Two Minutes of Genius! Incredible Film Montage from Humoresque

So what can I say about this, one of my all-time favorite noirish 1940s melodramas? It even has Joan Crawford with giant shoulder-pads playing a wealthy alcoholic cougar pursuing the very dishy John Garfield, who fakes his violin-playing quite effectively. The incomparable Oscar Levant is actually playing here, and many claimed he was at the same technical and interpretive level as Vladimir Horowitz (and the two were, by the way, buddies). This montage thrills and delights me every time, as it says so much about Garfield's tough-guy character and his bewilderment at landing in the Big City to pursue his music career. There are some echoes of An American in Paris here, as Garfield begins to feel more and more like a gigolo who can't escape Joan's desperate clutches. It ends in her walking into the surf a la A Star is Born. In spite of all this borrowing and unabashed melodrama, Garfield keeps it from sinking into sappyness and gives it an effective edge. I play violin myself - not like this, of course, but I do play, and even though it took a team of people to convincingly show him playing, I think it worked very well. As he was a minimalist, he didn't ham it up or overdo it facially, which makes it especially effective. Garfield died of a heart attack depressingly young, so we don't get to see him very often. But in the film Three Daughters, he plays a sardonic pianist whom he admitted was based on Oscar Levant. 

My description of the clip on YouTube is as follows:

A brilliant bit of filmmaking, one of the highlights of this noir-ish 1940s melodrama. John Garfield plays Paul Boray, an ambitious young concert violinist pursued by wealthy cougar Joan Crawford. Here he arrives in the hustle and bustle of New York City. So could tough guy Garfield really play the violin? Of course not, but he was saved by some Hollywood magic. For close-ups, Garfield’s arms were pinned down, the violin was attached to his neck, and two professional violinists would crouch down beside the actor, out of camera range, one doing the fingering and the other bowing. The actual soundtrack heard by the audience was played by Isaac Stern, with Oscar Levant accompanying him on the piano. After a couple of takes working in this strenuously awkward manner, Levant called out, “Why don’t the five of us do a concert tour?”

I wish that I were dead!

Agghhh! The worst has happened, and a whole post disappeared. Is this some sort of "sagn" that I'm not supposed to write about Oscar Levant any more?

At this rate, I never will, for I HATE trying to piece together lost posts.

It didn't even save as a draft, which is insane! I tried to listen to some Debussy while fucking around with my photos, which are probably gone also.

Perhaps Oscar is playing with me.

Levant was a strange one. In the video he is being marched along between two ageing legends, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, who have been hauled out of retirement to do yet another musical, The Barkleys of Broadway. I'm not keen on the retread aspects of this show, with Astaire in his 50s dancing with a bunch of disembodied shoes. This 3-minute ditty is the best part: it's a charming little song, with Oscar bellowing in a voice that sometimes reminds me of Walter Matthau. And it was true, he really did hate the country - the crickets scared him.

So what was I going to say about all this, before it was all fucking lost? I wanted to tell a little story from the Levant bio I am reading, A Talent for Genius. I'm not sure what I think about this book, or about Levant generally, because he ended up such a wreck. He looked about 100 years old when he died, twitching, bent over, virtually incoherent, his mind in a million pieces. Such a mind. And he was only 65.

"Levant's film career was about to become another stroll through a hall of mirrors," the bio claims, "not only reflecting his own life experience as a struggling musician in New York, but full of biographical doppelgangers as well."

Anyway, one of the first times he played the "Oscar Levant type" that was soon to be popular in the '40s was in Humoresque, in which Joan Crawford plays a rich older woman lusting after a novice concert violinist (incongruously played by John Garfield). Levant probably got along fine with him, since they had a certain gangsterish quality in common, even though he was hardly a musician: Isaac Stern had to stand behind him and stick his arms through his jacket to play the violin.

Crawford was another matter.

To quote A Talent for Genius: "To Levant's mystification, Crawford always showed up on the set carrying two raw steaks under her arm. She also had a habit of knitting during the long hours between scenes - she was a compulsive knitter. She even brought her knitting to dinner parties. Noticing this habit, one of Levant's first remarks to her on the set was, "Do you knit while you fuck?"

 

I can't picture it. I can't picture Levant with Crawford - at all - though legend has it he was a chick magnet, a fact that was written into several of his movies (e. g. The Barkleys of Broadway, in which he plays a bravura version of Khatchaturian's Sabre Dance while four gorgeous babes "woo-hoo" him from the balcony.)

 

Oh I don't know, I suppose I should try to be more charitable towards Joan Crawford. Then again, why should I? She's dead and she was a hard bitch who only cared about herself. She ate men alive and spat out the bones. I tried to find a picture of Catherine O'Hara spoofing her Humoresque rich-bitch character on SCTV: they did a superb satire of the movie called New York Rhapsody, though they didn't include Levant. (Eugene Levy might have been up for it.) I just remember O'Hara's shoulders wouldn't fit through the door, so she had to go sideways.

It's hard to know what exactly happened to create the "Oscar Levant type", because there really was no such thing. He didn't do anything an actor was supposed to do. He didn't project. He said his lines in a flat New Yorkish voice and showed little emotion. He rarely smiled. He played piano in a way that could give you an orgasm, but when he was finished and took his bow, he had a sort of pained look on his face. Why did everyone love him so much?

Joan, you had your chance. Or did you take it? If so,  please tell me. . . did you knit?

CODA. Or something. This book just gets better and better. I mean the "fuck" parts, as Levant himself might put it. He started out with an awful fondness for professionals, and seemed to have thought of sex mainly as a business transaction. Later it was married women - no strings attached, and by this time he seems to have gained some technique. His two wives (not at the same time) might have thought he was crazy, but both admitted he shone in a certain arena. "Oscar was sexy," his "forever-wife" June said about him, "and women instinctively knew he'd be good in bed, particularly married women who felt a little thwarted in that area." Though he was given to explosive battles with his first wife, she said about him, a little sadly, "Oscar was a wonderful lover. He was tender."

Stop the necrophilia? OK.

Oscar Levant: The Lost Interview

An interview with Oscar Levant

(from Pulse Magazine, April 7, 1960)

Hello, Oscar. Nice to meet you. You know, I almost said “Hell, Oscar.”

(laughs) It would have been more appropriate. Come right in to my den of thieves.

Thieves?

I steal material all the time, everybody thinks it’s mine. It’s all in the delivery.

You mean a “special delivery”.

Aha, a smart-ass kid! We oughta get along just great.

 OK, Oscar Levant, let me get right down to it. What is it that drives you?

Drives me? I have a chauffeur, but it’s a “he”, not an “it”.

You know what I mean.

Drives me, it’s probably just the will to get up in the morning.

Is that hard for you?

Don’t pry.

OK, I won’t. Sorry. I want to know what. . . I hate to say “inspires” you.

Thank you.

Let me rephrase the question. Did you choose music, or did it choose you?

Do you need to ask?

Would you have done anything else?

I probably would have done practically anything else. The rule in our house was absolute perfection. One wrong note was a source of shame. It drove me absolutely crazy. See, now you have your answer!

As to why you went crazy?

I might have been crazy from the beginning.

So in what way did you depart from absolute perfection?

In just about every way. I hated my teachers. I hated my father. I hated my piano.

I have to tell you a story. Nobody in our family had any talent whatsoever on the keyboard, even though a few of them are professional musicians. When my brother was practicing, he kept trying to leave the room but my mother would stick her head in and say, “You have to practice for half an hour!” At one point he slammed the lid down and opened the front door and yelled at the top of his voice, “I HATE THE PIANO!”                  

(Laughs with a wicked expression)

I love piano stories. I hated the piano too. Or I hated what it did to me.

Did you never feel you’d mastered it?

No performance is ever as perfect as the one that exists in your mind.

That’s profound.

No it isn’t, I forgot my Demerol this morning.

Oh, so that’s supposed to be funny?

It gets big laughs.

So when did you decide to. . .

To be a sellout? That’s what they say about Levant. That he’s a sellout, that he sold out to Hollywood and cheap fame as a movie sidekick who plays cornball classical music between production numbers.

Are you?

A sellout?  Oh sure. But I make a lot better money. And it’s a way to stay out of the concert hall. It’s the ninth circle of Hell up there. (lights another cigarette)

But you’re so good. I mean, you’re –

Let’s get on with the Gershwin stuff, shall we? I know it’s coming.

OK, the Gershwin stuff. May I ask what he was really like?

Nothing like that limp-wristed Robert Alda who played him in the film. Had to dub all his playing for him.

Oh, THAT film! The one where you played yourself. What was it like to play yourself?

Let’s not get obscene here.

I don’t mean play “with” yourself.  I mean – portray yourself in the film.

I’d say it was a snap, but I don’t think I ever really figured out my character.

But you kept the coffee-and-cigarettes mode.

Sweetheart, that’s the only mode I have.

Is it your “shtik”?

Jesus, where do you get these words? What makes you think I’m Jewish?

It was the way you hugged Steve Allen on his show.

I hugged him “Jewish”?

I had to translate it.

(Laughs again) So did these guys send over somebody they think can stay ahead of me, or what?

No one can stay ahead of you.

Better for them. Listen, if I hugged Steve Allen any way at all they’d say I was a faggot. I was friends with Gershwin, and he was supposed to be a faggot, so that made ME a faggot by association.

I get the feeling you’re not a faggot.

Not lately. I think I’ve forgotten how, due to lack of practice. I have a lovely wife,  I mean it sincerely, June, she’s just terrific, we busted up last week. No, seriously, I don’t think I’d be alive without her and I don’t know how she puts up with me.

She loves you.

Loves me, as in popular song? Or loves me, as in, she loves him one minute and hates him the next? That would be my wife.

Do you ever stop joking? Do you ever get truly, deeply serious about things?

You mean, do I ever explore the darkest recesses of my tortured psyche?

Something like that.

Yeah, all the time.

At the piano?

Why would I damage my piano like that?

At the psychiatrist’s office? I saw him on your TV show the other day. That’s an innovative idea, to invite your analyst to come on your show.

He’s the only one I could get on such short notice. Adlai Stevenson bailed out on me at the last minute.

What do you say to your psychiatrist?

HELP!. . .  HELP!

Does he help?

I’m not sure there is such a thing as help, I mean on this plane of existence. I think you are who you are. It might be worse if I didn’t go.

Do you run in little circles inside your head?

What sort of question is that?

Just curious.

If you mean, am I a manic-depressive, of course. That’s the only diagnosis they could come up with that was frightening enough.

What are the highs like?

I don’t even know I’m on a high until I come down and realize that I’ve been babbling and swinging from chandeliers for weeks. Usually turns out I’ve offended a lot of people.

It sure smells like cigarettes in here.

The place is one big ashtray.

Are you hooked?

(Gazes at interviewer, lights another cigarette)

Would you play something for me right now?

I thought you’d never ask.

The Humoresque?

Which one?

Dvorak. Am I pronouncing that right?

No. Do you know there are words to that piece?

I didn’t! Why don’t you sing them?

Right now?

Right now.

(He sits at the piano, fidgeting and taking 2 or 3 minutes to get settled.)

Like a bike but so much cuter

Is my tiny two-wheeled scooter,

And I ride it ‘round and ‘round each day.

Though it has no engine on it,

Once I place my feet upon it

Merrily I’m on my way.

When I grow older

I may be bolder

And I’ll think of aeroplanes

And auto-mo-biles. . .

But right now when I’m outside

I’m satisfied to guide and ride

My tiny little scooter

With two wheels!

Oh, that’s lovely!

So are you, sweetheart. Come back any time. (Coughs, drapes arms around interviewer in Jewish embrace)

END