The Eddy Duchin Story

Eddy Duchin was a bandleader known for his piano in New York in the thirties. The film tells his rise, his marriage to Marjorie, the years he spent in the Navy during the war and the relationship he had to build with his son on returning. As long as Duchin is on stage everything looks well; off it the losses come one after another, and past a certain point the man struggles to sit down at the piano. Tyrone Power plays Duchin; the piano is played by Carmen Cavallaro. Directed by George Sidney, the film is a standard Hollywood biography and takes liberties with the facts, but the music part is genuine. Kim Novak was at the start of her career. Duchin died of leukaemia at forty-one, and the film uses that not as an incident midway but as its centre of gravity. The production was shot in colour for a wide screen; how New York nightlife looked at the time is what lasts longest in it.