Singing the praises of Anita O'Day

"Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer" begins with a bang.

An elderly O'Day briefly rehearses a version of "Yesterdays" (an aptly retrospective choice). Cut to a gangbusters montage of album covers and publicity stills from her '40s and '50s prime, with a big band muscling out "Sent for You Yesterday" in the background. Then Bryant Gumbel's voice comes in. "Your personal experiences include rape, abortion, jail, heroin addiction." O'Day cuts him off in a chiding tone. "It's the way it went down, Bryant." Her inflection on "down" -- tough, hip, so matter of fact you want to check your wallet -- is "Non, je ne regrette rien" unplugged.

Well, that was O'Day, who died in November last year, at 87. She more than earned her nickname, "the Jezebel of Jazz." A junkie for 15 years, she gets mentioned in "On the Road," and was once declared legally dead. Robbie Cavolina and Ian McCrudden, the documentary's directors, adore her. When they film O'Day at Santa Anita Race Track, it's for the sake of the name. Forget about the horses.

They've assembled archival material from throughout O'Day's career -- a soundie, kinescopes, concert footage, newspaper clippings, broadcast interviews with Gumbel, Dick Cavett, and Tom Snyder, among others -- and talked to friends and colleagues. Most of all, there are interviews with O'Day, still garrulous and feisty in her 80s, looking like Ethel Kennedy's much wilder, not much older sister.

Inevitably, the movie goes downhill from that flat-out opening, but not too far. It's a good, solid account of a good, solid jazz singer.

The movie's biggest flaw is overselling O'Day. Her very nearly randy duet with Roy Eldridge on "Let Me Off Uptown" in 1941 is a minor classic. Her splendiferously behatted appearance steals Bert Stern's famed documentary about the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival, "Jazz on a Summer's Day." And her Verve sides from the '50s and early '60s hold up well. But to place O'Day in the same league as Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, as several interviewees do and the film implicitly believes, does an injustice to her, them, and the truth. The documentary also can get gimmicky at times, with split screens and overbearing graphics.

Gimmicks and hyperbole aren't necessary, so long as there's O'Day's beaming face to look at -- radiant when young, radiant and wrinkled when old -- and the sound of that sloe-gin voice to savor.

Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.