FILM CHRONICLE
97
of the dramatic construction of current films. What tends to give one of
them its life is not some unified action, the working out of a sensed
Order of things; it is the dynamic of personalities exhibiting themselves
in a dramatic void. We are allowed to feed upon these personalities,
upon their suffering hearts, upon their extraordinary charms or quirks
of person.
The star system specializes in prefabricating the dramatic essential,
in endowing spe:cial personalities with a reality for audiences outside the
bounds of any specific film. "Robert Taylor loves Greta Garbo" trans–
cends the reality of the drama of
Camille. Anchors Aweigh
depends upon
familiarity with the attributes of one of these Personalities, for it derives
its pep from playing with this on the bias: Sinatra is given the role of a
sailor anxious to learn how to make himself attractive to girls! "You'll
just have to do the best with what you've got," his buddy remarks. There
is also a sequence in which this sailor encounters Iturbi, who plays him–
self in the film; he takes Iturbi to be a piano tuner who'd like to be a
pianist, and encourages him to keep plugging (we know who he really is) ;
lturbi compliments
him
on having a rather nice voice (we know the
sailor to be
acted by
Sinatra). A strange game of in and out of context.
When Hollywood offers us up an historical character, the essential
is again the illusion of intimacy. In its efforts to afford us this, Holly–
wood is apt to pluck a character abruptly out of an historical context,
with grotesque result. Recall that passage in
Wilson
where a montage of
headlines announcing the eruption of World War I is followed by a shot
of Wilson twiddling plaintively upon the piano a duet he and his wife
used to sing: he is missing her. The sudden shift of perspective is accom–
plished not knowingly but naively. The return and the return again to
glut upon the exposed person of the hero, when not, as here, grotesque,
tends to become simply monotonous. In the same way, the close-ups
which current films insert incessantly, come to appear to wear again and
again the same expression. This impression of fatuous grimacing, in space,
is provided in a new degree by Oscar Levant in
Rhapsody in Blue.
Levant is here set down in the middle of a story he knows has no rela–
tion to the real life of Gershwin; set down, too, in tPe middle of a
strangely assorted company-some, the actual people who participated
in
his life; some, impersonations of actual people; some, entirely mythical
characters. In this shifting illusory world, he goes through the motions of
exhibiting to us his intimacy with Georgie, the fun they had together, the
turmoil he endured for his sake. Strange motions, unreal contortions.
BARBARA DEMING
