The Jazzman of Alcatraz (1962)

D. Quentin Hofstetter
B&W

White corporate America’s ability to either sanitise or remake everything in its own image always astounds me. Here we get a double jackpot, with a bleached and cleaned up version not just of the hardest nastiest prison in the United States; but much more than that, the absolute whitest version of jazz music human eyes and ears have ever had the misfortune to endure.

The altogether much too clean-cut and distinctly unblemished Robert Vaughan plays an incarcerated jazz musician. It’s hinted that he’s the victim of a miscarriage of justice and I can believe that, as a more honest, decent, grown up boy-scout boring, sickeningly saintly character one couldn’t possibly meet. Whilst enjoying a stint in Alcatraz he starts to write a piece in his head based on the sounds of life, laughter and love drifting across the bay from San Francisco. This isn’t a bad idea for a story, in the right hands those sounds of freedom would surely be both an inspiration and an exquisite torture. However the not bad idea at the centre is decidedly hamstrung by the fact that this is a film which wants to do nothing to upset middle America. And things which might upset middle America clearly include both jazz and Alcatraz.

I actually went to Alcatraz recently and if ever a film fails to capture the grim bleakness of it, it's ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’. There are moments when the director and designer seem to trying to make it look grim, but not wanting to scare off the punters means it mostly comes across as homely. It’s like a hotel that you would never want to stay in again, but still actually a three star hotel. There's a nice autumnal light to the cellblock, helpful and articulate fellow prisoners and guards who are not only courteous but actually encouraging. In fact the version in the film seems a great place to pursue an artistic endeavour, as a writer myself I almost wanted to check in there.

More alarmingly though, Robert Vaughan is the nicest, sweetest, most upstanding – non-drinking, non-smoking (absolutely no drugs!) – jazz musician to ever grace the silver screen. Even his prison uniform looks freshly starched and laundered each morning. Given the actual history of jazz music, he is painfully white and so his casting feels amazingly anachronistic in what is a contemporary film. Remember that unfortunate scene in ‘Back to the Future’ where Marty McFly inadvertently inspired Chuck Berry? Well imagine that cultural appropriation spread out to eighty three minutes of length and you have ‘The Jazzman of Alcatraz’.

Except not quite.

Vaughan broods about his quite nice cellblock playing jazzman (playing rather than being, it’s an important distinction), he stares moodily out while composing in his head, but what we get here is nowhere near ‘Johnny B Goode’. It's not really a surprise that after all the inspired looks and beauty struck words he uses to describe his opus, on unveiling it is so lacklustre and insipid that to describe it as elevator music would be far too kind.