In the entire catalog of Louisiana cinema – films made here, movies set here, etc – you’re likely to find more obscure titles than known ones, at least the farther you go back in time. For example, Nutriaman (Terror in the Swamp), a roughly made but essential independent film from the pre-Hollywood South days of the 1980s, is only available on second-hand VHS tapes and scratchy YouTube uploads. Some, as recent as the early 2000s (before Katrina), like the crazy Happy Here and Now, you’ll have to settle for low-resolution DVDs and streaming. Without Google, Wikipedia, IMDB, and informed obsessives, these movies would indeed go forgotten.
But the beat goes on and, much like a fiery heart, local cinephiles are always open to making discoveries.
Over a decade ago, when the social media site Twitter was… Twitter, famed film critic Roger Ebert had made note about upcoming screenings of a modern silent movie known simply as Louis, as in Armstrong. To be accompanied by live music, Louis – about a young Satchmo in early 1900s New Orleans – would screen as part of a limited roadshow presentation, with only a handful of cities included. And none of them in Louisiana.
How absurd, I thought.
I spent every year since trying to find any additional information on this movie. I took to message boards, I emailed producers and distributors, I took phone calls, and did everything under the sun, to no success. Frustrating, indeed. Why was a contemporary and fantastical story about THE New Orleans jazz legend not available in New Orleans? In Louisiana? At all!?
There have been many films made about Louis Armstrong, including a personal favorite, the archival documentary Little Satchmo, which I highly recommend for its revelatory and passionate nature. But still… I WANTED Louis.
Thankfully, a crack in the wall presented itself this year, when a West Coast tour (of course, nowhere near our city) of the film was announced. Exhausted from targeting the filmmakers, I turned to a Hail Mary source: eBay. And, sure enough, private preview DVDs – meant for critics only – were for sale.
Naturally, I leapt at the purchase and pressed play once it arrived in the mail. My long cinematic search was over.
And so, here we are. Published on August 4th, Louis Armstrong’s birthday, is the following review of the movie that was never meant to be found, and rarely, if ever, shown where it was set. The harder they come, the harder they fall, I suppose. Whatever will become of the flick is up to its owners, but dear readers, know that somewhere in the world, movies like Louis are indeed alive and wanting to be screened:
In turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans, music wasn’t just heard; it was lived. It was partied. It was loved. Is it still? Of course. Always. But, in the 1900s French Quarter-set Louis, the life and love of music was dirty and dangerous. Burlesque was one thing, brothels another, and political power was seething underneath it all. The city, or rather the famous part of it, is shown as a place of evil and whimsy. And sometimes, when these elements criss-cross, the whimsy is what’s remembered and told throughout time.
But the evil and the ugliness linger.
What can be done?
Louis, the modern-made silent film from wealthy heir and director Dan Pritzker, takes the historical and musical biopic genre and twists it with a fairy tale that alternates between grunge and grace. About the early childhood of Louis Armstrong, seen here as a scrappy kid selling coal out of the back of a riding wagon, the movie dreams up heroes and villains, slapsticks and screwballs, and a love for music that’s found by serendipity through a store window. Once little Louis spots a trumpet for sale behind a glass window, he knows what he wants his destiny to become. And it’s beautiful how his fellow paupers give him a helping hand to achieve who he is and what he can be.
Jackie Earle Haley, who once played the vigilante Rorschach in Zack Snyder’s movie Watchmen, takes on the role of a creepy and bothersome regional overlord and politician who favors and seeks to control a local sex worker and her baby, in both a ploy to keep his child out of wedlock a secret and maintain a false affair with the lovely lady in distress. Haley is predictably game in portraying a man of such wrongdoing, and so is the movie. His small figure, cut to imitate Charlie Chaplin’s famous Tramp character, confuses in contrast with the bad guy he is. In one particularly shocking sequence, where he makes a move to murder someone, Haley gives the movements and hesitations some life by way of careful weight and stalking, not to mention exaggerated facial expressions – a key to the best silent movie acting.
Surprisingly shot by cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, Louis makes use of its red light nature and nightlife atmosphere very well, which only heightens moments where things slow down and become full of genuine and kindly light and color. This movie, which isn’t presented in black & white, does feature light and colors that, whilst sometimes dimmed just enough to almost look grey, do provide emotional importance to more dark and macabre tones. The lady in distress frequents the solitude of a cemetery from time to time, making for some wonderful (and ironic for those who don’t get New Orleans) bits of bliss.
A gripe of mine, when it comes to modern silent films, is that they often aren’t shot like their old counterparts. Louis has nice visuals, but only a handful are framed and composed in a manner expected. And, in some places, the music isn’t exactly synced well with the actions on screen, perhaps because it was meant for live score accompaniment. I’m not sure, but it’s possible that Pritzker was in over his head a little when it came to the more technical parts of the craft.
Everything else about Louis is adorable and bursting with lively attitudes. Again, the good vs evil story is picture-perfect, making this humble viewer cheer for our little Louis to fight and win the day – for the lady, for himself, and for all of history. 3.5/5
Bill Arceneaux has been writing about movies in Hollywood South since 2011. He’s a voting member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association and has a newsletter blog called Moviegoing with Bill. Follow him on Letterboxd and Bluesky.
