The Glenn Miller Story

A musician's biography set in America. Glenn Miller plays trombone. In the early thirties he struggles to find work and keeps pawning his instrument. He has a sound in his head. He knows how a band should sound and cannot get it out. He marries. He telephones Helen after years and proposes directly; they knew each other at university. From there the film is a story of searching. Touring, buses, cheap hotels and bands that fall apart. The sound he wants is a matter of arrangement. The clarinet carrying the melody with the saxophones underneath. He finds it by accident. The trumpeter splits his lip and the part is given to a clarinet. From that moment the band works. The narrative passes over success quickly. Records, radio, ballrooms and money. The war comes. Miller joins the army and forms a service band. His idea is this: the soldiers will be played dance music, not marches. What the narrative is interested in is not fame but insistence: its idea is that the man settled for nothing until he found the sound in his head, and that he put it above his marriage. In December 1944 Miller disappears over the Channel in an aircraft. It was never found. The film does not show it. The narrative ends on a radio broadcast. The music is real. Former members of the band played on the recordings and Louis Armstrong and Gene Krupa appear as themselves. James Stewart learned to work the trombone; the fingering is real, the sound is not. This is one of Stewart's collaborations with Anthony Mann outside the westerns. James Stewart, June Allyson, Harry Morgan and Charles Drake are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes classic Hollywood biography and big band music. Who it is not for: anyone looking for realism; the narrative flattens the life and gives the marriage without a single friction.