Would it make any sense to most of the Tribune audience if I said that Max Ophuls was the Mozart of film directors, Alfred Hitchcock was the Bartok and Sergei Eisenstein was the Beethoven? Of if I started drawing links between dramatic/comic riffs in the movies of John Cassavetes (“Faces”) or Mike Leigh (“Secrets & Lies”) and the jazz riffs of Duke Ellington or Miles Davis?
Probably not, but sometimes I’d like to give it a try.
One of the misfortunes about becoming any kind of specialist, even if you are specializing in a huge cross-cultural art like film, is that it takes away from time spent in other arts you love — in my case, arts like jazz and classical music.
In college, I started eagerly attending concerts and collecting lots of jazz and near-jazz (John Coltrane, Charlie Mingus, Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra) and a huge amount of classical music, including multiple copies of key works such as Bach’s Brandenburg concertos and Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.
I wasn’t an audiophile. I always went for performance — and I never cared if my second-hand library was marred with some pops and hisses. I liked fiery, bravura performances that blazed with energy or oozed with Weltschmerz. Two of my all-time favorite records are Bernstein and pianist Rudolf Serkin playing Beethoven’s soaring, tumultuous “Emperor Concerto” and Artur Rubinstein’s meltingly emotional andante in Mozart’s 21st concerto.
I’ve seen Ella Fitzgerald, Sinatra, Dexter Gordon, Count Basie, Sarah Vaughn and Ray Charles, and only the very best movies measured up to them. One of my all-time favorite experiences was attending, at 12, an all-Gershwin program sung by Fitzgerald at the Hollywood Bowl. The entire performance was candy on velvet, brandy by moonlight.
Nowadays, I mostly catch my concerts in films. And jazz and the classics do pop up in the movies, with some regularity. But not enough. There are jazz and classical movies that were planned and never made. Consider what happened when RKO canceled Orson Welles’ 1942 documentary “It’s All True.” One section of that film was to be a jazz segment featuring Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday and the Duke Ellington Orchestra — and Ellington was already composing the score. What we wouldn’t give for that movie today!
In movies as elsewhere, it does pay to mix passions — and arts.
