--- title: "Alexander's Ragtime Band" year: 1938 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/alexanders-ragtime-band" fi1m_score: 70 critics_reviews: 3 published: "2026-09-19T23:47:51.802065+00:00" updated: "2026-09-19T23:48:30.082373+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Alexander's Ragtime Band (1938) Directed by Henry King · 1h 46m · MPA NR · Music, Drama, Romance **Fi1m score: 70** · Critics: 3 of 6 reviews so far *In a sentence:* Alice Faye sings, Ethel Merman shouts, and twenty-five years go by on a calendar between the choruses > Henry King’s musical is a delivery system for more than two dozen Irving Berlin songs, and as such it is a pleasure. The story between them is thin, the history careless, and Alice Faye and Ethel Merman carry most of the rest. ## Synopsis San Francisco, 1911. Roger Grant (Tyrone Power) is a Nob Hill violinist, trained for the concert platform by Prof. Heinrich (Jean Hersholt) and fussed over by his Aunt Sophie (Helen Westley). He would rather play ragtime, so he takes a scratch band down to a Barbary Coast saloon for an audition. Stella Kirby (Alice Faye), a singer with a new song in her bag and a dress Roger dislikes on sight, has come for the same job. The band picks up her sheet music by mistake, plays ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band’, and the crowd will not let them stop. Roger becomes Alexander, Stella becomes his singer, and Charlie Dwyer (Don Ameche), the pianist who writes their tunes, falls for her while she and Roger quarrel about who is in charge. The saloon is the start; Roger means it to be Broadway. ## Review *Alexander’s Ragtime Band* is not really a film about a bandleader. It is 106 minutes built to hold as many Irving Berlin songs as a film could carry in 1938, more than two dozen by most counts, hung on a plot that starts in a Barbary Coast saloon in 1911 and marches on through the century. The studio’s own tagline called it an American cavalcade, and that is honest: the songs are the parade and the people are there to carry them. Taken on those terms it is a good evening. Asked to be a drama it is thin, and asked to be history it is careless. The songs are staged with more care than anything else. Alfred Newman first gives us the title number as a five-piece racket in a smoky room, then lets it grow, as the band does, into full brass and strings, so that by the time we hear it again we know how far these people have come without being told. Alice Faye has a low, unhurried voice with no showing off in it, and when she sits by Don Ameche’s piano to sing ‘Now It Can Be Told’, a new song Berlin wrote for the picture, we were moved more than the flimsy scene around it had any right to expect. She simply sings the words and looks at him. That is the film’s best minute, and it is a quiet one. Ethel Merman arrives late, as Jerry Allen, and from then on the film has two engines. She sings ‘Heat Wave’ straight at the back wall in a dress Gwen Wakeling has cut to leave nothing to chance, and the screen seems slightly too small for her. Jack Haley, as the drummer Davey Lane, gets the comic numbers and the reaction shots, and he is better value than his billing suggests: a small, anxious man who knows exactly when to look worried. The trouble is the man in the middle. Tyrone Power is handsome and photographs like a statue, and Roger Grant asks nothing more of him than that. He holds the violin as an accessory and leads the band by standing in front of it. Kathryn Scola and Lamar Trotti have written him one quality, stubbornness, and every scene with Stella is the same quarrel in a different hat. Ameche, as the pianist who writes the songs and loves the singer, does the wistful third wheel with grace, and the picture is warmer whenever he is at the keyboard. Then there is the calendar. Barbara McLean bridges whole decades with a headline and a dissolve, and nobody ages by a day. Songs turn up ten and twenty years before Berlin wrote them; ‘Heat Wave’, from 1933, is belted out in a stretch the film has placed well before that. Most critics have waved this through on the grounds that the tunes are the point. We found it nagged. A film that calls itself a cavalcade has promised us a passage of time, and this one keeps forgetting what year it is. The craft around the gaps is solid Fox work. J. Peverell Marley lights the saloon with lamplight and cigarette smoke, so the early scenes have some grain and heat, and then lights the later stages flat and bright, which is correct for a revue and duller to look at. Wakeling’s costumes do the time-keeping the faces will not: Stella’s feathers and hobble skirt give way to bobs and bias-cut satin, and it is the clothes that tell us the war has come and gone. McLean, to her credit, mostly lets the songs run whole. Henry King keeps the camera still and the singers centred, which is modest and right. Against [*Top Hat*](https://film.one/film/top-hat), made three years earlier from the same songbook, this has no dancing to speak of and no lightness in the book. It is a singers’ film, and it has two singers worth the price. Watch it as a concert with interruptions. The interruptions are short, and Faye and Merman will be back before you have finished your tea. *Fi1m score 70, published 19 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (3) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (85/100, inferred): The review praises the film as a grand filmusical that stirs and thrills with its medley of over 30 Berlin pieces and subtle screenplay integration of the songs. It singles out Henry King's direction with humor and sentiment, along with strong turns from the cast including Ethel Merman. [Read](https://variety.com/1937/film/reviews/alexander-s-ragtime-band-1200411722/) - **The New York Times**, Frank S. Nugent (80/100, inferred): The critic calls it the best musical show of the year thanks to its lavish production and the 26 timeless Irving Berlin tunes delivered by strong performers. They single out the music's remarkably age-resistant quality as a key strength that carries the film. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1938/08/06/archives/the-screen-the-roxy-plays-host-to-alexanders-ragtime-band-a.html) - **The New Yorker**, Russell Maloney (50/100, inferred): The critic notes that the 26 revived Irving Berlin tunes are reason enough to see the film but finds the plot persistently irritating with sloppy anachronisms that undermine it as a period piece. They credit Ethel Merman and Jack Haley as bright spots amid the flaws. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1938/08/13/1938-08-13-047-tny-cards-000040805) ## Details - **Director:** Henry King - **Director:** Henry King - **Screenplay:** Lamar Trotti, Kathryn Scola - **Cinematography:** J. Peverell Marley - **Editor:** Barbara McLean - **Music:** Irving Berlin, Alfred Newman - **Costume design:** Gwen Wakeling - **Cast:** Tyrone Power as Alexander - Roger Grant; Alice Faye as Stella Kirby; Don Ameche as Charlie Dwyer; Ethel Merman as Jerry Allen; Jack Haley as Davey Lane; Jean Hersholt as Prof. Heinrich; Helen Westley as Aunt Sophie; John Carradine as Speakeasy Doorman - **Runtime:** 1h 46m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 24 May 1938 - **Genres:** Music, Drama, Romance - **Budget:** $2 million - **Box office:** $4 million ## Where to watch in the US Not streaming, renting or buying in the US at the last check. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1939: Best Film Editing (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Production Design (nominated); Best Story (nominated); Best Score, Adaptation or Treatment (won) ## If you liked this - *Top Hat* (1935), Fi1m 87: Berlin’s songs with Astaire and Rogers dancing them; the lightness this one lacks — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/top-hat.md) - *Yankee Doodle Dandy* (1942), Fi1m 78: Another American songbook marched through the decades, with Cagney doing the marching — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/yankee-doodle-dandy.md) - *Blue Skies* (1946): Berlin’s catalogue again, Crosby and Astaire, and a plot equally beside the point - *The Glenn Miller Story* (1954): A bandleader’s rise told straight, with James Stewart and the real arrangements - *The Young Girls of Rochefort* (1967): Demy’s French musical about performers who keep missing each other, in colour --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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