LIGHT ON THE MOVIES
Hamilton, James S.
Light on the movies America's Grandeur Belongs To People By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER Rhapsody in Blue—One of the boasts George Gershwin jokingly makes a couple of times in this screen biography is...
...Blood On The Sun—James Cagney and Sylvia Sidney get the best of the Japanese in their homeland before Pearl Harbor...
...J. Carroll Naish is the real star of a touching and significant story, surprisingly well assisted by Dorothy Lamour...
...Family...
...The trouble, of course, is that Gershwin started being successful very young, and success kept piling up—no struggle, no drama, except perhaps that unpic-turable turmoil within the artist that drives him to creation and comes out in the form of his work...
...Family) * * * A Handy Guide To The Best Current Films A Medal for Benny.—A tragi-comedy by John Steinbeck about the exploitation of war heroes, laid among the paisa-ttos of southern California...
...Even a triumphal parade gets monotonous after it has been passing a given point interminably...
...This picture hasn't...
...The Cagney esprit keeps an ordinary spy melodrama lively and interesting in a juvenile way...
...The Gershwin music is the treat of the show, presented handsomely, generously and effectively, all the way from Swanee through Porgy and Bess...
...THE truest aspects of the Gershwin one has heard about come out in his absorption in his music, which even made him delighted to play for hours at parties, and in his Paris days, in which there is a particularly pleasant little episode with Ravel...
...It is all pleasant, and some of it very funny...
...He saw some sort of goal, not too definitely but urgently, and nothing deflected him from it for long...
...Somehow they have managed to make the picture seem one of the longest pictures in the world...
...Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, and Anne Revere (a new and refreshing movie mother...
...Joseph Cotten, Ginger Rogers, and Shirley Temple lead an all-round good cast...
...One thing that makes the film so long is the time wasted on trying to inject a love interest...
...Mature...
...A story of uninterrupted success can, of course, have its drama, and there is a hint at one in Gershwin's: would all the easy Tin Pan Alley business, the succession of Broadway hits, smother his talent and stunt his promise...
...Family...
...The other Gershwins, especially his brother Ira, are a nice and devoted family...
...Some attempt to dramatize this kind of conflict is made with a music publisher (Charles Coburn being Max Dreyfus of Harms, Inc., and presumably representing Mammon) and an old German teacher (Albert Basserman) who keeps trying to hold before his pupil the ideal of becoming the new musical voice of America...
...Robert Alda looks enough like Gershwin to be plausible as a still figure, but in action he doesn't seem to have much more than a faint inkling of what it is all about...
...The point, obviously, is that his music meant more to him, than any woman could, and 2 apocryphal ladies are brought in to prove it...
...A most liberal all-Gershwin program...
...Once his Rhapsody goes over (and his dying teacher listens to its first performance, over the radio, in one of movieland's top flights of bathos) he and everyone else knows that he can go on growing as much as in him lies, and toss off popular tunes at the same time with no danger at all to his highest aims...
...Light on the movies America's Grandeur Belongs To People By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER Rhapsody in Blue—One of the boasts George Gershwin jokingly makes a couple of times in this screen biography is that his hand contained the longest life line in the world...
...But most concerts have interludes and intermissions where you can draw breath and maybe stretch your legs...
...The Clock—New York City plays genial host to a very nice romance between a soldier and a working girl...
...Family) I'll Be Seeing You—A war-shocked soldier's readjustment to civilian life, warmly and sympathetically presented...
...But Gershwin wasn't really troubled by any such problem...
...Family) National Velvet—A warm and enjoyable story of an English family and how an enchanting little girl's dream of winning the big steeplechase came true without hurting her common sense...
...Family) A Royal Scandal—Handsome comedy of Catherine of Russia and one of her minor amours, spun out too long, with Tallulah Bankhead and Charles Coburn in grand comic vein...
Vol. 9 • July 1945 • No. 31
