Barnes & Noble

While contemporary music has a visual crutch -- the advent of the music video -- to add imagery to the sound, the jazz age of the first half of the last century is mainly seen through the imagination. Actual footage of the seminal artists who molded and engineered the popular music is now hard to come by. New Orleans takes place in the early jazz era and features two true legends of the form: Louis Armstrong, and Billie Holiday in her only significant big-screen role. With a colorful backdrop of Bourbon Street and Storyville, New Orleans concerns the culture clash between emerging ragtime and "jass" and highbrow society, the latter keeping careful company with the Big Easy's fast underground. Arturo De Cordova is Nick, the suave gambling maven who runs the jazz-joint Storyville. Dorothy Patrick plays Miralee, a young socialite who falls for the music, the scene, and Nick -- against the wishes of her imposing rich mother. Louis Armstrong and Woody Herman make appearances as themselves, while Billie Holiday plays Endie, maid to the society family, but Storyville singer by night; New Orleans is at its best in its half-dozen musical sequences with these stars. Satchmo's ebullience and Billie Holiday's iconic cool, beautifully contrasted in a duet, are the rewards of this portrait of a bygone age.

All Movie Guide

New Orleans is Republic Pictures' spin on such "musical origin" films as Birth of the Blues and Dixie. Covering nearly four decades, the story is a fanciful recreation of the "birth" of American jazz music. Arturo de Cordova plays Nick Duquesne, owner of a posh gambling house in turn-of-the-century New Orleans (yes, that's an uncredited Shelley Winters as Duquesne's secretary!) When the "good" people of the town forced Duquesne to pack up and leave, he relocates in Chicago, where he discovers that his customers are turned on by hot jazz. Hiring bandleader Louis Armstrong to entertain his patrons, Duquesne no longer has to rely on gambling to make a living. Romance enters the picture in the form of Miralee Smith (Dorothy Patrick), a straightlaced student of classical music who learns to kick up her heels and shed her inhibitions at the sound of jazz. New Orleans is the only mainstream Hollywood feature good enough to cast Billie Holliday in a major role: true, she's playing a maid, but a maid with the most exquisitve singing voice this side of Heaven. The film's highlight is the Holliday/Armstrong duet "Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans," surely one of the great moments of movie-musical history. Hal Erickson

Product Details

• UPC: 738329015923
• Source: KINO VIDEO
• Region Code: 0
• Presentation: B&W
• Sound: monaural
• Language: English
• Time: 1:30:00
• Sales Rank: 36,483

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