owner, "get someone to bring Joey in - it's raining on him". The picture ends with Kelly having a showdown with the mob boss and a couple of his "goons" in a well executed shootout in a deserted ballroom.

In between all the drama and gunfire there are some fine jazz numbers "played" by the on-screen band which is ghosted on the soundtrack by popular jazz band of the day Matty Matlock's Dixieland Jazz Band. Matlock himself ghosted for Lee Marvin on clarinet while Matlock's trumpet player Dick Cathcart doubled for Webb on the Cornet. It is reputed that Webb - an avid jazz fan - based the band in the movie on his own favourite Dixieland band - Eddie Condon's Dixielanders (who themselves in real life had problems with gangsters). But the movie is disappointing in that there aren't enough numbers played by the band in the film. We could have tolerated quite a few more of them from Matlock's great band! However as compensation we are treated to some terrific songs. The great Peggy Lee gives us her wonderful and unique renditions of such standards as "Sugar" and "Somebody Loves Me". Then there's a marvellous cameo by the First Lady of Jazz herself the inimitable Ella Fitzgerald belting out "Hard Hearted Hannah" and the title tune "Pete Kelly's Blues" (composed by Warner Bros. musical director Ray Heindorf). Interestingly Peggy Lee won an Acadamy Award nomination for her portrayal of McCarg's drunken moll in the picture.

So not too bad a movie really - saved mostly as I've said by the music. But it is stylishly photographed in Cinemascope and colour by Hal Rossen and has some clever rapid-fire dialogue. Thanks to Webb's expert direction he imbues his film with an exceptional jazz era atmosphere and his knowledge of Dixieland jazz helps it along. Dixieland jazz was the pop music of yesteryear. Hearing it here and in the light of what we have to listen to today it's a great pity it still isn't. Hmmm!

Now a word about the DVD! Although it is in a well defined 2.35 widescreen format Warner's presentation of "Pete Kelly's Blues" leaves a lot to be desired! There are no extras to speak of! Just a silly very dated short about the early days of motoring and a Looney Tunes cartoon. Surely they could have scraped up, from their archives, some short about jazz or something jazz related. No?? Also why was there no attempt to have a commentary? And to add salt to an already blistering wound - there isn't even a trailer! For shame Warner Home Video!

However, nothing can diminish this classic line from "Pete Kelly's Blues"........... The deadpan Webb (the only actor who could walk without moving his arms) in a confrontation with gangster O'Brian : "I've heard about you McCarg - down south they say you have rubber pockets so you can steal soup"!

The background of the Prohibition Era of Tom Pendergast's Kansas City in the Twenties at its height is the setting for the story of Pete Kelly's Blues. Jack Webb's crisp documentary like style honed by years of doing Dragnet on television is the manner in which Pete Kelly's story of resistance to the mob is told. All Webb in the title role wants to do is play jazz, but playing jazz in mobbed up Kansas City came at a price.

The one who wants the payoff is political ward boss/gangster Edmond O'Brien. He's got the swinging part of Kansas City in his pocket where all the speakeasies and clubs are and he's thought of a new racket, charge protection to the musicians, even to the extent of moving their own legitimate agents out. And O'Brien wants 25% not the usual 10% real agents charge.

Webb's defiant, cowed, and then defiant again during the course of the film. The murder of his drummer Martin Milner takes a lot of the fight out of him. But O'Brien pushes way too hard and he's a really crude sort of thug. In the end Webb snaps.

With one exception the cast is great. The music end is taken by two really great singers Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee who have some great numbers that show why they were the best in their business. Lee even copped an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to Jo Van Fleet for East Of Eden. Lee Marvin is here and not playing a thug, but is a clarinetist and Webb's best friend. Webb plays the trumpet. Andy Devine is law enforcement and deadly serious. The squeaky voice is moderated and Andy's bulk is used similarly to Laird Cregar in I Wake Up Screaming and Orson Welles in Touch Of Evil. Andy never had a role this serious on screen. And Peggy Lee even with that Oscar nomination never followed up on it, my guess being she thought of herself as a singer not an actress primarily.

Janet Leigh who usually is great disappoints me here. Her role as an air-headed party girl is really out of place and why Webb is falling for her is a mystery. Later on she nearly gets him killed when he finally decides to face down O'Brien. Janet does her best, but the part makes no sense at all to me.

The locale of Pete Kelly's Blues in Pendergast controlled Kansas City is interesting. O'Brien is just the kind of guy Pendergast would have as a lieutenant. Pendergast's name is not mentioned, in 1955 it didn't have to be. The recent president of the United States, Harry S. Truman was a product of that machine and that was never out of the public's mind even after Pendergast was dead.

Dixieland jazz fans will really like the music from Pete Kelly's Blues, I certainly did along with the rest of the film.

****SPOILERS*** Jack Webb riding high in his "Dragnet" TV series fans out here as a "Just the Music Mame" clarinet jazz musician Pete Kelly coupled as a crime fighter, like his Sgt. Joe Friday, in battling the mob headed by the whale like mobster Fran "Francis" McCarg, Edmond O'Brien. It's McCarg who's attempting to take control of Kelly's "Big Seven Band" working out of "Rudy's Speakeasy" in downtown Kansas City as well as all the other big bands in the Mid-West. That by McCarg forcing him to pay, 25% of the take, homage to him and his homeboys or else get his arms & legs broken. Acting at first like a tough cop instead of a sensitive clarinet player Kelly change his act when his drummer boy Joey Firestone, Martin Milner, who refuses to give into Mcarg's demands is gunned down by his boys one rainy evening leaving "Rudy's" to dry out after an all night binge of heavy boozing.

Kelly now giving into McCarg's demands has his entire band start to check out on him for better pastures, or gigs, in the east which includes his fellow clarinet player Al "Gunny" Gunnaway, Lee Marvin. It's Gunnaway who takes Kelly's lucky mouthpiece, in revenge for breaking up that band of his, for his clarinet that he once gave him as a present.

Living in limbo with no futures in the music or band business to speak of by being controlled by McCarg Kelly gets his big break when McCarg slips up by beating his girlfriend singer Rose Hopkins, Peggy Lee, almost into a coma. That by Rose, who was too drunk, being unable to belt out a song at the nightclub she was preforming in making him, who kept saying what a big hit she is, look ridicules.

***SPOILERS*** Kelly soon finds out that Rose now mentally damaged with the mind of a five year old has information about Firedtone's murder that can send McCarg, who ordered it, straight to the electric chair! The ending is something like a scene out of "Gunfight at the OK Corral" with Pete and his girlfriend ivy, Janet Leigh, who just came along for the ride confront McCarg and his henchmen in this empty ballroom for a final dance. It's interesting to see how Jack Webb can pull all this off going from a crime fighter in "Dragnet" to a jazz clarinet player in "Pete Kelly's Bules" and does a fairly good job in doing it. It's just that the public warn't ready to see Webb change horse in mid-stream which had him go back to playing Sgt. Joe Friday for the rest of his career until the early 1970's with only one film "-30-" in between!.

Ivy, girl, I don't know why you're wasting your time with Pete. He kicked you, a beautiful and eager woman out of his bed and even before that you fell into a fountain and he didn't even help you get out. He would rather play in a smokey club while avenging his buddy's death than marry you. And I'm not buying that his character can lick Lee Marvin (twice). And all those Dragnet style one liners he was talking, he was too scared to hit dude with that bottle when he had the chance.

I was reading some old magazine from back then from before the film was released and many articles seemed excited that Jack had a love interest in this film. Well, what's the point because he wasn't even interested.

Considering all the hype with which the medium was promoted, the early days of CinemaScope brought very few cinema masterpieces. "Pete Kelly's Blues" is one of those few.

By masterpiece, I don't just mean superlatively entertaining. "Broken Lance" fills that bill, but it's not the sort of movie you can see over and over again, each time re-living the emotions of the characters and soaking up the atmosphere. The master script has an astringency, the master movie has a pace and flair that survive endless repetition. There is a special poignancy about the acting, a unique vigor in the direction, an artistic harmony in the images, a soul-searching vibrancy in the music. It's a movie with something to say, even if its philosophy can only be expressed in the most general terms, for example "Evil is ultimately defeated by Right" (Pete Kelly), "Romance and sentiment triumph over war and corruption" (Casablanca).

With its jazz-age soundtrack complementing its prohibition-era Kansas City visuals, "Pete Kelly's Blues" provides a rich aural and visual experience that can be turned on whenever a CinemaScope print can be threaded through a projector. (Obviously it's a waste of time watching the movie on the old standard TV screen). I don't know whether any attempt was made to duplicate actual Kansas City locales, and I don't care. The movie has its own atmosphere, its own ambiance, its own moody plays of light and shade.

The appropriately glum but practical, cynical, wavering but finally rock-solid Webb is ideally cast in the title role. On the other hand, despite her second billing, Janet Leigh's part is comparatively small and not particularly memorable, but she performs her chores admirably all the same. It's Edmond O'Brien, Peggy Lee, Lee Marvin, Ella Fitzgerald, Andy Devine (forsaking his usual comic antics), and most surprising of all, the bumptious Martin Milner (here perfectly cast) that join Webb in contributing some really unforgettable portraits.

And on the soundtrack — Webb's cornet dubbed by the brilliant Dick Cathcart — such now nostalgic standards as "Pete Kelly's Blues" (Sammy Cahn, Ray Heindorf, sung by Ella Fitzgerald), "Sing Me a Rainbow", "He Needs Me" (Arthur Hamilton), "Somebody Loves Me", "Sugar" (Maceo Pinkard, Sidney Mitchell, Edna Alexander, all sung by Peggy Lee), "I Never Knew" (Gus Kahn, Ted Fiorito), "Hard-Hearted Hannah" (Jack Yellen, Milton Ager, Bob Bigelow, Charles Bates, sung by Ella Fitzgerald), "Bye, Bye Blackbird" (Mort Dixon, Ray Henderson), "What Can I Say After I Say I'm Sorry" (Walter Donaldson, Abe Lyman), "Oh, Didn't He Ramble" (Bob Cole, Will Handy), "Breezin' Along With the Breeze" (Haven Gillespie, Seymour Simons, Richard Whiting), "Gonna Meet My Sweetie Now".

In all, however, this movie is not just a feast for jazz fans, it's a top-of-the-post drama in any man's league.

This is a movie that satisfies on so many levels and even manages to overcome a less than perfect print (I have long coveted this title and mentioned it to the guy in Norway who has been so generous in supplying me with French Classics: he located a print which, bizarrely is dubbed into Spanish whilst RETAINING the original English soundtrack). It also has to overcome Jack Webb's wooden acting and my personal aversion to Janet Leigh and it does this in Spades. On the first level it's a wonderful mixture of the visual and oral with Webb's eye for detail, period and otherwise, perfectly complemented by Richard L. Breen's brilliant screenplay liberally laced with faux-Chandler narration and dialogue (Webb in voice-over setting the scene, a brownstone in KC where his band is resident: It used to belong to a dentist but he moved to Chicago to get a piece of the flu epidemic. This line is so good that it doesn't really matter that the great flu epidemic was in 1928, one year later than the setting of the film. Later, when the hot-headed drummer Joey Firestone, is gunned down in front of Webb in torrential rain in an alley outside the club, Webb goes back inside and addresses Rudy, the owner: Webb: Get someone to bring Joey in. Rudy: Why? Webb: It's raining on him.

Webb may have been wooden but he sure knew how to tell a story cinematically with touches like the one where he comes off the stand after a set, walks to the bar, leans against it, facing away from it, stretches a hand backwards into which the bartender places a towel, with which Webb (Pete Kelly) proceeds to wipe his brow. The movie is replete with touches like this, note, for example, the recurring motif when the band are relaxing in the kitchen in between sets and each time the door opens it creates a draught in the pizza oven. The beauty of this is that it ISN'T a plot point and no one remarks on it, it's just wonderful attention to detail. I could go on and on citing visuals like this and low-key dialogue because this movie is so rich in both. In a rare sympathetic role Lee Marvin is outstanding as Al Gannaway, the clarinet player and longest serving member of Pete Kelly's Big Seven, world-weary and tired of trouble, who leaves the band and returns again. Equally outstanding is Edmund O'Brien's Fran McCarg, a local gangster who offers the band both 'protection' and the services of a singer, his alcoholic girlfriend, Rose Hopkins, a truly outstanding performance by Peggy Lee. The final shootout is very reminiscent of Orson Welles, with one of McCarg's heavies lurking in the rafters above the glitter ball in a ballroom and Webb's camera shooting from above the man and looking down through both rafters and ball. Add Ella Fitzgerald to the mix plus some fine Dixieland Jazz (Dick Cathcart played cornet for Webb) and this is a true neglected gem.

It was Teddy Buckner playing the trumpet in the funeral scene that first turned me onto this film back in 1957.A Louis Armstrong - inspired trumpeter.(hear his "West End Blues" on the Goodtime Jazz album "Dixieland Jubilee")he totally outshone the eponymous Pete Kelly's playing throughout.(believed to have been ghosted by Jimmy McPartland). Ella Fitzgerald had a minor hit with a 78 of "Hard Hearted Hannah" b/w "Pete Kelly's blues".Although nearly half a century old,Webb's movie remains the best "jazz film" ever made.It was 100% fiction whereas "Bird" was 80% fiction presented as fact.Not that I'm knocking Clint Eastwood - it wouldn't have been made without his clout and it certainly served as an introduction to Charlie Parker's music. I absolutely agree with the people on this site who consider Jack Webb's contribution to films due for a revision."The D.I." is far better than it's reputation suggests and until F.Lee Ermey came along remained the ur USMC movie. "Pete Kelly's Blues" is an astonishingly accomplished piece of work. Mr Webb gets fine performances from veteran and tyro alike(although I am a dissenter in the "Peggy Lee for an Oscar" debate),she does well for a singer playing a singer but was wise not to give up her day job. The "Wild Party" scene is brilliantly orchestrated and never allowed to spiral out of Mr Webb's control.The complex relationship between gangster,jazz musician and cop is given the attention it merits and reflects the reality of the time. Pete Kelly himself is given verisimilitude by a marked physical resemblance to dixieland trumpeter Muggsy Spanier who would have been around at the same sort of time. In an era full of method actors over-emoting,Jack Webb could be said to be internalising his characters - or,on the other hand,you might think he was monolithic.Whichever,it made him stand out amongst his fellow thesps in an era when it wasn't considered the mark of a man to shed an easy tear. In the "Not a lot of people know that" dept.:- the solo banjo player is Harper Goff,member of the "Firehouse Five",a band formed by Walt Disney artists in the early fifties. You don't have to be a jazz lover to enjoy "Pete Kelly's blues",but if you watch it you might end up buying the sort of records your grandma used to dance to.