Kattiera Nana I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Juana what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Isbel A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

tavm Just found out on this site that the man who portrays Stephen Foster here was the voice of the Prince in Disney's Sleeping Beauty and the singing voice of Freddie in Warner Bros.' My Fair Lady. I recognized two names in the cast credits: Louise Beavers, who I knew from Imitation of Life, portrays another Mammy role, the kind that she became known for and Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer (credited as Carl Dean Switzer) who portrays a different Freddie here (his character works at the same accounting office Foster works). Everyone else drew a blank though I also found out Rex Allan, who guests here in blackface, was also a narrator in films like the original movie versions of The Incredible Journey and Charlotte's Web. Mostly enjoyable musical despite the blackface number near the end that I just referred to. For that reason, more sensitive souls should proceed with caution. Made before the civil rights era came into full bloom.

brinchatt I found a DVD of "I Dream Of Jeanie" in the $1.00 bin at Wal-Mart. When I saw that it was the "story of Stephen Foster", being a musician and music educator, I had to see it. I had no idea what year it was made for it did not say on the cover, just that it was a remake of 1939's "Sewanee River". Bill Shirley's portrayal of the composer is sometimes painful, sometimes laughable. The man has NO testosterone and is a wimp all the way through! I have a difficult time believing Stephen Foster thought music publishers were doing him a favor by publishing his songs...without paying him for them! In addition to that ridiculous notion, there is a nearly 20 minute segment of Ray Middleton and his black-faced "Christy Minstrels" performing Stephen Foster's songs that was difficult to watch, to say the least. I can hardly believe anyone would consider this movie appropriate to resurrect in our current time. It is an embarrassment and should remain forgotten. Fortunately, Stephen Foster's songs will NEVER be forgotten....also, Eileen Christy's portrayal of Jeanie was certainly the highest point in this lowest point of Hollywood history.

Bobs-9 I also watched the DVD that resurrected this forgotten film. The minstrel show scene aside (and that was not considered particularly hateful by white society in 1952), the racism isn't any more offensive than anything you might see in "Gone with the Wind." Ray Middleton is fun to watch as an egotistical hambone of a showman, but he is not the hero of this story. This film's real crime is to make the film's subject, songwriter Stephen Foster, the most unappealing, weak-willed, limp dishrag of a person ever to have a film centered around him, and there was no compensating spark of personality, wit, or nobility to counterbalance that impression. There was a sense of romance about him, in a wan, hopeless, tear-in-the-eye Pierrot sort of way. But really – he was portrayed as such a sad sack human doormat that you couldn't even feel sorry for him. I found it altogether puzzling.

Ralph Michael Stein Veteran director and producer Allan Dwan, whose huge string of films includes both the utterly forgettable and the recurrently shown (for example, John Wayne in "Sands of Iwo Jima") tried his hand at a big musical with "I Dream of Jeanie." Harnessing a lead cast of singers with little past film experience and, as it turned out, virtually no future, he spun a fictional and in no small part offensive story about the great American songwriter, Stephen Foster.Bill Shirley is the young, lovestruck Foster whose kindness to slaves includes giving the money saved for an engagement ring to pay the hospital cost for an injured little black boy. His intended is Inez McDowell (Muriel Lawrence) whose pesky younger sister, Jeanie (Eileen Christy), is slowly realizing she's in love with the nearly impecunious song-smith. Foster is in love with Inez who is revolted by the composer's Number 1 on the Levee Hit Parade Tune, "O Susannah." Enter minstrel Edwin P.Christy (Ray Middleton) to help launch the profit-making phase of Foster's career.This is, by the musical-film standards of the early Fifties, a big production. The sets are lavish in that special Hollywood way that portrayed fakes with all the trimmings. The singers aren't half bad and the Foster songs are almost impossible to ruin.But this is also a literal whitewash of the antebellum South. The biggest number features black-face for all on stage, an historical anomaly and a contemporary piece of unthinking racism. Were these portrayals of blacks anywhere near reality, the abolitionists would be rightly condemned for interfering with so beneficent an institution."I Dream of Jeanie" apparently sank into the studio's vault with barely a death whisper. Now revived by Alpha Video for a mere $4.99 it's a period piece with charming songs and repulsive sentimentalizing about the victims of America's great crime, slavery.This was what Hollywood was putting out two years before Brown v. Board of Education. Must have warmed the hearts of some moviegoers who wore their bed linen to the theater.