Tonight's penultimate Wellington FilmSoc outing of the year was the splendid and quite bonkers King of Jazz (1930) in glorious, bizarre two-strip Technicolor - a highly innovative film process that could portray red and green moderately well but couldn't cope with the colour blue. (This is a full nine years before colour pioneers Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, remember). Which makes this extravaganza of George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue - written originally for the Paul Whiteman Orchestra featured in the film - even more ambitious. And while it might not seem credible, this sequence involving a giant piano big enough to contain the entire orchestra is by no means the most overblown spectacle the film contains.
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