Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

Suppose you were so boring that when Hollywood decided to make the movie of your life they had to add extra characters that never really existed just so you could be more interesting…?

Set to the music of Jerome Kern, Till the Clouds Roll By does exactly that. It opens with a very long rendition of Showboat, then jumps back to Kern’s days struggling to sell a tune in London. Almost immediately he does. After a brief and idyllic courtship starting with an unlikely breaking and entry to borrow the use of a piano, Kern marries his English rose and quickly ascends to Broadway. Then…, well…, we have another 60 minutes or so left in the film for a follies-esque presentation of his greatest hits strung together by a subplot of a young actress and family friend (played by Lucille Bremmer, a singing and dancing Bette Davis type) who learns the hard way she must make her own stardom to be successful…. Never mind this woman never existed, nor her father who is supposedly Kern’s manager and mentor.
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