So declares an embittered Danny Kaye in the emotional climax of 1959's The Five Pennies, the movie biography of the '20s jazzman Red Nichols. In real life, Ernest Loring Nichols was, just as the movie portrays him, a talented brassman and one of the best of his era (if not quite on the level of Bix Beiderbecke or Louis Armstrong). An innovative bandleader, Nichols (1905-1965) was also an early believer in the then-avant-garde concept that hot jazz could be annotated and played by ensembles of all sizes. Most of the major stars of the swing era graduated from Red Nichols bands, including Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, Gene Krupa, Jimmy Dorsey, Tommy Dorsey and Jack Teagarden.
   As early as 1954, in the wake of the incredibly successful Glenn Miller Story of the previous year, Red Nichols and Paramount Pictures were talking about turning the cornetist's story into a movie. Variety announced that Nichols had turned over his entire band library of some 2,500 pieces of music to Paramount, who were beginning to put together the story and the score. By the time The Five Pennies was released in 1959, several similar films had already been made including The Benny Goodman Story (1956), The Eddie Duchin Story (1956) and St. Louis Blues (1958), the only portrayal of a black musician (W. C. Handy).
   The studio scored a major coup when they were able to procure the services of the film's two leading men, Danny Kaye, as Nichols, and Louis Armstrong, as himself. In the story, Armstrong first serves as Nichols's inspiration, then his equal, and, in the very touching last scene, Nichols's benefactor and angel of salvation. In October of 1958, Armstrong was allowed only three days to pre-record all his soundtrack music for the film before he commenced work on MGM's The Beat Generation.
   Any picture with Armstrong was virtually guaranteed some boxoffice, even if Wonder Man Kaye had appeared in a few flops by that time. Kaye is ultimately both the major strength and the weakness of the picture, at least historically: Nichols did most of his bandleading in studios, doing records and radio, in fact he doesn't even talk in most of his surviving broadcasts and films. About the most extroverted thing he ever did was call himself "Red" rather than "Ernest Loring." Nichols had little in common with Kaye's portrayal of a mugging, singing, dancing in-your-face merrymaker, sort of like a New York Jewish equivalent of Armstrong or Louis Prima.
   The picture takes liberties with Nichols' own life story too: unlike the very touching scene where Kaye witnesses the success of former sideman Glenn Miller, while he is old (in his late '30s) and out of work, the real life Nichols never left the music business. The Five Pennies starts off like a traditional movie musical with a backstage story and lots of singing and dancing, but becomes a sick-kid, boy-loses-daughter story: Nichols is shown as loving but neglectful dad. When he doesn't quit the road soon enough, his daughter almost dies from polio and doesn't walk again until the very weepy finale-by which point she has become Tuesday Weld.
   But the numbers are great: everything that Satchmo touches turns to gold, and Kaye's wife, Sylvia Fine, came up with three original numbers: "Follow The Leader," "Lullaby In Ragtime" and the title song. Out-doing Irving Berlin, Fine weaves three melodies on the same harmonic sequence. They are sung contrapuntally by Armstrong, Kaye, Eileen Wilson as the singing voice of leading lady Barbara Bel Geddes, and nine-year-old Susan Gordon as the young Dorothy; those chords are really working overtime. She also supplied special material adaptations of the Dixieland warhorses "The Saints" and "Indiana." Instrumentally, there is a lot of excellent brasswork from both Armstrong and Nichols himself, who plays for Kaye (except in the Russian segment of the "Indiana" montage, in which Mannie Klein supplied klezmer trumpet).
   Even if it gets a little fuzzy on the details, The Five Pennies expertly captures the flavor of a colorful era, has lots of great music, and winds up being a very moving story about a family. As Ms. Fine's lyric states, "this little penny is to love on, and where love is, Heaven is there."