User reviews

Probably because the songs of Stephen C. Foster were in the public domain and therefore cost penny pinching Herbert J. Yates not a dime, Yates decided to do a minstrel show musical comedy with the life of Stephen C. Foster to hang the story on.

The songs of Stephen Foster retain their beauty to this day, sad though that they do reflect the times they were written in. Since the famous minstrel star and entrepreneur E.P. Christy was the one who popularized Foster's work, to not have a minstrel show in the story would be historically way inaccurate.

But this film isn't anything close to the story of Foster's life. For all the inaccuracies of that film, 20th Century Fox's Swanee River which starred Don Ameche as Foster and Al Jolson as E.P. Christy is far more accurate.

The thin plot seems to be borrowed a bit from Bing Crosby's Mississippi where Bing is courting Gail Patrick, but it's really Joan Bennett who's crushing out on him. Here William Shirley as Foster is courting Muriel Lawrence, but it's really Eileen Christy as, guess who, Jeanie who's giving him the come hither glance.

One thing I will say, the Foster songs are given magnificent vocal treatment. The women both sing well and Shirley most famous for his behind the camera vocalizing in Sleeping Beauty and My Fair Lady has a terrific tenor voice. Ray Middleton however, most famous as the original Frank Butler in Annie Get Your Gun, gives the best performance in the film as the egotistical E.P. Christy.

The rest of the cast, acting wise, is pretty weak. The plot is razor thin and in 1952 there was no excuse for calling a young black kid, Chitlin. Rex Allen, Republic's last cowboy B picture star makes a guest appearance here in blackface as a minstrel and that sure didn't help his career in any way.

I'd stick with the Ameche-Jolson version of the Stephen Collins Foster story.

Just found out on this site that the man who portrays Stephen Foster here was the voice of the Prince in Disney's Sleeping Beauty and the singing voice of Freddie in Warner Bros.' My Fair Lady. I recognized two names in the cast credits: Louise Beavers, who I knew from Imitation of Life, portrays another Mammy role, the kind that she became known for and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (credited as Carl Dean Switzer) who portrays a different Freddie here (his character works at the same accounting office Foster works). Everyone else drew a blank though I also found out Rex Allan, who guests here in blackface, was also a narrator in films like the original movie versions of The Incredible Journey and Charlotte's Web. Mostly enjoyable musical despite the blackface number near the end that I just referred to. For that reason, more sensitive souls should proceed with caution. Made before the civil rights era came into full bloom.

On the surface, this is a poor man's SWANEE RIVER (1939) – the big-budget 20th Century Fox biopic of celebrated American songwriter Stephen Foster (played in that film by Don Ameche); actually, there had been an even earlier film version of the same events entitled HARMONY LANE (1935) and starring Douglass Montgomery!

This Republic production is, nevertheless, a colorful diversion – with a third-rate cast scoring quite nicely with their enthusiastic performances, and especially Ray Middleton (as famous minstrel man, E. P. Christy – portrayed in SWANEE RIVER by Al Jolson, and whom Middleton appears to be mimicking throughout), Muriel Lawrence (as Foster's snobbish fiancée) and Eileen Christy (as her earthier younger sister, the Jeanie of the title). However, the actor who portrays Foster here – Bill Shirley – is rather weak and fails to do real justice to the troubled, short-lived composer! Rotund character actor Percy Helton has a nice supporting role as Foster's sarcastic employer during his day job as a book-keeper.

The film starts off amiably enough, but the second half is mostly bogged down by an uninterrupted succession of musical numbers – although Middleton's forceful, slightly campy portrayal of the flamboyant Christy does a lot to enliven proceedings nevertheless. Prolific Hollywood veteran Dwan dabbled in practically every genre; this, in fact, wasn't his first musical – having earlier made the 1939 version of THE THREE MUSKETEERS (also known as THE SINGING MUSKETEER, and whose recently-released DVD edition I need to pick up, especially now that I've just acquired a number of his work via budget releases from VCI). For the record, three cast members from the film – Middleton, Shirley and Christy – were re-united with their director here for next year's SWEETHEARTS ON PARADE.

An interesting film, despite the slightly overblown sentimentality and romance. Great music and ballads. Disturbing slave-era imagery, and even more disturbing, but historically accurate black face performances in the portrayal of Christy's Minstrels.

The one thing I would like to know is how accurate are the portrayals of E.P. Christy and Stephen Foster? Christy's Minstrels was a black face troupe, and their performances are among the more disquieting moments in the film...you want to enjoy the music...but can't due to the irreconcilable racist undertones.

All in all it's an enjoyable film, but be cautioned that your kids might ask "why are those people wearing black paint?" an honest question and worthy of in-depth dialog to help "foster" respect for all people in upcoming generations.

It feels like a film from the early thirties, surprisingly it's from '52. I bought it for the performance of "Beautiful Dreamer."

I also watched the DVD that resurrected this forgotten film. The minstrel show scene aside (and that was not considered particularly hateful by white society in 1952), the racism isn't any more offensive than anything you might see in "Gone with the Wind." Ray Middleton is fun to watch as an egotistical hambone of a showman, but he is not the hero of this story. This film's real crime is to make the film's subject, songwriter Stephen Foster, the most unappealing, weak-willed, limp dishrag of a person ever to have a film centered around him, and there was no compensating spark of personality, wit, or nobility to counterbalance that impression. There was a sense of romance about him, in a wan, hopeless, tear-in-the-eye Pierrot sort of way. But really – he was portrayed as such a sad sack human doormat that you couldn't even feel sorry for him. I found it altogether puzzling.

Stephen Foster lived a pretty interesting, and tragic, life, but this production, ambitious by Republic standards, reduces that life to sitcom level. Played by a game, sweet-voiced Bill Shirley, he's so besotted with nasty Muriel Lawrence that he utterly ignores how much nicer her sister, Eileen Christy, is, and how besotted she is with him. That's the main drama, and along the way we get a fair amount of minstrelsy, including a big minstrel show led by Ray Middleton, as E. P. Christy. Middleton's terrific, taller than anybody else and a great, rich-voiced ham, though you may have to look away when he dons blackface. According to this movie, Foster lived happily ever after once he decided which sister he loved; actually he lived to 38, and his final years were heartbreaking. The music's nicely presented, anyway, and Allen Dwan, whose directing career goes from about 1910 into the '60s, keeps it moving. Note: The copy viewable on Amazon Prime is in black and white, which is a shame, because the color version is a good look at fading '50s Trucolor.

Veteran director and producer Allan Dwan, whose huge string of films includes both the utterly forgettable and the recurrently shown (for example, John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima") tried his hand at a big musical with "I Dream of Jeanie." Harnessing a lead cast of singers with little past film experience and, as it turned out, virtually no future, he spun a fictional and in no small part offensive story about the great American songwriter, Stephen Foster.

Bill Shirley is the young, lovestruck Foster whose kindness to slaves includes giving the money saved for an engagement ring to pay the hospital cost for an injured little black boy. His intended is Inez McDowell (Muriel Lawrence) whose pesky younger sister, Jeanie (Eileen Christy), is slowly realizing she's in love with the nearly impecunious song-smith. Foster is in love with Inez who is revolted by the composer's Number 1 on the Levee Hit Parade Tune, "O Susannah." Enter minstrel Edwin P.Christy (Ray Middleton) to help launch the profit-making phase of Foster's career.

This is, by the musical-film standards of the early Fifties, a big production. The sets are lavish in that special Hollywood way that portrayed fakes with all the trimmings. The singers aren't half bad and the Foster songs are almost impossible to ruin.

But this is also a literal whitewash of the antebellum South. The biggest number features black-face for all on stage, an historical anomaly and a contemporary piece of unthinking racism. Were these portrayals of blacks anywhere near reality, the abolitionists would be rightly condemned for interfering with so beneficent an institution.

"I Dream of Jeanie" apparently sank into the studio's vault with barely a death whisper. Now revived by Alpha Video for a mere $4.99 it's a period piece with charming songs and repulsive sentimentalizing about the victims of America's great crime, slavery.

This was what Hollywood was putting out two years before Brown v. Board of Education. Must have warmed the hearts of some moviegoers who wore their bed linen to the theater.

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.

The great American songwriter Stephen Foster (born 1826, died 1864 during the Civil War) wrote many enduring American songs, and you can hear 16 of them here, rather beautifully sung, including "Oh! Susanna," "My Old Kentucky Home," "Old Folks at Home," "Beautiful Dreamer," "Camptown Races," "Old Black Joe," and "I Dream of Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair." In the context of his times, Foster did much to dignify African-Americans and draw attention to the indignities to which they were subjected, yet the film offers a minstrel show, complete with blackface and racist jokes, and even though it portrays a period in American history when such things were accepted with glee, it makes you blink in astonishment that the film was made in 1952. Even though there are a couple attempts to show the kind of misery Foster observed and apparently deplored, the movie can only be seen as a whitewashed history lesson in American racism. There are also a couple of attempts to show the miserable side of Foster's life, but the end result is a typical Hollywood romanticized musical that doesn't come close to others of the 1950s and '60s (such as "Show Boat"). The leads in the film-Bill Shirley as Foster, Ray Middleton as the minstrel show star, and Muriel Lawrence and Eileen Christy (playing the Jeanie of the title) as two singing sisters-are all talented but made few other films of distinction. Favorite line, uttered by Foster to the family of a sick Negro child: "I learned everything I know about music from you people."

Just picked up this film for a buck at National Wholesale Liquidators, and after watching it, I feel like I got ripped-off.

I don't know that I've seen a worse film than this. Honestly. And I would never write a negative review of a film had I not such enormous respect for the subject matter, that is, Stephen Foster and his music.

First, what is it? It's a musical biography? Yeah, lot's of tunes by Foster then interspersed here and there are these pseudo-Broadway-Jerome Kern-type numbers that reek more than the Mississippi delta. I mean, somebody got PAID to write this drivel? Secondly, the REAL story of Foster is a fascinating one. Why not even come CLOSE to it? Thirdly, what did they have on the great Ray Middleton to get him to do this film? Pictures of him with small boys?? With communists? What a waste of a great talent.

So, friends of Foster, and the truth, and good entertainment, be afraid... be very, very, afraid.

No, this ain't "The Stephen Foster Story." That's in Bardstown, Ky, a place that Stephen Foster never saw in his short and tragic life. Foster's real life was tragic and depressing and might make an interesting "All That Jazz" style film. But this ain't it. This is a razzle dazzle musical comedy with the music of Foster as an added plus.

This is the kind of musical film that used to be common but are now long gone. It's an attempt by Republic Picures producer Herbert J. Yates to cash in on the success of MGM's 1951 hit "Showboat" but with the lowest budget possible. In view of that the film manages to look much more lush than it really is. Of course the use of the Foster song catalog didn't cost Repbulic anything. Surprisingly the color quality of the print the DVD I viewed was mastered from held up surprisingly well considering the obvious neglect it was subject to.

The production has the feel of the composer bio pics MGM used to churn out during this era. You could easily recast the film in your imagination with Metro contract players from that time.

Director Alan Dwan obviously had the expertise to make a cheap programmer like this look better than its budget should have allowed. The pic is almost set bound with few exteriors and limited interiors. But Dwan keeps the pace moving at a brisk clip with the musical numbers occurring so rapidly you have little time to think about the silliness of the plot.The songs have been given arrangements more suited to the 1950s and are not the reverential treatments that might be expected. They are instead bright Hollywood musical comedy numbers. These numbers were staged by associates trained by Nick Castle (I guess Republic couldn't afford Mr. Castle himself) and are brisk and lively. There has obviously been an attempt to integrate some of the songs into the action but if some of the cues and other proceedings seem laughable, well go ahead and laugh. It's all in fun, so enjoy it for what it is.

The cast perform competently and seem to be enjoying themselves which helps to make the film more enjoyable to the viewer. Of course Ray Middleton, the original Broadway Frank Butler opposite Ethel Merman in "Annie Get Your Gun" almost steals the proceedings with his bombastic performance.

The film was of course made in a more politically incorrect era. But it is not much more incorrect than ...say.."Holiday Inn'.

The film is a perversely delightful relic of a by gone era and well worth the dollar the DVD sells for in many areas.

...but god knows it ain't good. Between the fictionalized life story of popular songwriter Stephen Foster (complete with the happy ending he never had), it's rife with racism, a long stretch of the Christy Minstrels in blackface, annoying performances and a lack of focus - a lot of it just tracks over to E. P. Christie, who here assumes responsibility for promoting Foster and getting him paid. The blackface and racism make this hard to watch in particular, however - it's sort of accurate, but the emphasis, just a few years before blackface stopped being accepted in musical performances, is disturbing.

Also, why is there such indecision over whether or not this is a full blown musical? Initially it's pretty much depicting music in relation to Foster and company, but by the end it goes full tilt musical.

This lightweight update of "Swanee River" (1939) is also in color, but lacks Al Jolson. "I Dream of Jeanie (with the Light Brown Hair)" is not only the title, but also introduces perky Eileen Christy (as Jeanie). She is the love interest of great American songwriter Stephen Foster (Bill Shirley), but he thinks he likes sister Muriel Lawrence (as Inez). Minstrel showman Ray Middleton (as Edwin P. Christy) is the man who helps turn Mr. Foster's songs into hits. Home studio Republic's Rex Allen joins in a partially embarrassing "black-face" sequence, by which time the movie has lost sight of its flimsy plot. It's tuneful, though.

*** I Dream of Jeanie (6/4/52) Allan Dwan ~ Bill Shirley, Ray Middleton, Eileen Christy, Rex Allen

This is purportedly the story of Stephen Foster but bears no resemblance to his real life. It is more than 80% pure fiction and its only saving grace is a load of his music and some very good performances of it. Foster is portrayed as a wimp who is so besotted with a girl who is so obviously a self-centered brat that he swears that he will give up writing music if she will marry him (she doesn't). Many of the facts of Foster's life are portrayed here, his association with Christy, his lack of copyrights, his not being paid royalties, etc., but the basic story is pure Hollywood. Watch it for the good old music but beware, there is a long black face Minstrel show which will jolt many who grew up in recent years. Tacky by today's overly sensitive standards the minstrel show was still alive and well in the 1940s and into the 50s. Foster died, penniless and alone, at an early age but his music lives on and is well represented in this film.