Swanee River: the Story of Stephen C. Foster (1939)

Oh my god. This is a biopic of the composer Stephen Foster, who wrote "Oh, Susanna!", "Swanee River", "Camptown Races" and a bunch of other songs. It stars Don Ameche, who is great! Andrea Leeds is not given anything to do except love Stephen Foster. Swanee River also stars... Al Jolson as EP Christy (of Christy's Minstrels fame). This makes the film truly unhinged as a historical object. There is an insane amount of blackface in this movie, and Swanee River seems to think it is laudable that Foster took music from the enslaved Black folks he knew and made good money off of it. This is sort of a crazy movie. And its ending is completely bananas.

Swanee River covers over the likely fact that Stephen Foster killed himself. It also invents a very strange alcoholism plot that feels completely fake onscreen, even if the man actually was a hard drinker. E.P. Christy, as it turns out, also committed suicide two years before Foster did. But Swanee River would have us believe that Christy (in blackface, of course) rushed from the theatre to Foster's bedside and then back to the performance, where he performed Foster's latest tune, "Old Folks at Home", to a crowd who sang along (they apparently memorize the lyrics spontaneously). Then the film – while Jolson and the crown are still singing – cuts to images from the American South, including a man picking cotton, a plantation mansion, and an old Black woman sitting outside a cottage. This is how the movie ends. It's unhinged.

Anyway you can watch this technicolor non-masterpiece on YouTube if you so desire.