Synopsis

In 1915 San Francisco, classically trained violinist Roger Grant turns away from his family's expectations to lead a jazz band. Renamed Alexander, he and singer Stella Kirby build a national career while their volatile romance is tested by ambition, war, and separation. Years later, a landmark Carnegie Hall concert offers Alexander a chance to prove that popular music belongs on the grandest stage.

Factoids & Trivia

• The film takes its title from Irving Berlin's 1911 song, which helped make ragtime a national craze, although music historians do not consider the composition strictly ragtime.

• Darryl F. Zanuck originally wanted to make a film based on Berlin's life. Berlin rejected a direct biography, so Zanuck proposed a fictional story incorporating elements of Berlin's musical career and the experiences of figures such as Paul Whiteman and George Gershwin.

• Irving Berlin supplied a large selection of songs from different periods of his career, including "Blue Skies," "Easter Parade," "Heat Wave," "A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody," and "What'll I Do."

• The production was prepared over roughly two years and filmed during the first months of 1938. Its reported cost was about $2 million, making it one of Twentieth Century-Fox's major productions of the period.

• Alfred Newman won the Academy Award for Music (Scoring) for the film. Berlin's song "Now It Can Be Told" was also nominated for Best Original Song.

• The musical traces the changing public status of popular music, moving from ragtime and early jazz toward the more formally accepted concert swing of the 1930s.

• After release, the picture became the subject of a plagiarism lawsuit involving an unpublished novel. The legal dispute examined similarities between the book and elements of the film's story.