THE FABULOUS DORSEYS is not fabulous - a B feature with a C-minus script and D-plus dialogue - but the music at least is enjoyable, as I'd expect from a picture starring not one but two big bandleaders.
Laying aside the rickety wooden dialogue and nonexistent love duo, the story is compressed but basically true: poor Irish mining family produces two talented musicians who don't get along, but rise quickly through the band business, start their own outfit, then inevitably break up. As a band nut I'd have liked to see mention of some of the name orchestras of the 20s including the Dorseys - Jean Goldkette? Freddie Rich? - or of Joe Haymes, a forgotten talent who sold Tommy his first band. But that's just me.
Janet Blair (like the brothers a Pennsylvania girl, and one-time vocalist with Hal Kemp's band) just lights up the screen every time we see and hear her, leading us to wonder just what she sees in a stuffed-shouldered cluck like William Lundigan. Other vocal highlights come from ex-JD singers Bob Eberly and Helen O'Connell and TD's then current crooner, Stuart Foster. Instrumental stars Art Tatum, Ray Bauduc and Charlie Barnet add heart to a jam session sequence. Paul Whiteman, gruff, fast-talking and positive, obviously liked playing Paul Whiteman, liaison between fiction and musical reality.
TD and JD are actually OK on screen - they weren't actors but one should not expect them to be. The fault there is with the mawkishly written dialogue that flops out of everyone's mouths. Their real personalities are visible, though toned down: Tommy's natural side-of-the-mouth cockiness, Jimmy's salty dignity of the veteran trouper. (In reality Tommy was profane and given to physical violence; Jimmy was quiet, decent but more than a little bitter, and both had long love-hate relationships with John Barleycorn.)
The real-life Dorseys - their music, their problems, their era - still await a full-dress Hollywood treatment before their names totally fade from the culture. It's easy to imagine, say, Ben Affleck and Ed Burns in the roles of TD and JD, complete with booze, broads, cuss words, flying chairs, and original orchestrations.
(PS: Those commenting about how over-the-top Mom and Pop Dorsey's Irish brogues were should understand that the actors playing them actually were Irish.)
