Film Chronicle
A JUBILANT STORY
Rhapsody in Blue: The Jubilant Story of Geor:.ge Gershwin.
Note
the dispatch with which the subtitle mutes the note of the blues. Holly–
wood would not have any dismayed. Much is in a name. Under another
name, the blues can be given play in comfort.
Where are the blues? This is a success story, complete with final
sunburst inevitably reserved for the demise of genius. Poor boy from
the Bronx, unappreciated genius, goes "up like an elevator" to become
the idol simultaneously of Broadway and Carnegie Hall. "A career you
only read about in story books!" Where are the blues?
"Poppa knew," George pleads with Julie. "Success is not enough."
George wants Julie. But Julie insists, as Christine had before her: Your
destiny lies straight ahead; you don't need anyone or anything. Gershwin
moves on from triumph to triumph, more and more successful, more
and more lost to himself. His friend Dreyfus has a talk with him: Why
isn't he happy? Gershwin (who stands before a self-portrait he's been
trying for months to complete, but which "keeps running away from"
him)
finally cries out in anguish: "Part of me is lost somewhere!" Drey–
fus agrees with Poppa: It should've been Julie. "Way down deep,"
Gershwin sums up, "I'm a family man without a family." Julie per–
severes in believing that Gershwin does not
n~ed
anyone. But when at
length, racing on, he ascends to the verge of a breakdown, she tele–
phones. "Oh, Julie !" he gasps, "Meet me! ... Make up for the lost
years! ... Hurry, darling,
hurry!"
She is coming. He flings aside drap–
eries; sunlight floods the room; he sits at the piano and plays, and a
singer who is there sings. "Love walked in and drove the shadows
away ... I had found a world completely new!" It is too late. He is a
sick man... .
What is the source of this sad story? Critics agree that it is not
Gershwin's life. Is this then simply Hollywood's version of the isolation
of the artist in bourgeois society, of his nostalgia, in exile, for what
Thomas Mann has called "the bliss of the commonplace"? But this pat–
tern of an ascent up the ladder of success that ends in estrangement,
turns up again and again on our screens; and the hero or heroine is by
no means invariably the Artist. The source is some dim sense of a
general
plight. The concrete terms in which
it
is expressed in film after
