1920年代のシカゴ。スターを夢見るロキシーは、キャバレーの専属歌手ヴェルマのステージを羨望の眼差しで見ていた。そんなロキシーはある日、ショーに売り込むとの約束を守らなかった愛人と諍いを起こし、ついに彼を撃ち殺してしまう。そして逮捕され留置所に送られたロキシーは、驚くことにあのヴェルマと出会った。彼女は不倫した夫と妹を殺した罪に問われていた。しかし、マスコミ操作に長けた辣腕弁護士ビリーのおかげで、巷では一躍スター扱い。ロキシーも同じ手段でヴェルマ以上の注目を浴びようとビリーを雇う。
Millie Dillmount, a fearless young lady fresh from Salina, Kansas, determined to experience Life, sets out to see the world in the rip-roaring Twenties. With high spirits and wearing one of those new high hemlines, she arrives in New York to test the "modern" ideas she had been reading about back in Kansas: "I've taken the girl out of Kansas. Now I have to take Kansas out of the girl!"
The story is about Iris's rise to the apex of a love/power triangle that includes her roguish English lover, McHeath, and Art, an earnest young boxer. Within the flawed moral landscape, each character struggles to establish their sovereignty.
Filmed in Chicago & finished in 1959, The Cry of Jazz is filmmaker, composer and arranger Edward O. Bland's polemical essay on the politics of music and race - a forecast of what he called "the death of jazz." A landmark moment in black film, foreseeing the civil unrest of subsequent decades, it also features the only known footage of visionary pianist Sun Ra from his beloved Chicago period. Featured are ample images of tenor saxophonist John Gilmore and the rest of Ra's Arkestra in Windy City nightclubs, all shot in glorious black & white.
Duke Ellington and Orchestra perform 'C Jam Blues'.
When love came the way of this gentleman crook he turned to the right---only to be caught in the swirling eddy of his criminal past! (original ad)
A jeremiad against intemperance, jazz music, and abortion, set on a train filled with unrepentant sinners hurtling toward damnation.
Ann Martin will inherit six-million dollars if she marries a man her two spinster-aunts approve of, but, so far, her aunts haven't approved of any man she knows. Ann tries to get a bashful hotel clerk to marry her in name only, and then get a divorce, but he refuses to because he is in love with her. Her cousin then brings in another clerk and Ann now has two men on her hands. Ann now wants to marry the first clerk, having discovered she also loves him, but the aunts object. She then hires two gigolos to charm her aunts into a compromising situation.
FOR MY SISTERS is a movie about black culture or rather: black women, specifially: a movie about black singers. Alberta Hunter, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae, Nina Simone. They are the four "Big Sisters", singer Carole Alston follows through to the age of jazz. Alston, "a voice as dark and sweet as molasses", as described by the Financial Times, was born in Washington, DC and has been living in Vienna for almost 30 years. She is sure: "Those four icons help you explain what jazz is and even the history of jazz right along."