George Latimer (Adolphe Menjou) and his daughter Kit (Bonita Granville) live in New Orleans, the city of jazz. Unfortunately, the family business is not doing well and has to relocate to Chicago. Kit is heartbroken, but she agrees to the move with the promise that they will return someday. As she gets older, she never loses her love of jazz and plays it whenever she gets a chance. One night, she goes for a walk and comes across Johnny Schumacher (Jackie Cooper),a down and out musician. He takes her to a party where they play a new variation on New Orleans jazz and she brings down the house with her piano-playing. Her confidence gives Johnny a new outlook on his love for music, although money is always a temptation.

Syncopation could have been much better, but it constantly strays from the fact that jazz music came from the black community. It begins with black people, one of the rare opportunities in classic films for black actors to shine, but that quickly disappears in favor of the white stars. Noteworthy players are Todd Duncan as trumpet-player Rex Tearbone and Jessica Grayson as his mother. The movie becomes a bit of a cliché with the actors struggling against all odds only to inspire the greats like Benny Goodman and Harry James. Unfortunately black musicians like Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller, and Duke Ellington are left out of the grand finale.

As it stands, Syncopation is an entertaining movie with lots of great music, but it is simply average overall. It never sticks to a time period, but what it lacks in accuracy, it makes up for with catchy tunes and praise-worthy leading actors. Granville is dazzlingly beautiful throughout the movie and she and real-life boyfriend Cooper work well together on-screen.

Good intentions do not make a good film, and unfortunately this jazz musical drama is an artistic failure from the start. It appears to be emulating the recent success of Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane" in presenting story on film in a different manner, utilizing opening credits that deals with the actors as in front of the camera and the people behind the scenes as back of the camera, never indicating who did what. The film is episodic from the start, and the real success in there is the use of the jazz music taking the story back and forth between New Orleans and Chicago. Adolph Menjou give his usual elegance performance as a struggling Southern gentleman who longs to see his children succeed as jazz musicians. The story focuses on his daughter, played by Bonita Granville, who moved to Chicago and found romance with a struggling trumpet player played by Jackie Cooper. Of course, there's a criminal element involved, and the story loses its itself in misguided melodrama that never seems to hold interest. The film tries to reach back to its artistic beginnings, bur continuously fall short of its goal.

There is a sequence at the very beginning with the extraordinary gifted Hall Johnson choir, and they are singing some heavenly spirituals. They truly are the highlight of the film, which unfortunately means that the first 10 minutes which is uneven anyway ends up being more memorable than the remaining 80. I truly wanted to love this film, but I just found it torturous and tedious, mostly as a result of its constant mood swings, acting like many a brooding jazz musician whose lives were documented in many films of the Jazz Age.if only the film had tried to just capture one mood and not move into so many different directions, it would have been tremendously more successful. It is lavishly filmed, and the dubbed musicians on screen do a great job in pretending that they are actually playing whatever instrument happens to be in their hand.

The film certainly deserves an A for effort, but I can't see the teeny boppers of the Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney era making it through this without yawning, and I couldn't see the adults dealing with the jitterbug and jam sessions that this put in in spots where the writer seem to think that the younger crowd might be getting restless. So ultimately, in trying to please so many different types of audiences, my guess is that this pleased very few, making this an artistic flop and a missed opportunity that needed a better sense of direction and a more consistent theme.

I expect to post my 3,000th review here in a matter of days and I can't believe I've never heard of this valentine to Jazz let alone seen it. As far as I can ascertain it's unavailable commercially - I caught it at the Regent Street Cinema in London where they have a policy of screening musicals every Wednesday at 2 p.m. For jazz fans this is a must-see as it traces the growth of the art form from its roots in New Orleans through all the styles up to the swing that was current when it was released in 1942. Although there is a story of sorts involving Bonita Granville a New Orleans stride pianist and Jackie Cooper a Chicago-style trumpeter this isn't allowed to get in the way of the music and overall this film has arguably more music than anything outside of an out-and-out biopic like Night and Day or Words and Music. It concludes with a jam session featuring Charlie Barnet, Benny Goodman, Alvino Rey, Harry James, Jack Jenny, Gene Krupa, and Connee Boswell is thrown in for good measure. Unmissable.