The Glenn Miller Story

Audience Reviews

View More

Steve D @RT35616104 06/25/2023 Not worthy of Stewart. See more Leaburn O @RT35452347 01/16/2021 The story seems to be that there barely is a story. If you like his music just play an album and save some time you'd lose watching this rubbish. Here's the abridged film, musician not having a great career, marries a woman he's liked for a while, she helps him save some money, he creates his own band and becomes successful. He then dies in a plane crash. That is literally it. The wife is played by the most wooden actress imaginable, marrying her would lead to an early grave through sheer boredom alone. James Stewart plays James Stewart masquerading as Glenn Miller. It's a really bad film. The music is lovely as you might expect. See more 11/14/2020 I love Glen Miller music and Jimmy Stewart is my favorite actor so this movie made for a perfect combination of music, storytelling and American history all wrapped up into one wonderful movie! See more 06/12/2020 A solid biopic with tones of 1950s nostalgia. It does have a very bad sense of time and feels a bit rushed. Still a really good film though. Total classic See more 06/12/2020 Great movie though at times it is a bit bizarrely sugary and Hollywood-ized (Miller's wife takes approx. 20 seconds into the song to recognize "Little Brown Jug," a song that had already been a massive hit for him for years, as just one example). But that is also a sign of the times in America, as well as the fact that the movie was filmed less than ten years after the end of WWII when so many US lives had been sacrificed to defeat Hitler. You have to love the music, which is the real star, and Jimmy Stewart. Always worth a watch! See more robert r @RobertRiley 04/04/2020 When the Wikipedia article about your subject is structured and paced better than the contents of your movie, you've got an issue. I'm sure I've brought this up before, but there's really only two approaches to writing biopics. The first is the birth-to-death approach, detailing every significant event in every major phase of the subject's life (i.e. Gandhi, Vice, etc.) The other is the more focused approach, selecting a very specific period of time or deed in a subject's life and telling a story about that particular instance (i.e. Lincoln, The King's Speech, etc.) Either approach can work at any given time, but it all usually depends on the subject. They try the blow-by-blow method here, and it really doesn't pass the smell test. I'm not saying that Glenn Miller's entire life isn't worthy of a good film being made out of it. It just feels like these filmmakers didn't care to tell a good story and instead wanted to remind everyone of the songs that the man worked on. I kid you not, a quarter of this movie's runtime is simply watching a band play the tunes arranged by Glenn Miller. That's not a story, that's a Time Life infomercial. Yes, the last third of this movie works better than the first two, but it's only because something of genuine consequence happens. And, by the time it even does, the film's over anyway. As much as I love seeing Jimmy Stewart stammer and squawk around in his goofy, yet winsome Jimmy Stewart way, this didn't end up working for me. See more Read all reviews

The Glenn Miller Story

My Rating

Read More Read Less WRITE A REVIEW EDIT REVIEW POST RATING