Syncopation works along two lines. On the one hand, there’s the love story between Kit and Johnny, which is a mess as it surges from first one thing then another. Starting with the childhood friendship between Kit and Reggie, we suddenly realize that Reggie is gone from the story and find Kit married to Paul. Soon after that, she’s getting along famously with Johnny. While the story is bumping along these changes, there's also a shift in focus. Kit emerges early on as the musical center of the film, climaxing with the courtroom scene, but she is then relegated to a role as cheerleader for Johnny for the rest of the movie. And among all these surges and shifts, odd moments interrupt the story. Ella, for example, breaks into song in court, Kit and Johnny fall in love in seconds while reading Walt Whitman, and Ella dies melodramatically as her son Reggie arrives in Chicago on a parade float. None of these events is central to the story. And continuity elements plague the narrative line, too. At the end of the film, Kit’s father suddenly turns up in the audience in New York to celebrate Johnny’s successful appearance at a club there, though we haven’t seen or heard from him for a long time in the film. The Kit/Johnny story line is a turbulent muddle.
But the other main thrust of the film, the story of jazz, works much better. From the earliest scenes in Africa, Dieterle shows us feet moving in a syncopated rhythm, the film’s idée fixe definition of jazz. After Africa, we see the same shot of feet moving to this rhythm in a New Orleans church, then in the Chicago courtroom, and finally in the film’s concluding club scene. The jazz through-line also interprets the meaning of the genre. The suffering of the enslaved incubates the music, and when Reggie tries to blow the star down for the recently-widowed Kit, we see the significance of jazz has expanded to express individual suffering. As the music morphs into the Swing 40s, it’s a music that simply expresses something real and primal. Syncopation shows us that jazz always retains a connection to the essential heart. The movie makes an additional point as we watch Reggie’s failure to master Bach and Johnny’s throwing off the confines of orchestral jazz -- jazz is an individual expression that occurs at an inspired moment, an analog to the restless American poetry of Walt Whitman, and not a performance of notes on paper. The film also anchors the birth of jazz in the African-American community and dramatizes the music’s crossover into the white community when Reggie teaches Johnny how to swing his trumpet. As messy as the love story is, the movie’s treatment of jazz makes many important observations. And it has a fun conclusion of several important early-40s musicians edited together as a performance.
Syncopation is a worthwhile interpretation of jazz as a quintessential American expression with a focus on the individual. Unfortunately, Dieterle is unable to merge this line of thought with a coherent narrative, and the film suffers for it. It’s worth watching Syncopation for the musical thought, but it’s mostly a failure as cinema.
