King of Jazz

Rhapsody in Blue is played on a piano the size of a room, Bing Crosby sings with the Rhythm Boys, and Walter Lantz opens the film with the first Technicolor cartoon. A revue in two-strip Technicolor built around Paul Whiteman and his orchestra, who had commissioned the Rhapsody six years earlier, staged by John Murray Anderson from Broadway: sketches, blackouts, a bridal-veil number, and a finale called the Melting Pot of Music that stirs every nation's folk tune into jazz and leaves out the one that made it. It cost a fortune and lost most of it. Universal's 2016 restoration put the colour back. 1930.