oscar levant: Movies

TiVo Alert: 31 Days of Oscar, Day 4

Wednesday night is devoted to biopics in TCM's "music department,'' and my not-on-DVD pick is Irving Rapper's "Rhapsody in Blue'' starring Robert Alda as George Gershwin (10:30 p.m. EST) which, if you ask me, is much superior to Michael Curtiz' "Night and Day'' with Cary Grant as Cole Porter (at 8). So much for the auteur theory. Both films take enormous biographical liberties with their subjects and have many unintentionally funny lines and scenes. But Monty Woolley's "Miss Otis Regrets'' and Mary Martin delightfully singing a bowlerized version of "My Heart Belongs to Daddy'' aside (both make you grateful it's on DVD), "Night and Day'' (1946) is loaded with dubious musical performances by the likes of Jane Wyman, Eve Arden and Ginny Simms and ugly production numbers in gaudy
Technicolor. "Rhapsody in Blue,'' released a year earlier in black-and-white, features top-notch musical performances by Al Jolson, Hazel Scott, Oscar Levant and Paul Whiteman (all as themselves) and expertly staged dance sequences, plus a lovely "An American in Paris'' montage credited to the elusive James Leicester (who collaborated with Don Siegel on the one in "Casablanca''). Levant, who was a real-life friend of Gershwin and performs the title composition in the tearjerking finale set in an enormous studio mockup of CCNY's long-gone Lewisohn Stadium, had written an unused script, as did Clifford Odets. Fragments of both of them are reputed to have turned up in "Humoresque,'' which also featured acerbic pianist Levant. Besides the cornball script, the movie's main flaw is the inexperienced Alda (Robert's father), who was sort-of making his screen debut as Gershwin (he had shot Busby Berkeley's "Cinderella Jones'' first, but that was held back until after the release of "Cinderella Jones,'' forcing the studio to cut wartime references when it was finally released in 1946). The senior Alda went on to a long career that included the original Broadway production of "Guys and Dolls,'' spaghetti westerns, a long-running radio show (a favorite of mom's) on WOR and an appearance with his son on "M*A*S*H.'' In "Rhapsody in Blue.'' He did have some expert support from Charles Coburn, Albert Basserman, Rosemary DeCamp, the soon-to-be-blacklisted Morris Carnovsky and Herbert Rudley as Ira Gershwin, who has the impossible task of worrying about his brother's headaches for two hours. Only Warners would describe a movie about a man who died at 38 on the poster as "The Jubilant Story of George Gershwin.''


Source: blogs.nypost.com