The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

A decent Danny Kaye vehicle. The humor is delicate and the music is memorable. Kaye isn't as funny as Gary Cooper was in the original -- "Ball of Fire", also directed by Howard Hawks. I know that's hard to believe but the character of Professor Hobart Frisbee is supposed to be pawky, professionally precise, and socially clumsy. Kaye is his usual stuttering self, whereas Cooper WAS the character. And Virginia Mayo, delicious as she is, doesn't have the sassy talent of Barbara Stanwyk, who could throw away laugh lines and still get smiles. Mayo seems earnest as all get out.Still, nice technicolor photography, almost lurid. And the musicians do their thing, which is pretty good, in fact. How could they not? Tommy Dorsey, Satchmo, Lionel Hampton, Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell, and a supporting role for Benny Goodman. I don't know if you have to realize what a musical technician Goodman was to appreciate the scene in which, as a fuddy-duddy musicologist, he is invited to take a crack at playing swing music. I think there's a recording of his playing Mozart's clarinet quintet too. Many of those once-household names, I imagine, have already disappeared from popular consciousness. A good thing they didn't hire Charlie Parker or somebody. It wouldn't have a prayer of striking a resonant chord.

Gregg Toland, the great director of photography of CITIZEN KANE, WUTHERING HEIGHTS and THE GRAPES OF WRATH was said to be the highest paid D.P. in America, as well as perhaps the finest B&W lighting cameraman the major Hollywood studio system ever produced. Under long- term contract to producer Sam Goldwyn, he died at the early age of forty-four in 1948, the same year this film was made for his boss. A SONG IS BORN is one of his few Technicolor films. For a man of visual genius, the photography here is surprisingly routine—flatly lit and uninspired compared to the more adventurous color work being done about the same time by Harold Rosson and Joe Rutenberg at the MGM studios. Perhaps Toland was too ill at the time to pay much attention to this project, no more motivated to do his best than was the film's director, the usually brilliant Howard Hawks who had directed BALL OF FIRE, an earlier version of the same story. The film is also flawed by garish makeup for the gorgeous Virginia Mayo. On the plus side, jazz lovers get a few brief moments of pleasure: a rare chance to hear America's prime band leaders of the time—Armstrong, Dorsey, Goodman, Hampton, Louis Armstrong—jamming together with sidemen Mel Powell and Louie Bellson. (Fletcher Henderson probably did the band arrangements) There is absolutely no comparison between this insipidly silly remake and the charming earlier B&W version which starred the incomparable Barbara Stanwyck as the bad/good girl and Gary Cooper in the role Danny Kaye assays with only moderate success.

Honey Swanson finds out that her gangster boyfriend is under investigation by the police, she hides out at a musical research institute run by Professor Hobart Frisbee. The institute is run purely by bachelors, and the arrival of Honey turns heads in more ways than one, especially the affable Frisbee.Howard Hawks remakes his 1941 film Ball of Fire, only where that film had the main protagonists learning about slang, A Song Is Born is a musical based around delightful swing and jazz. As many of the other users here have pointed out, this is a must for music fans, the music is quite simply brilliant, boasting the talents of Louis Armstrong, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, Mel Powell and Lionel Hampton, it's no small wonder that the film is an immense foot tapper from the top draw.However, not much is said as regards the other good stuff available in the picture, for instance those who have an aversion to Danny Kaye need not worry here, he has been reigned in by Hawks to give a very subtle comedy performance, yes, a little trade mark pratfall here and there exists, but it's a highly effective and charming turn from him. Rarely mentioned, also, is the sultry and pleasing turn from Viriginia Mayo, she looks fab and some of her scenes are a joy to observe, witness her first sequence at the institute, where the old boys get hot under the collar as she whirls her sexuality, I know how they feel, because I was feeling it too!This is a smashing film, one that had me grinning all the way through, a big foot tapper with heart and smiles, well that will do for me."Ever since that woman crossed this threshold, a prairie fire of orgiastic events has swept thru this house" 8/10

Long, dull remake of BALL OF FIRE by the same director (Howard Hawks) just 7 years after the original Gary Cooper/Barbara Stanwyck starrer. Why? Danny Kaye mercifully doesn't do his accent schtick patter songs here but he doesn't do anything else either. Plus he can't act. Virginia Mayo does better and tries to inject some life into this DOA turkey. The only time the films has a spark of life is from the music.Such major musicians as Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Lionel Hampton, Mel Powell, Tommy Dorsey, Louie Bellson, Charlie Barnet, and supporting actors like Esther Dale, Mary Field, and Hugh Herbert spark some interest, but the story is too familiar, the ending is excruciatingly drawn out, and the story is almost a scene for scene remake of the better, earlier film.WHY?