Your enjoyment of 1942's Syncopation will likely be tied to how much you enjoy the jazz music that provides the pulse of the film. Director William Dieterle (The Devil and Daniel Webster) and cinematographer J. Roy Hunt (I Walked with a Zombie) craft a stylish-looking, swiftly paced trip through fictionalized jazz history that's an utter blast as long as you don't focus too intently on the story.
The German-born Dieterle adds some unusual flourishes right off the bat, such as opening credits that don't detail anyone's specific job apart from noting which "collaborators" appear on-camera and off-camera. Then, once the film starts, we are taken to Africa, where a tribe is captured by traders and carried aboard a slave ship to the New World. It's a pointed choice to begin a jazz story like this, but it is also pretty much the film's only explicit acknowledgement of racism and the power differential between whites and blacks in America. In this narrative, they pretty much get along from here on out.
After that opening vignette, we quickly flash-forward to turn-of-the 20th-century New Orleans, where two different children's lives are being profoundly affected by the power of music. The first is Reggie Tearborn (played by an uncredited Jack Thompson as a child, then later by Todd Duncan, the original stage Porgy in Porgy and Bess). Reggie is a natural trumpeter whose housekeeper mother Ella (Jessie Grayson) wants him to get a good education, like white folks, but whose talent lies outside of reading notes on a page.
The second child, who becomes more primary as the story progresses, is Ella's charge: Kit Latimer (Peggy McIntyre as a youngster, Bonita Granville when she's grown), who already has the knack for New Orleans-style blues piano before she's out of pigtails. She is the daughter of gregarious but down-on-his-luck businessman George (Adolphe Menjou), who is forced to move everyone to Chicago to right the family's finances. Young Reggie stays behind to cut his teeth with a professional band, fronted by King Jeffers (Rex Stewart, Duke Ellington's cornetist).
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