It's a biopic of Stephen Foster, which means that its relationship to reality is a bit rocky. Nonetheless, it does its best to be entertaining, with basso Ray Middleton as Edwin P. Christy becoming the strongest advocate for Bill Shirley's songs, after Shirley's brother, Dick Simmons, strong-arming publishers and performers into actually paying for them.
As the movie starts out, Shirley -- as Foster -- is living in Lynn Bari's barn and yearning for snobbish Muriel Lawrence, while ignoring Miss Lawrence's adoring kid sister, Eileen Christy. Foster is portrayed as an idiot savant, hearing music in all sorts of unlikely things, but having no idea of how anything operates in the world. This allows him to suffer, as all real artists must, I suppose, and occasionally sing a song himself. Otherwise, it's Middleton in big production numbers in front of his blackfaced Minstrels. They offer some good slapstick, and Glenn Turnbull performs a fine eccentric tap dance.
Modern audiences will have issues with the blackface, of course, and may not care for the sentimental tone of Foster's songs. They were enormously influential, and still popular when I was a child being forced to take lessons on the piano. They were an early example of nostalgic culture, for the old, lost rural America which appealed strongly to the city dwellers in the in the industrializing north.... and their sentimental view of slave culture made them popular down south. Director Alan Dwan made sure that the costume design by Adele Palmer was historically accurate, even if story story was not.
