SHAWFAN

Yes, Robert Walker was not a great Jerome Kern and Van Heflin was completely fictional, and yes, the story line was tedious and sappy, but...all those incredible stars in one movie (despite some of the greatest ones like Kally and Astaire and Robeson being left out) in some of the most beautiful songs ever written (some of the greatest ones likewise also left out like "The Way You Look Tonight") just coming at you one after the other in sumptuous settings: what an unrepeatable and irreproducible gem of a movie! And the fact that Kern missed the Lusitania by oversleeping was replaced by a more dramatic plot line that had him trying unsuccessfully to catch that boat (We're all so glad he didn't!) and follow Frohman to England I thought was an actual dramatic improvement on what really happened.

But you know, to me the most telling aspect of the whole movie which reflected so perfectly American mores and prejudices of the day was the fact that nowhere in the movie was the fact alluded to that Jerome Kern was---Jewish! And to this day none of your 40 other reviewers betrayed an awareness of this fact. The Jewish movie studio heads like Louis B. Mayer and Arthur Freed were not about to compromise the success of their glorious effort by turning any portion of the movie-going public off. But that thick American anti-Semitism of the day was about to receive its rebuke just a few seasons later in Gregory Peck's Gentlemen's Agreement.

An incredible video has just been released by National Public Television on the Jewish heritage in the American popular musical. And astonishing as it is to realize that with the exception of George M. Cohan and Victor Herbert (Irish), Cole Porter (Christian denomination?) and Andrew Lloyd Weber (?) all the great Broadway composers and lyricists from Jerome Kern to Leonard Bernstein to Stephen Sondheim have indeed been Jewish and Jerome Kern was one of the greatest of them all. But this movie did its best to keep all that a secret (and succeeded.)

There's something very Greek about this compelling story as one generation visits its sins upon its offspring. Though some of your reviewers pointed out that the Rafe/Peppard character does not appear in the original novel for the life of me I can't figure out what the story would have been like without him. The development of his character and his gradual integration into his father's affection and respect is certainly one of the film's mainstays and very attractive features. If there was no Rafe character in the novel then I can only conclude that the movie script writers improved the story greatly.

I found the emotional relations between the different pairs of characters endlessly fascinating and gripping: Mitchum/Parker and their icy 18 years of separation; Theron/Rafe and their finding each other as brothers; Parker/Hamilton as the over-protective mama and her boy; Theron/Libby and their sensitive and beautifully scripted love scenes followed by their heartbreaking estrangement as Theron chooses his mother over his true love; Rafe/Libby and their equally brilliantly scripted encounters one after the other from Rafe's quiet admiration of Libby at the car washing scene to Libby's unburdening of her soul to Rafe in the restaurant and their final happiness in marriage; Mitchum/Libby's father as the one's cold dismissal of the other is eventually returned by the father's revenge and his assassination of the one he thought had shamed his family. The beautiful and emotional moments just keep coming at you one after another.

Everyone's acting was brilliant, Kaper's score was understated and beautiful, Minelli's directorial pace superb, and the scripting outstanding. Having never heard of this movie before but having sat enthralled throughout its almost three hours I thought this one one of the finest movies I have ever seen.

This film falls into that genre of movies which celebrate education and the power of great teaching to influence and develop young minds and hearts especially through the medium of the fine arts. Besides the several films which your other reviewers cited I could add How Green Was My Valley, Renaissance Man, Konrack, Mr. Holland's Opus, The Chorus, etc. In this film the arts were represented by the students' staging of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty, just as in Renaissance Man by the Shakespeare plays, in Mr. Holland's Opus by the ensemble music they all performed together, in The Chorus by all the music the students sang together, etc.

The CT character was admirably strong. Since he was by age a 7th grader in a 4th grade class he had already reached the stage of disillusionment and could strongly insist on the non-existence of Santa Claus as well as of a god in whose image they were all supposedly made but who had failed to solve the conundrum of two different images: white and black. CT wasn't having any of that and walked out.

I discovered that this was Harry Belafonte's first movie. Indeed he seemed rather stiff in his acting and delivering his lines.

I was surprised that the segregated school the students attended was a smart looking brick building. I always imagined them as wooden shacks. Was I wrong? A jarring note in the film was the white doctor at Tanya's bedside. It implied that black people weren't smart enough to become doctors, or more likely were prevented from being so.

I found the movie a rather sugar-coated version of black life in the south, but still, all the African-American characters were treated with respect and without condescension which I found admirable.