The Glenn Miller Story (Universal-International, 1954)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 1) Turner Classic Movies ran, back to back, two major biographical films about important big-band leaders, The Glenn Miller Story and The Benny Goodman Story. Both were made for Universal-International in the mid-1950’s – The Glenn Miller Story in 1954 and The Benny Goodman Story had a copyright date of 1955, though it wasn’t released until 1956 – and both were in wide screen and Technicolor. By the early 1950’s Universal Studios and Decca Records had merged, and their intent in making these films was at least partly to create original soundtrack albums that would have immense sales potential. (So-called “synergistic marketing” is nothing new; in the 1920’s German director Fritz Lang and his wife, writer Thea von Harbou, regularly did simultaneous releases of their stories as novels under her name and films under his. And in the teens the Thanhouser studio in the U.S. released a serial called The Million-Dollar Mystery as both a newspaper series and a movie, with audiences offered a prize for correctly guessing the ending.) The Glenn Miller Story was a major hit commercially, and it’s also a much better film. Glenn Miller was played by James Stewart, who was actually older when he made the movie than the real Miller had been when he died (Miller was born in 1904, Stewart in 1908), but he was an excellent actor who brought his trademark aw-shucks sincerity to his portrayal even though it’s a bit hard to believe in him as a driven bandleader searching for a new, mysterious sound for his orchestra. The Glenn Miller Story was written by Valentine Davies and Oscar Brodney and directed by Anthony Mann, who’d previously established a good working relationship with Stewart in films like Winchester ‘73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur and Thunder Bay.

It hits most of the high points of Miller’s life, including his early days as a poverty-stricken would-be trombone player (there are some charming if horrendously clichéd scenes with a Los Angeles pawnbroker played by Sig Ruman, the entertaining character actor from three Marx Brothers movies, with whom Miller regularly hocks his trombone and then has to get it out again whenever he gets a job); his hiring by former New Orleans Rhythm Kings drummer Ben Pollack (playing himself, as he does in The Benny Goodman Story as well) for a big band he started in L.A.; his rather bizarre courtship of Helen Burger (June Allyson), whom (at least according to the script) he’d dated in college at the University of Colorado and then made a habit of not seeing for years and then dropping in on until he finally got her to marry him; his work as a sideman for Loring “Red” Nichols in the pit band of the hit Broadway musical Girl Crazy in 1930 (the show was a huge success and launched the careers of Ginger Rogers and Ethel Merman); his dissatisfaction with other bandleaders and determination to create a band of his own; and its early trials, tribulations and failures until he finally hit on his unique “sound” in 1939. The film shows that much the way it actually happened – he’d been experimenting with a voicing in which a high-note trumpet part doubled the saxophone line an octave higher, only his trumpeter split his lip during a rehearsal and Miller decided to try the gimmick with clarinetist Wilbur Schwartz playing the sax line an octave higher instead. What the legend doesn’t mention is that Duke Ellington had been experimenting with that very sound as early as his 1933 record “Rude Interlude,” six years before (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hJVRa2sbRg); it appears at 1:18 in the reed ensemble under Louis Bacon’s scat vocal.

With the help of his long-time friends, pianist Chummy MacGregor (Henry Morgan, young but already avuncular) and manager Don Haynes (Charles Drake, who was in the Marx Brothers’ next-to-last film as a team, A Night in Casablanca, so two of the actors in this film had Marxist connections!), Miller’s band soon becomes the biggest in the country, selling millions of records (though there had been million-selling records before, Miller was the first artist actually awarded a physical gold record for his 1941 hit “Chattanooga Choo Choo”) and appearing at all the top night spots, including the Glen Island Casino in upstate New York (the name is spelled “Glenn Island Casino” in a music newspaper clipping and the correct “Glen Island Casino” in the establishing shot of the building itself, just as Miller himself sometimes spelled his first name “Glen” and sometimes “Glenn”; his real full name was “Alton Glen Miller” but like a later music superstar, James Paul McCartney, he used his middle name as a professional first name). Don Haynes rightly predicts that the Glenn Miller sound will last forever – various tribute bands, some sanctioned by the Glenn Miller estate and some not, continued for decades after Miller’s death – and the band and its leader look headed for a long and prosperous career when fate intervenes in the form of America’s entry into World War II. Miller immediately enlisted as an officer with the U.S. Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force) and ran into trouble with the military bureaucracy; he was hired to lead military bands but was told just to play the same old marches. Miller’s friend and biographer George T. Simon reported that Miller was told the U.S. Army had won World War I with the same music Miller was being asked to play now, and Miller’s comeback was, “Tell me, General. Are we still flying the same planes in this war that we flew in the last one?” (It’s a line that Davies and Brodney didn’t use in the script, but certainly should have.) Miller worked up march arrangements of swing tunes like W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” and Harold Arlen’s “Blues in the Night,” and though he couldn’t record these commercially because the American Federation of Musicians had called a strike against the record companies in 1942, they did come out on V-Discs, special 12-inch 78’s on plastic issued to servicemembers.

Miller’s career met its end when the plane that was supposed to take him and two other members of his organization from London to Paris in December 1944 mysteriously disappeared; the cause of his death has remained a mystery but the general consensus today is he was the victim of “friendly fire,” shot down by British anti-aircraft gunners who mistook his little aircraft for an enemy plane. The film ends with a macabre scene ripped off from the ending of the 1939 film The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle. Helen Miller is waiting to hear a special broadcast her husband’s band is supposed to give from Paris which will include a surprise: he’s planned to play a swing arrangement of her favorite song, “Little Brown Jug,” after he’s been denouncing it as “tin-ear music” all movie. (The real Glenn Miller recorded “Little Brown Jug” in 1939, and it was one of his biggest hits.) The Glenn Miller Story is sentimental as all get-out (given how Miller really died it would have been hard not to give it a sentimental ending!), and it’s an indication of how Universal-International’s executives felt about this movie that its titles are in cursive script the way they usually did with romantic films, but it’s also well directed, competently acted (and Stewart’s sincerity is enough to overcome any doubts about him playing a character who died before he reached Stewart’s age) and beautiful to look at, a souvenir of the days when color films were actually colorful instead of being stuck with dirty greens and browns that make one wonder (make me wonder, anyway), “If you’re going to use so little of the visible spectrum, why don’t you just shoot it in black-and-white?” There are also some strong appearances by guest stars, including Frances Langford singing “Chattanooga Choo Choo” (unusual since the original vocal was by a man, Miller saxophonist Tex Beneke) and Louis Armstrong in a stunning sequence playing and singing “Basin Street Blues” in a nightclub with rotating gels over the floor lights so the background changes color as he performs.