Juke Joint

Juke Joint (1947)

The Joint is Jumpin'! / The Jive is Jivvin'! / The Jam is Jammin'! / Everybody's High in the Happy Slap-Happy Holiday Family!

Hitchhiking conmen Bad News Johnson and July Jones arrive in Texas. A group of talented hopefuls vie for a coveted crown in a jitterbug contest.

Date of release
1947-01-01
TMDB
6.5 / 10 (4)
Runtime
1h 8m
Genres
Comedy, Drama
Director
Spencer Williams

Casting

Interesting facts

Juke Joint is a 1947 race film directed by and starring Spencer Williams and produced and released by Sack Amusement Enterprises. The film was considered lost until being rediscovered.

Production

Juke Joint was the last in a series of films directed by Spencer Williams, an African American actor and writer, for production by Sack Amusement Enterprises, a white-owned Dallas-based company that distributed all-black race films to segregated theaters across the United States. Williams was among the few African Americans to direct films during the 1940s.

The juke joint scenes were filmed on location at the Rose Room in Dallas and Don’s Keyhole in San Antonio, Texas, and included musical numbers featuring band leader Red Calhoun.

Following the release of Juke Joint, Williams disappeared from the entertainment industry. He returned to prominence in 1951 when he was cast as Andrew H. “Andy” Brown in the television version of the radio comedy Amos 'n Andy, which ran on CBS from 1951 to 1953. He made one final film appearance in a small role in the 1962 Italian horror production L'Orribile Segreto del Dottor Hitchcock.

Juke Joint was considered a lost film for many years, until a print was located in 1983 in a warehouse in Tyler, Texas.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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