bkoganbing
Although this is a film made on a wafer thin budget by poverty row PRC films Dixie Jamboree has a lot going for it with a cast of some fine character players. With Frances Langford singing some sadly forgettable songs and a cast that includes Fifi D'Orsay, Lionel Talbot, Frank Jenks, Almira Sessions, Eddie Quillan and topped off by Charles Butterworth and Guy Kibbee this is one not to tax the gray cells with plot but sit back and enjoy.Kibbee is the Captain Andy of the showboat Ellabelle and a regular passenger on the boat is Charles Butterworth a snake oil salesman who is sort of a sponsor of the showboat, he gets commercials in for his product during the show. Langford sings for her supper and she's Kibbee's niece and Sessions is her aunt. Eddie Quillan is a sometime trumpet player and full time romantic.Talbot and Jenks are on the lam they pay Kibbee some big bucks for passage to New Orleans. But soon see possibilities in using the showboat for their own nefarious schemes. Then the fun begins.Dixie Jamboree is hardly Showboat, not one song comes close to matching anything Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein,II wrote for that immortal show. But these are players with real personalities that make films stand out.And how often does Eddie Quillan get the girl?
JohnHowardReid
For fans of Frances Langford (like me), this little movie is a real treat. Admittedly, you've also got to put up with Eddie Quillan's way overdone performance as a hexed trumpet player, plus Frank Jenks's hammy, over-expressive rendition as chief offsider for the super-smooth lead gangster, a bad egg played by Lyle Talbot. Talbot is good, but the rest of the cast, featuring Guy Kibbee, Charles Butterworth and Fifi d'Orsay – plus Frances L. of course – is great. Even Christy Cabanne's direction is smart enough and winning enough to cover most of the holes in the paper-thin script. Six songs by Michael Breen and Sam Neumann are on the track, four of them enjoyably rendered by Langford, and one by Fifi d'Orsay. Grapevine's very good quality DVD also includes "The Brementown Musicians" (1935), an excellent cartoon from Ub Iwerks which is presented in its original Cinecolor, which I'm happy to say has not faded and still looks great.
MartinHafer
"Dixie Jamboree" is a film from PRC--a tiny production company that had a long track record of sub-par films...at best. Tiny PRC made a ton of films that are rarely worth your time but fools like me watch them because we are crazy film buffs, I guess! The film is very much like "Showboat"....except "Showboat" was a good play and film. As for "Dixie Jamboree", it features lots of singing--but none of the singing (except for the black singers at the beginning) were any good and none of the songs were any good either. As for the acting, you know a film is in trouble when it relies on Frances Langford and Eddie Quillen! The only potential bright spots were Charles Butterworth and Guy Kibbee--who always provide some goofy support. But even here, they're not even close to being at their best because the material is just very limp. The bottom line is that the film is not terrible---just uniformly poor and dull. Forgettable in every way.PS--You politically correct folks take note--this film WILL offend thanks to its patronizing treatment of the black actors throughout the movie. Typical of the times but still kind of sad.
Larry SLuss
I pulled this movie from the Indianapolis Library soon after the death of Frances Langford. I wanted to remember her and this was the only thing Indianapolis had easily available. Her singing is OK with incidental songs, but that does not justify the time to watch it. Another commentator said it was an hour and a half. My copy is sixty minutes or so. Maybe that's for the better. The whole thing is a bit too stereotyped. The concept of the crooks is a bit much. Kibbee and Butterworth do the thing they do rather well. If you are a fan of those two, then it might be worth while seeing them in one of there last works.
AD
