[chajin]

Of all the news here, the most significant in the long run is the shortest: the two-sentence notice about Rita Hayworth being chosen to star "in a straight dramatic role in Columbia's 'Gilda'."

All the other movies are either forgotten--I agree with the reviewer, Rhapsody In Blue does Gershwin no justice, if Alan Alda knew how to act he never shows it here--or period pieces, like Cagney's Blood on the Sun, which was obviously rushed in production and looks it, perhaps in fear that the war would be over before the movie could be released.

And at the "Soviet" concert, they say it's "early Soviet," but Gayane was first performed in 1942--except that it's really Armenian, and based primarily on Armenian folk music and dances, only "Soviet" in the 1945 political sense. I suspect they did not play the Adagio from the third act, which was the background for the opening sequence of the Jupiter voyage in 2001.

[Sans-Culotte]

I guess I like Rhapsody in Blue a little more. I didn't think Robert Alda was bad. The movie had a lot of his music and gave an idea what a loss he was to the music world after his untimely death. The women in his life were fictional composites, though I particularly enjoyed Joan Leslie, who I always thought should have been a bigger star.

[Fiji Hill]

I enjoyed watching Rhapsody in Blue when I saw it in the theater. One thing that amazed me was that so many of the characters played themselves.

That Soviet concert also featured a composition by Dmitrii Kabalevskii, a Communist who embraced "socialist realism," a style that seems to have gone out with the USSR.