Till the Clouds Roll By

Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)

The mammoth musical of Jerome Kern's dramatic life story

Light bio-pic of American Broadway pioneer Jerome Kern, featuring renditions of the famous songs from his musical plays by contemporary stage artists, including a condensed production of his most famous: 'Showboat'.

Date of release
1946-12-05
TMDB
5.8 / 10 (30)
Runtime
2h 16m
Genres
Music
Director
Richard Whorf

Casting

Interesting facts

Till the Clouds Roll By is a 1946 American Technicolor musical film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and a fictionalized biopic of composer Jerome Kern, portrayed by Robert Walker. Kern was involved with the production, but died before its completion. It was the first in a series of MGM biopics about Broadway composers.

Production

The working title for the film was "As the Clouds Roll By". Gene Kelly was intended to play Kern, with Gloria DeHaven, Jacqueline White, Imogen Carpenter, and Jeanette MacDonald in major parts. None appeared in the film.

When the film started production in the fall of 1945, Judy Garland was signed as Broadway singer-dancer Marilyn Miller, having just returned to California after a long New York honeymoon with her new husband, director Vincente Minnelli. Soon after, Kern returned to New York toward the end of October and died in November 1945.

During the six months that it took to shoot the film, producer Arthur Freed had to find one director after another. Lemuel Ayers, a set designer, was scheduled to make his directorial debut on the film, but was replaced by Busby Berkeley late in August 1945.

The film includes two versions of "Ol' Man River": the first sung by Caleb Peterson and an African-American chorus as part of the Show Boat medley, and the second, a "crooner version" by Frank Sinatra, featured as the grand finale.

Barbette consulted on the creation of the film's circus sequence.

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

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