What Price Jazz: A weird, rhyming assault on the ears and eyes

Is this thing worth your time?

Honestly? Only if you like your early talkies served with a side of bizarre, rhyming dialogue and zero logical consistency. If you want a straightforward story, run away. If you want to see a man with an axe try to stop a jazz band from playing, you’ve found your holy grail.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of What Price Jazz (1934) through its definitive frames.

It starts with this preacher, Mr. Blue Laws, who sounds exactly like you’d expect—cranky and obsessed with misery. He teams up with Mr. Public Opinion, and the whole thing is written in rhyme. Yes, the entire script. It’s exhausting after three minutes but somehow weirdly hypnotic.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of What Price Jazz (1934) through its definitive frames.

Ted Fio Rito and his orchestra are just trying to play some music, but they get interrupted by these two fun-killers. The scene where they bust in with a shotgun is actually kind of tense, or it would be if they weren't shouting poetry at each other. Why are they rhyming? It feels like a nursery rhyme gone to hell.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of What Price Jazz (1934) through its definitive frames.

Then everyone runs to the woods. It's that classic 1930s transition where the set just stops being a club and starts being a bunch of plywood trees. Ted gives a pep talk, the songstress shows up, and suddenly we are doing the blues. The tone shift is massive. One minute it's a moral crusade, the next it's a cabaret show in the forest.

Cinematic perspective: Exploring the visual vocabulary of What Price Jazz (1934) through its definitive frames.

Weird details that stuck with me

• The way they handle that axe. It’s not threatening; it’s like a prop they forgot they were holding.
• The dancing girls appearing in the woods. Where did they change? How did they find the orchestra in the middle of nowhere? Don't ask.
• The look on Mr. Public Opinion’s face when the music starts. He goes from 'stern judge' to 'mildly annoyed bystander' in about two seconds.

It’s not as polished or clever as The Cocoanuts, which was doing the whole musical comedy thing with way more style. This feels like someone had a weird dream about censorship and decided to film it before they woke up.

The ending is a total shrug. The 'death sentence' gets handed down, but nobody seems to care because they’re too busy doing a final strut. It’s the most 1930s way to end a movie—just throw some glitter on it and hope the audience forgets the plot holes. 🎷

It’s short. It’s weird. It’s barely a movie, really. It’s more of a musical tantrum captured on film. Watch it for the confusion, not the art.