Pete Kelly's Blues

Jack Webb, famous as Joe Friday on Dragnet, directed Pete Kelly's Blues.  The 1955 production is bizarre in a number of ways and, also, elaborately designed; shot in wide-screen format, Webb's picture is not the rough-and-ready film noir that I expected.  The movie is beautifully photographed in technicolor and has an all-star cast -- Lee Marvin and Janet Leigh have second billing to Webb who plays the eponymous Pete Kelly.  Featured as well are Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee.  You can glimpse Jayne Mansfield as a brunette cigarette girl in the jazz bar, Rudy's --a mobster roughs her up a little when she  gets in the way of a brawl.  Andy Devine is also cast, against type, as a sinister, steely-eyed detective --  his trademark whisper here is an ominous purr.  One doesn't think of Webb much as an auteur, but this is just prejudice -- in fact, he developed a highly distinctive style, particularly with respect to over-the-top hardboiled dialogue and Pete Kelly acts just like Joe Friday, although with a cornet as opposed to a gun and badge. Like Clint Eastwood, another right-wing law-and-order director, Webb has a genuine affection for jazz and stops the show from time to time to let his musician perform in sequences that are shot to flatter them and make the most of their music.  Like Eastwood, he was a musician himself and could play the trumpet well enough to release an album under his own name.  No one is more square that Joe Friday and so it's a bit incongruous to see Webb mouthing the argot of the jazz musician and appearing as an apostle of the cool.  This is part of the film's somewhat kinky charm.  Webb is homely with a huge square head and flat face. (He looks like a flesh-and-blood bobble-head.)  He's very slender in  this film and, though he marches around like a Drill Instructor, he has soft-looking sloping shoulders and a completely unprepossessing physique.  This is also part of the movie's weird appeal:  Webb seems to be blissfully unaware that he isn't leading man material -- in the film, he beats up Lee Marvin, not once but twice (this has to be seen to be believed); even more astounding, he gets the girl, the beauteous Janet Leigh, and, then, proceeds to abuse and neglect her, showing the woman complete disrespect; a glutton for punishment, Janet Leigh is like a whipped puppy:  every time Webb breaks up with her and calls her names, she comes back for more.  It's an astonishingly egotistical performance wholly ignoring the fact that Webb's goblin appearance makes him painful to the eyes.  Webb was always the perfect character actor, but here he's the leading man and it just doesn't work.  The effect is similar to the way that Wim Wenders elevated Harry Dean Stanton to the status of romantic leading man in Paris, Texas.  

If you are expecting cut-rate film noir, the movie's opening sequence will quickly disabuse you of that notion.  We see a Jazz funeral in the south, all weeping willows and clouds of dust drifting in the wind over a graveyard.  On the nearby bayou, a big paddle-wheeler plows through the water.  The technicolor is gorgeous and the film making looks like a big Cinemascope David Lean production.  There's a big African-American choir and, then, a second-line jazz band playing "Didn't he ramble" on the way back from the cemetery.  A cornet, apparently standing in for the deceased, drops off the funeral hearse, fallling to the ground.  We next see the instrument in a freight-train box car where Jack Webb's Pete Kelly wins the trumpet in a crap game.  Kelly is wearing his World War One dough-boy uniform and the picture has a strong post-war ambience -- everyone vividly recalls combat and, at least, one of the characters has shell-shock.  After this bravura opening, the film takes us to Kansas City in 1927 -- this location is characterized by four places:  Rudy's, a speakeasy, Fat Annie's, a rural juke joint presided over by Ella Fitzgerald, a ballroom, and some dusty country lanes apparently connecting these places.  The script is economical:  we never see where any of these people live -- all the action, more or less, is set either in one of these entertainment venues or out in the dark country, shot consistently in implausible-looking day-for-night and reverting as much as possible, even for exterior shots, to the studio.  The plot is simple as well:  a Kansas City mobster demands that Pete Kelly's band pay protection money.  They refuse.  The drummer is a hot-head (you can always count on a drummer to be a trouble-maker).  He beats up a mobster and, then, gets machine-gunned in the alleyway outside of Rudy's.  This murder seems to encourage Pete Kelly to cooperation and, it seems, that a truce is declared between the gangsters and the band.  (For a big part of the film, the murder of the drummer is simply forgotten and doesn't motivate any action; at the climax, Pete Kelly suddenly recalls that the gangster, played by Edmond O'Brien, killed his drummer and, then, belatedly, seeks revenge.)  The mobster has a moll played by Peggy Lee.  She yearns for a family but is a pathetic drunk.  A socialite slumming at Rudy's develops an infatuation with Pete Kelly and pursues him -- this is Ivy played by Janet Leigh.  Incredibly, Webb resists her blandishments and, then, after succumbing, mistreats her throughout the whole film.  (There's lots of smooching between the decidedly unsightly Webb and Janet Leigh -- one wonders what she thought of these scenes staged to show that the real sex object here is not the actress, but Jack Webb.)  When Peggy Lee comes onstage too drunk to perform, the gangster (a bit like Kane with his opera-singer wife in the Welles movie) is enraged and humiliated.  He beats up the singer and, then, she falls down a flight of stairs.  She ends up in one of the most ghastly mental asylums ever shown -- a literal dungeon.  The singer is now completely crazy, cradling a doll, and murmuring pathetic gibberish.  (It's the kind of performance that gets an Oscar nod -- Lee was nominated but didn't win.)  The mad-woman provides a clue as to where the gunsel who ventilated the drummer is hiding out.  This leads to a spectacular shoot-out in the ballroom.  Lee Marvin, who quit the band and, then, has come back, wants to accompany Pete Kelly to the gun-battle.  (The hulking and menacing Marvin plays clarinet of all things and he's bullied by the Webb who looks like the proverbial 98-pound weakling.)  One expects that Marvin, who shows considerable muscle, will be instrumental in helping Kelly wipe out the gangsters.  But Kelly doesn't want hi friend in harm's way and knocks him out with a right-hook to the jaw.  Kelly is quick to use his fists to resolve problems.  In the end, Kelly is back on the bandstand with the adoring Ivy watching him play his trumpet.  

The film is amusing and beautifully shot.  Webb and his cameraman use the wide-screen format very inventively and many of the images are gorgeous in their own right.  Sometimes, Webb puts someone in close-up in the corner of the screen and, then, shows action behind them in deep focus.  At other times, he contrives complicated linear compositions --  for instance, the choir spread out under the willow trees  in the New Orleans cemetery.  The technicolor is very good and Webb, who seems to have been a control freak, shoots in the studio so that he can control all nuances of lighting and color composition.  The sets are nicely dressed if a bit strange -- Rudy's jazz club is also a pizza joint and we get showy shots of the pies being baked and spices being very precisely sprinkled on them.  (Webb liked "realism" although aspects of this film are clearly stylized.)  Race relations issues intrinsic to films of this kind are simply ignored;  as in Blues in the Night, made 14 years earlier, the bands are strictly segregated. It's wonderful to see Ella Fitzgerald, who performs two songs.  She also has some dialogue that she mouths in a terrified, stammering whisper.  Webb, the archetypal square, gets lots of one-liners that are sardonic and laconic at the same time:

On the need to remove the dead drummer from the alley:  "It's rainin' on him."

On a dishonest person:  "They say you got rubber pockets so you can steal soup."

On a shell-shocked flunky:  "After the war, he couldn't set fire to a bucket of kerosene."

On telling an annoying person to leave:  "Dust off; get the night boat to Phoenix."

On a gambler:  "He'd shoot crap on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier."

On being poor:  "If I wanna post card, I gotta buy it on time."

On a a slim showing at an event:  "You could put the whole crowd in a bathtub and still have room to splash around."

On having no friends:  "If I wanted a friend these days, I'd have to send away to Sears Roebuck."

On his obsession with his jazz, Pete Kelly's girlfriend says:  "You don't want me.  You won't get married until you find a girl who looks like a cornet.  But I'm three valves short."