Pete Kelly's Blues (1955)

Directed by

Jack Webb

Genre

drama film, musical film, crime film, romance film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 35m

Rated

NR

Rating

6.2 of 10 from 29 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

A jazz bandleader in the 1920s resists pressure from a gangster to play ball. A socialite party girl and an alcoholic singer get tangled up with him.

tensesmoothnoir-ishbittersweetperiod-feelmusicalmelancholicstylized

What happens

Pete Kelly's Blues is a 1955 musical crime film based on the 1951 radio series of the same name. It was directed by and starred Jack Webb in the title role of a bandleader and musician. Janet Leigh is featured as party girl Ivy Conrad, and Edmond O'Brien as a gangster who applies pressure to Kelly. Peggy Lee portrays alcoholic jazz singer Rose Hopkins (a performance for which she received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress in a Supporting Role). Ella Fitzgerald makes a cameo as singer Maggie Jackson. Lee Marvin, Martin Milner, and Jayne Mansfield also make early career appearances. Much of the dialogue was written by writers who wrote the radio series Pat Novak for Hire (1946–1949), and the radio version of Pete Kelly's Blues (1951), both of which Webb starred in for a time before creating Dragnet. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

More like this

• Love Me or Leave Me (1955)
• The Big Combo (1955)
• Stolen Harmony (1935)
• Running Wild (1955)
• The Crooked Web (1955)
• Murder Is My Beat (1955)
• The Tender Trap (1955)
• Shack Out on 101 (1955)