Producer Arthur Freed's musical on the life of composer Jerome Kern is just another excuse to feature MGM stars in musical sequences without bothering about a pesky plot.
The actor Robert Walker is the chief victim of this mess. He walks around knocking out songs like he was picking lint off of his well tailored suits. The audience never sees Kern actually sit down and write a song it's just taken for granted that he has a portfolio full of them where ever he goes. Jerome Kern may have been a great American songwriter but he was a very boring guy.
For a composer who wrote a lot of great songs, this film presents them in a fairly mediocre middle class style. The director was Richard Thorpe a studio contract guy who is barely remembered and gets no respect from film scholars although he made a lot of films. Thorpe's chiefly remembered as the guy who got fired off of The Wizard of Oz.
Till the Clouds Roll By is also extremely long coming in at over 2 hours, a real killer of a film.
132 minutes
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