“Rhapsody in Blue” is an interminable juvenilizing and denaturing of George Gershwin’s person, career, friends, relatives and a period from about 1905 to 1937, which sacrifices biography even more extensively than did “Wilson” to indifferent performances of songs. The movie is two and a half hours and what seems like 5,000 song-choruses long, and during great stretches of it you hardly see Gershwin except for an occasional shot of him listening to somebody sing his songs or a close-up of his hands doing rapid two-finger runs over a grand-piano keyboard. The problem of making music eloquent in a movie is as hard as any I know of, and the music in this comes through effectively only by fits and starts. The finest musical intervals turn up in an occasional spot where the music has been subordinated almost to the status of a background, or where the view of the performer—as in Joan Leslie’s singing of “You’re So Delicious”—remains static, or where the music has been accented rather than destroyed by a violent contrast of action on the screen. For the most part both the image and the music are nullified by being played for maximum effect at the same moment—the most common procedure being to change the screen image as rapidly as the musical image is changed, and obliterating both. The songs are also dulled considerably by performances that are supposedly styled to a period in the twenties or early thirties but are diluted with a pretty, immaculate, lush, modern movie manner of singing, make-up and stage decor, the most destructive element being the hundred-piece Phil Spitalny-like orchestral accompaniment. A number of Gershwin concerts are shown in a conventional way (with mirrors set behind keyboards, players in the orchestra isolated, posed dramatically and lit up like a Hollywood opening), but there is one passage at the end that is likably less ordinary and polished, and almost hysterical. It consists of various nervously changing views of a performance in Lewisohn Stadium, starting directly above the pianist’s hands and moving out over the audience to a mile or so behind the stadium and ending up with a shot from the clouds—the purpose being to show that the composer is in heaven and that his music is a product of the people and for the people and now belongs to them.
The music isn’t the only element in “Rhapsody in Blue” that is diluted in one way or another. Robert Alda, who plays the Gershwin role, is much less virile, eloquent and Jewish than Gershwin, though he looks like Gershwin in one shot—an ingenious close-up of him with his teacher that is angled to make his face long and narrow and to accentuate nose, mouth and cheeks. Alda’s looks, his bland, relaxed manner of acting, and the script’s jolly, worshiping portrait of Gershwin which has him smiling at every other moment of his screen career, make his personality resemble that of a musical-comedy juvenile. The script accents two of his characteristics—his egotism and his hurry to compose everything he had to compose—in a way that makes them seem twice as pleasant to live with as they probably were, and uninteresting as characteristics. His love affairs couldn’t possibly have been as vapid and predictable as the two shown here, though Joan Leslie uses her Most-Popular-Girl-in-the-Senior Class quality in a way that partially redeems one of them. The Jewishness of the Gershwins is made vaguely evident by fearfully playing an occasional Jewish melody in the background and by using for comedy purposes a limited number of Jewish attitudes, some of which are pretty funny. Most of the scenes are written in the standard biographical-movie way, so that each has its joke, each shows the hero scoring one more victory, and each uses the people around Gershwin (who are acted quite well in most cases) as though everything they ever said or did in their lives was concerned in helping, praising or explaining the composer.
One of the better sequences is a Gershwin party with Gershwin and Oscar Levant kidding a two-piano improvisation in a noisy, flashy, convincing party way; following that, there is a nice group-singing of “Bidin’ My Time” that seems just right for the moment and for the tune. Gershwin’s taste in homes is realized with skill in at least three different sets: a modern Hollywood number and another closer to the Grauman era, and an earlier Bauhaus-influenced job, all of them stadium-sized, heavily packed with blocky, homely furniture of which each piece is just barely out of relation to its neighbor. There are a number of good things in the final Hollywood sequence besides Ira Gershwin’s sports jacket with large brass buttons, and the people who play Broadway characters often get a lot of Broadway into the movie.
July 23, 1945