Hollywood never did do right by musical performers when it decided to make one the subject of a "biopic." The Eddy Duchin Story continues the time-honored tradition of playing fast and loose with the facts, but at least it has a different tone than so many other films in this genre, opting for a soapish tearjerker approach rather than settling for a standard thin storyline that serves as nothing more than an excuse for presenting musical numbers. Duchin has its share of songs, of course, and they're the highpoints of the film, but much more time is devoted to plot. Unfortunately, that plot is tricked out with plenty of clichés and strung together with terribly trite dialogue; as a result, a potentially interesting story comes across as a series of unconvincing episodes, usually colored with artificially heightened emotions. Under the circumstances, Tyrone Power does as well as can be expected, despite the fact that he's too old for the opening sections of the film, a fact which makes his eager-to-succeed routine discomfortingly pathetic. Kim Novak turns in some surprisingly fine work, and she has a genuine rapport with Power -- something that cannot be said of Victoria Shaw, whose performance is grating and mannered. Duchin is not a bad film -- and it does benefit from some actual on-location shooting in many places, but it's also not terribly involving.