Round Midnight (1986) on Netflix
Dale Turner, a saxophonist, leaves New York in 1959 to play the jazz clubs of Paris. There a struggling graphic designer, Francis, becomes his friend and tries to keep him from drinking.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.4/106,516 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Dale Turner, a tenor saxophonist, plays the clubs of New York in 1959 and drinks heavily. After visiting a fellow musician who is ill, he leaves for Paris to work at a jazz club there. In Paris, Buttercup, his friend and business manager, settles him into a hotel, where Ace, a vibraphone player, stops him in the hallway and slips a small bottle into his jacket. At the Blue Note the band rises as he walks onstage, and he plays sitting down. Outside in the rain, Francis, a French graphic designer who makes film posters and lives with his daughter Berangere, listens through a basement window because he cannot afford the cover. When Dale asks him for a beer, the two begin a friendship, and Francis sets out to keep the saxophonist away from drink.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Round Midnight (1986)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Tavernier defied the film studio by insisting that real-life jazz tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon play the role of Turner. Gordon, who himself played with Bud Powell in Paris in the early 1960s, also helped to revise and rewrite the script.
- The protagonist jazzman Dale Turner is based on a composite of the real-life jazz legends Lester Young and Bud Powell, and the film is drawn directly from Dance of the Infidels, the memoir by French author Francis Paudras, who befriended Powell in Paris and on whom the character Francis was based.
