Movie Review: Billie (2019)

Now Available

The way that one interviewee in writer-director James Erskine's new documentary “Billie” tells it, when Ella Fitzgerald sings “My Man's Gone Now,” you think he's on a trip and is due back shortly, but when Billie Holiday does it, you know that man has packed his bags, he's already down the street, and he is never coming back.

Using her voice like a brass instrument to – with Holiday's singular, unorthodox lyrical phrasing, tell vivid, visceral, lived-in stories that cast a spell on her listeners – her friend and fellow jazz vocalist Sylvia Syms sums it up best. “Billie Holiday sang only truth, she knew nothing else.”

As both a word and an idea, “truth” is the quality that comes up most frequently in the film when people describe not just Holiday's voice but her life. And it's only fitting since just one spin of one Billie Holiday record leaves you with the impression that they are inexorably linked. Feeling the same way, in the late 1960s, feminist high school teacher turned freelance journalist Linda Lipnack Kuehl embarked on a quest to write the definitive biography on her favorite singer. From Holiday's cousin John Fagan, who recalled her feisty early years to the jazz greats who became her friends, colleagues, and lovers before her untimely death at the age of forty-four in 1959, Kuehl recorded hundreds of hours of interviews with the people who knew the singer born Eleanora Fagan the best. 

In Erskine's documentary, these frequently jaw-dropping, often cited, but previously unheard original audio tapes bring Kuehl and her vital first-person sources back to life. They also give us the briefest of glimpses into what her biography of the artist might have looked like if she'd gotten the chance to finish it. Sadly, much like Holiday, whose career trajectory fascinated her just as much as her self-destructive streak, Kuehl's life was also cut short. Nearly a decade after she began working on the book, the young journalist was found dead on a Washington D.C. street in a mysterious event that her family believes was perhaps linked to this quest.

Wanting to accurately represent Billie Holiday as she was and not just pay tribute to her as a legend, while on the surface, a white, Jewish teacher from New York who wrote about women's issues for publications like “The Paris Review” seems like she would have little in common with Holiday, Kuehl's sister dispels this belief early on in the film. Telling viewers that Linda identified with the singer's pain and didn't like the way she'd been portrayed as a victim, Kuehl herself backs up this thesis later on in her manuscript, saying that although the sexually voracious Holiday was often in relationships with abusive men, in the end, it was she who chose these partners for one reason or another.

Keeping an objective approach, even when she interviews a pimp that Holiday tricked for when she was a young girl, much like Kuehl, Erskine's film and Holiday's friends paint a portrait of a woman who loved to live fast for all of its ups and downs. It seems perhaps that Holiday knew her time on Earth was short. Exploring all facets of her personality from her two favorite expletives to her bisexuality, even when friends tell horrific stories about the men who graduated her from pot to hard drugs or beat her senseless (and some openly question whether or not she was, in fact, a masochist), Erskine strives to follow in Kuehl's nonjudgmental footsteps. 

Despite this, of course, some of these testimonies are absolutely devastating. Chronicling the way that Holiday and other Black artists were subjected to the shocking racism of America during the Jim Crow laws, interviewees describe Holiday's experiences ranging from club owners making her “darken” up her face to an actual brawl that broke out with a racist, white sheriff in the south. Using the truth of her voice and her ability to tell a story in song, Holiday's response to these injustices was with the powerful anthem “Strange Fruit,” which sadly remains just as timely and moving as ever, more than eighty years after it was recorded.

An eye-opening and engrossing overview of Holiday's life that will hopefully make you seek out, as I did, more information about the events and figures referenced in the film, while it's largely very successful from a narrative standpoint, occasionally, "Billie" struggles with its chronological presentation of facts. Hopscotching around to add new details about pivotal moments in Holiday's life that we wish we would've known earlier, this rings a particularly false note when, late into the movie, we jump awkwardly from one interviewee's analysis of her abusive relationships to the sudden revelation that she might've been raped as a child. While reflective of the way that Kuehl would've heard these confessions at various times throughout her decade-long research, I question the decision to save something so major for near the end of "Billie," particularly when it would've added a crucial counterpoint to the predominantly male recollections of her youth turning tricks, including an ex-pimp's testimony that his girls loved getting a black eye. 

Still, knowing that Billie Holiday was Kuehl's raison d'être, particularly in her final years, Erskine’s film pays fine tribute to her beloved subject and Kuehl's journalistic legacy overall. Working in a few facts about Holiday's biographer here and there, Erskine is smart to keep Kuehl's private life off the table until very late into the documentary, when we hear that she had been divorced twice, was perhaps romantically linked to one legendary interviewee, and had started to receive threats regarding that relationship and her book.

Although we would like to know more about her life and work, in her relative anonymity, Erskine taps into the link that not only Kuehl and Holiday share but many women and men do with the singer as well. Instead of openly philosophizing, he lets Kuehl's interviewees try to articulate it aloud when they discuss what they respond to most in Holiday's life and music. And while obviously, their words add vivid color to the black and white photographs utilized throughout, the most unforgettable hue of all comes not from them but Billie Holiday herself. We hear it in the heartbreaking lyrics she sings, the words she means, and the way she uses her instrument inimitably, unreservedly, and unmistakably to tell the truth, even when it hurts. 

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

Blu-ray Review: Kansas City (1996)

Now Available

From the stirring ballads of McCabe and Mrs. Miller to the country yearning of Nashville and soulful blues of Cookie's Fortune, music in the movies of Robert Altman comes in many forms. Complementing the high and low notes sung by his characters — in the vein of the overlapping dialogue that has become an Altman trademark — with his clever use of music to set the dramatic stage, the maverick filmmaker wields sound impressionistically, the way a painter swirls color around a canvas with a brush.

Regularly usurping his film scores, whether it's in the drawing room sing-alongs of Gosford Park or the vaudevillian numbers of A Prairie Home Companion and beyond, Altman uses the public performances of songs to not only create a mood but also transplant us into the heart of each work. Much more than just a single filmmaking tool he has at his disposal, frequently in his oeuvre, music becomes the most important one. Transcending the screen to have as much of an impact on him as it does on us, it informs his subtly ever-changing filmmaking M.O. And nowhere is this approach more evident post-Nashville than in his jazz fueled, forgotten '96 effort Kansas City.

Using jazz's signature improvisational riffs to build its narrative structure, the movie takes a look at vice, music, politics, and corruption over a twenty-four hour period when Missouri is set to hold a consequential 1934 election. While initially it plays like the latest in a long line of Altman's meandering ensemble dramedies, we quickly learn that, although they sound great jamming together, each character we meet in Kansas City doubles as an instrument and all will get their chance to solo.

Anchored by '90s Altman regular Jennifer Jason Leigh as a desperate woman who holds a politician's laudanum addicted wife hostage to secure the release of her hoodlum husband from a jazz club gangster, Kansas City is a crime film that — true to the director's work — is far less interested in plot than it is captivated by its characters.

Performing depression era slang in the hard and fast key of screwball (regardless of the scene's tone), Leigh tries her best to sell lines like "don't try to high-hat me," "park the body, sister," "and put some snap into it" which, when taken cumulatively, land far less than they detract from the goings-on. A Jean Harlowesque Girl From Missouri who's just wild about her man, as intriguing as Leigh's spunky Blondie O’Hara seems to be, we never get a true sense of who she is as a person from one outburst to the next. And although Leigh's Blondie dominates the scenes she shares with her hostage Carolyn Stilton (Miranda Richardson) in the film's first half, she disappears into the chorus once Richardson's increasingly curious victim takes over the bass line later on.

While Kansas City’s women propel forward a majority of the film's plot, the rest of the action is found in the booze soaked, testosterone heavy, smoke and sax filled world of the Hey-Hey Club. A jazz joint located on 18th Street where some of the '90s most talented instrumentalists bring to life the legendary sounds of Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins, for a music buff like Altman who grew up listening to blues in Black clubs, City's performances feel like he's stepping back in time to show us the place he calls home.

A dynamic showcase for Harry Belafonte in a daringly against-type role as an underworld gangster who holds court at the Hey-Hey, the actor commands every scene he's in right from the jump. Like a bandleader introducing the musicians keeping the beat behind him, he uses the frame like a microphone and reaches through to tell us exactly what we need to know. From where he sits in the center of the screen, Belafonte reveals, "what's gonna happen at dawn tomorrow going to depend on what happen when the sun go down tonight. You can believe that shit," just as events kick into high gear for Blondie and Carolyn and the music that is Altman's Kansas City starts to play.

Going off on what the director refers to as "jazz riffs" throughout the film where its characters wander away from the plot like a clarinetist backing away from the melody in order to stand up and jam on their own, occasionally the dropped notes and tempo changes distract rather than enhance the musicality of its plot.

Touching on some of his favorite issues like race, class, and gender roles amid the intersection of politics and vice, Kansas City feels like a thematic cousin to his musically minded 1975 masterpiece Nashville. A flawed yet still fascinating opus that rarely comes up in a conversation about the filmmaker's most beloved works that span his fifty year career, Kansas City is additionally dwarfed by the popularity of his other ‘90s output, in the form of the brilliant films Short Cuts and (my personal favorite) The Player.

Seeing it for the first time in twenty-four years however, in this stunningly remastered, special features loaded new Blu-ray from Arrow, Altman's movie proves itself not only worthy of a second look but a second listen as well. Filled with scene-stealing soloists like Leigh, Richardson, Belafonte, and Steve Buscemi ready to grab their trumpets and blow, Kansas City is a vital reminder that nothing — absolutely nothing — sounds quite like an Altman led band playing in 4x4 time.

Text ©2020, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. https://www.filmintuition.com  Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.  Also, as an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases made off my site through ad links. FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I may have received a review copy or screener link of this title in order to voluntarily decide to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique. Cookies Notice: This site incorporates tools (including advertiser partners and widgets) that use cookies and may collect some personal information in order to display ads tailored to you etc. Please be advised that neither Film Intuition nor its site owner has any access to this data beyond general site statistics (geographical region etc.) as your privacy is our main concern.

TV on DVD: The Beiderbecke Tapes (1987)

Now Available on DVD

Read Jen's Review of The Beiderbecke Affair

Bookmark this on Delicious

Print Page





Being that Headmaster Wheeler (Keith Smith) assumes that Greenpeace is a new drug hitting Yorkshire' San Quentin High School in the late 1980s, you can't really blame the man's illogical decision to punish popular schoolteachers Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn) and Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam) for living in sin by sending them to Holland.

Of course, the lure of the far more sinful Amsterdam isn't simply a vacation but a penance concocted by Wheeler to pack off San Quentin's English teacher Jill and woodshop department's Trevor as school chaperones when it becomes common knowledge that the feminist and environmentalist Jill has let Trevor move into her place when his flat was torn down in the name of progress (or, rather, a motorway).

While at first our wisecracking, screwball romantic comedy descendants are irritated by the assignment, when once again Jill and Trevor become unwittingly involved in another high level case of governmental corruption and conspiracy, a change of scenery becomes much more inviting.

Similar to award-winning playwright, creator, and screenwriter Oliver Plater's first work in the Trevor and Jill-centric trilogy-- The Beiderbecke Affair-- The Beiderbecke Tapes finds the two schoolteachers turned unlikely amateur sleuths in an increasingly convoluted plot when once again Trevor's passion for jazz and especially the music of Bix Beiderbecke provides the impetus for the dangerous mayhem and comedic fodder that follows.

Although Trevor has packed along his two thousand tapes and thousands of records to Jill's place, shortly after visiting a strange local pub with zero customers, Trevor bonds with a barman over Beiderbecke who delivers him nine hours worth of jazz on a stack of cassette tapes the very next day. While Trevor can't wait to dive in, Jill becomes suspicious and annoyed by her lover and sure enough, her antennae is set off even more when one of the tapes segues from jazz to what sounds like a high level, governmental conversation surrounding nuclear waste. Curious, they revisit the pub, only to find the barman dead, and later shockingly very much alive when Trevor attends the stranger's funeral.

Strangers who aren't what they seem, Beiderbecke obsession, international conspiracies, menacing agents, those who go from dead to alive and vice versa would normally make for one downright bizarre miniseries but given the craziness that Jill and Trevor faced in the original, amusing, yet far too long Affair, they're much more equipped to handle danger this time around. In doing so, the duo battle threats with rapid fire jokes, problems with puns, and physical confrontations with the reliance upon some new friends such as a rowdy group of senior Scottish bagpipers.

While Affair lost me before the halfway point of the miniseries, I was delighted that I was able to keep up with the intricate nonsensical plot twists and humor far more effectively in Tapes... at least until Plater's second volume ultimately morphed into something that made about as much sense as Howard Hawks' filmed version of Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep.

However, similar to Sleep, you honestly realize that it doesn't much matter since we couldn't care less about the red herrings and mysterious men who follow Trevor and Jill across the pond. And while this would be unacceptable in most mysteries or works of amateur wacky sleuthing, that isn't what Plater's series are about since the main mission of Beiderbecke is to entertain which it does tremendously in a sequel I enjoyed even more than the original, most likely because we've already been through the wild ride once before and realize that it's best to avoid obsessing about plot-holes or logic too much.

Yet another reason it feels more successful along with an enhanced video quality that makes the '87 production feel fresher than the otherwise outstanding '85 one may be due to its brevity of the much shorter 154 minute work as opposed to the original 320 minute opus that perhaps demanded too much intellectually with its wide-ranging subplots, characters and confusion. However, whatever the case may be, the wondrous chemistry of Flynn and Bolam, a truly witty screenplay, and terrific Beiderbecke modeled jazz music to give it a nostalgic feel make this a truly engaging find for those looking for an irresistible "they just don't make 'em like they used to" mix of jazz, screwball comedy, and film noir.

Text ©2009, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com
Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited.

Music Documentary DVD Review: 'Tis Autumn: The Search for Jackie Paris (2005)

Note: Originally Published in Jen's P.O.V. which hosts all Music DVD, CD, and Misc. Reviews.

The Search Arrives on DVD
3/31/09

Download The Music of Jackie Paris
On iTunes

Bookmark this on Delicious

Print Page


Long before the advent of Google searches, Wikipedia, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube-- when someone wanted to learn more about a subject, they had to venture to enormous buildings like libraries and stores which housed big, heavy, dust collecting, paper filled items called books.

And, of course, the mother of all texts--reliability-wise-- was a reference book or an encyclopedia as surely, the authors would have to fact check and one would assume that unlike Wikipedia (which can be updated by anyone), everything would need to be verified... or so you would think.

In 1991 Oscar nominated and Sundance award-winning filmmaker and jazz musician Raymond De Felitta found himself in awe of an unfamiliar voice crooning on a local radio station playing Charles Mingus' Paris in Blue. Simply put, De Felitta was hooked.

Mesmerized by what he’d heard, De Felitta set about tracking down every recording he could of the jazz singer Jackie Paris that resulted in obscure discoveries such as Japanese imports of classic albums including one misfiled under the name of Oscar Peterson. In addition to the the musical side, he also yearned to uncover more about the musician with pitch-perfect phrasing.

The biographical trail of Jackie Paris moved from hot to cool in the 1960s as the British Invasion made jazz a figurative musical dinosaur. And following that all information regarding Paris's life journeyed from cool to frozen in the 1970s when decades later, De Felitta read in a well-respected jazz-centric biographical encyclopedia that stated that Jackie Paris had died in 1977, while only in his early 50s.

Upon this newly acquired information, the filmmaker was content with what De Felitta referred to as his collection of “the handful of CDs and vinyl that comprised the meager but glorious output of Paris's career,” which included his signature rendition of “Skylark”-- his most famous and swoony work. And moreover, essentially to De Felitta the story of Jackie Paris seemed to end there in the all-too familiar jazz ending of death with more of the man's soul being captured on vinyl than in the history books.

However, his fascination with the Italian-American, New Jersey native who grew up entertaining, tap dancing and singing with a veritable who’s who of jazz legends (including Charlie Parker with whom sadly he never recorded any material despite a six month tour) never waned. Likewise, De Felitta became the latest in a long line of fans.



And even later he ascertained that Paris’s allegiance of admirers also had included the loftiest of greats from the era: Peggy Lee, who had arranged an elaborate audition for Jackie Paris with a major label; Lenny Bruce who helped him perfect his stage presence and humor as his opening act in one of the documentary’s most fascinating discoveries as a letter penned by Bruce is read aloud; musician Billy Vera who dubbed Paris “Chet Baker times ten”; later referred to as “the kissy singer” by Sarah Vaughan; as well as being called the personal favorite singer of Ms. Ella Fitzgerald.

Yet while his envious musical resume and near jazz-version of the six degrees of Kevin Bacon which linked him in roughly three degrees or less with every major recording artist in his jazz heyday was epic, De Felitta received the greatest shock when thirteen years following the first time he’d heard Paris’s voice over the speakers of his car, he learned that the “dead” singer was anything but.

When De Felitta happened upon a brief New Yorker magazine notice featuring club dates for the local Jazz Standard in 2004 with the name of Jackie Paris as the main attraction, he was stunned. “Jackie Paris? The one who died in 1977? How is he singing? Via a Ouija board?” De Felitta wondered but taking the chance, he decided to go.

Once he landed inside The Standard, he realized that “Paris was alive -- not exactly well, but still handsome and charismatic. And he was in fine form, singing a set that included three of my favorites...”although, while Jackie Paris politely but crisply dismissed him --which led De Felitta to the realization that "not all was peaceful in Parisland,” when he ventured back again the following evening, Paris started to warm up. Much to his amazement, Jackie Paris spoke to him in earnest between sets wherein he confessed that “he was terminally ill” and that therefore, this was probably his final gig.

In response, De Felitta went into overdrive blending together both the roles of fan and filmmaker and wanting to record it as a legacy “to bring the world's attention [to] the singer whose work I'd found so compellingly beautiful.” To this end, “working with borrowed video equipment,” he spent seven weeks with Paris before the man passed away on June 14 of the same year.

However, what started as a “tribute film,” filled with reminisces, interviews, and other accounts from both Paris himself along with others with whom he’s played, lived and loved whose phone numbers and addresses the musician graciously offered the filmmaker soon became a bit more of a mystery as De Felitta changed the approach from an introduction to one that took a more analytical stance.

Dedicating more energy to his new thesis of why Jackie Paris had become as the film's tag-line described “the greatest singer you've never heard,” De Felitta went to unprecedented lengths to address just why the man was always on the brink of stardom but repeatedly fell into obscurity.



Although he never really arrives at a set conclusion, several possible reasons are given in this fascinating piece of musical documentary portraiture which serves up the usual suspects as well as a decidedly different side to the man we’re consistently faced with throughout. Admirably he takes Jackie at his word and never probed him directly even though he had evidence to the contrary about some issues with which the man was less than forthcoming.

Yet, meanwhile De Felitta introduces us to two very different women who were both at one point Mrs. Jackie Paris, along with relatives, a denied son, etc. as we’re faced with tales of ego, temper, deep-rooted family dysfunction (in the form of a devastating account of his brother and abusive father), along with questions of whether refusing mafia support of his career or slugging the wrong club owner who was most likely "connected" always kept him from the top.

Overall, this routinely makes for a mesmerizing film that evolves much like an improvised jazz riff throughout its changes in tempo where some are successful with only a few rough patches in editing as we remain a bit foggy about some of the facts like we’d had a sax blaring too close to our eardrum for a bit.

However, the one issue that remains a subtext that's only vaguely questioned by De Felitta in his voice over narration at the end when quoting Orson Welles is just how much we need to know about artists to dig their work. And, likewise, whether or not the “search” for Jackie Paris was really a mystery in the end if he was happily living under the radar, definitely bitter about wasted potential, missed opportunities, and lack of money but essentially okay in his New York life.



This is especially the case since—while I’m incredibly grateful for De Felitta’s passion, compassion, and integrity in introducing a wonderful overlooked talent to a new generation—ultimately, I feel nearly as confused as I was near the beginning and still have just as many questions about Paris as I had from the middle of the picture to when the final credits began to roll.

This being said, the intent and style shown by De Felitta is warm and inviting. And it's what carries us through the work, despite the mysterious head-scratching footage we’re sometimes shown with contradictory interviews and a few loose ends that seem like they were left abandoned on the floor of the cutting room such as the discussion of a “wife?” who died of cancer and then talk of a divorce enters in the same sentence and a few interviewees aren’t identified at all. Yet this is all easy to overlook as soon as Jackie Paris’s astounding voice fills the soundtrack and when you couple this with the exquisite care he took towards his subject, De Felitta’s ‘Tis Autumn is a great find for jazz fans and documentary lovers alike.

Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival, De Felitta’s Search marks his strongest work since I first discovered his overlooked, Sundance Audience Award winning sleeper Two Family House which is not only a personal indie favorite—but much like this film—a highly personal work for the director and one in which his passion is so infectious that I selected it without hesitation for inclusion in a local film series I ran in our community.

And similarly--just like House had people nodding along to the music in their seats—‘Tis Autumn will definitely make you want to rush out and track down the music you can find by the musician… if, that is, there’s still any left in print here in the United States. So in other words, our “musical” Search for Jackie Paris continues.

TV on DVD: The Beiderbecke Affair (1985)

If William Powell & Myrna Loy Had a Son

And Cary Grant & Katharine Hepburn Had a Daughter,
Chances Are They'd Be "Trevor & Jill"
From this Delightful '80s British Screwball Mystery

Now on DVD

Although he has been involved with fellow teacher Jill Swinburne (Barbara Flynn), whom he complains at times treats him "like a sex object" by flipping a coin with his ex-fiance to see who can call dibs, woodshop teacher Trevor Chaplin (James Bolam) mostly prefers to keep a low profile blaring jazz into both ear drums via classic studio headphones.

When an alluringly beguiling blonde shows up at his door under the pretense that she's a mail order catalog saleswoman raising money for a Cub Scout's football (er, soccer to us Yanks) team, he tries to give her the traditional Jehovah's Witness-like brush off but suddenly decides to order an extremely rare coveted collectible set of '20s jazz musician Bix Beiderbecke LPs, being that it's for the kids.

After the wrong records are delivered, he and Jill become novice sleuths, wisecracking in the same spirit of Hepburn and Grant and Powell and Loy as they discover the phone number given on his receipt leads them to a crematorium and the business headquarters doesn't exist but when the curious two take it a step further by trying to track down the scouts, the coppers get involved.

Dominic Jephcott is marvelous as the department's "token graduate policeman," a.k.a. a required police officer with a B.A. degree who annoys his colleagues and incessantly tapes his hypotheses in a tape recorder, referring to all parties and events involved as "subjects A, B, and C," as well as listing the goal of each as though it were all a scientific experiment.

When Trevor and Jill stumble into a much greater mystery involving black market swag kept in a church basement and possible government and/or police corruption, they align themselves with others involved as the situations get much quirkier and the jokes become faster. And soon enough-- as though we were in one of Raymond Chandler's novels that became far too complicated possibly from too much booze (in Chandler's case)-- we discover we're less intrigued by the mystery and much more fascinated in watching the characters interact with each other in this delightfully comedic spin on mysteries which originally was produced for British television in the '80s.

Followed by two sequels-- aptly named The Beiderbecke Tapes and The Beiderbecke Connection, luckily The Beiderbecke Affair makes its way to our shores in a nice box set from our friends at Acorn Media-- a.k.a. my consistent go-to company for the best alternatives to horrific American programming like The Biggest Loser.

Despite this and-- as in the recent superlative release of The Last Detective-- subtitles unfortunately weren't provided in the box set and admittedly Beiderbecke itself is very dated. Likewise, it looks as though the 4x3 aspect ratio of the video footage hasn't ever been retouched-- making its transfer to DVD quality a bit unimpressive as you have to turn the volume exceedingly loud to hear the dialogue which becomes annoying when the otherwise spirited and upbeat Beiderbecke inspired jazz soundtrack by Frank Ricotti blasts from the television speakers to punctuate the action like a Woody Allen film.

Despite the flaws in poor sound and less than crystal color, the quality of the finished product is unmatched in its intelligence, humor, and escapist approximately 300 minute running time that gives viewers the perfect way to unwind after a hard day's work. This is especially true considering that brainy creator Alan Plater (Oliver's Travels, The Last of the Blonde Bombshells, A Very British Coup, Dalziel and Pascoe) dealt humorously with issues that resonate now more than ever today including teachers getting in trouble for sharing political convictions, school budgetary constraints, tax problems and wasteful government spending, and Jill's then quite unpopular quest to save the planet and support conservation.

Additionally, although it falls under the category of mystery-- it's much more laugh-based than that with a delightful old fashioned tinge to its dialogue and refreshingly unglamorous and relatable, natural actors who manage to convince us that they are playing themselves.

A fun series with great Dixie styled jazz music and just one of many films by Plater that involve his love of jazz-- while The Beiderbecke Affair is released here in the states from Acorn on January 27, I can only hope that eventually its sequels will also find their way to DVD.

Or, to quote Jill's favorite film Casablanca as she does throughout, once you get in The Beirderbecke gang, you realize this is going to be "the beginning of a beautiful friendship" indeed.