George Gershwin Filmography

Kurt Masur: A Life in Music - The Anniversary Gala from Leipzig

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Kurt Masur, Harald Schmidt

Synopsis: The performance release Kurt Masur: A Life in Music - The Anniversary Gala from Leipzig finds noted European conductor Masur leading the MDR Radio Choir and the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig symphony in renditions of works by Moniuszko, Dvorak, Dukas, Bizet and other composers. ~ Nathan Southern Read More

20th Century Music for Two Pianos

Crew: Featured Music

Synopsis: This concert program features a live performance by Joseph Paratore and Anthony Paratore on two pianos. The concert consists of a variety of works by 20th century composers such as Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. ~ Cammila Albertson, All Movie Guide Read More

Fantasia 2000

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Steve Martin, Itzhak Perlman, Quincy Jones, Bette Midler, James Earl Jones, Teller, Penn Jillette, James Levine, Angela Lansbury, Leopold Stokowski

Synopsis: Initially released to IMAX theaters at the crescendo of millennial fever and 60 years after the original Fantasia, Fantasia 2000 was meant to revitalize Walt Disney's goal of a constantly evolving film, with new segments replacing old ones with each re-release. Only The Sorcerer's Apprentice Read More

Crazy For You

Crew: From Musical by

Synopsis: Crazy for You, Ken Ludwig's 1992 adaptation of George and Ira Gershwin's 1930 musical comedy Girl Crazy, had already won a Tony award when this PBS TV adaptation was taped at New Jersey's Paper Mill Playhouse. As if it matters, the plot concerns Bobby Child (Jim Walton), the son of a prominent Read More

Jake's Women

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Alan Alda, Anne Archer, Lolita Davidovich, Julie Kavner, Mira Sorvino

Synopsis: Assembled by the same team responsible for "The Hallmark Hall of Fame", this TV adaptation of Neil Simon's hit play Jake's Woman stars Alan Alda, recreating his Broadway role as Simon-esque writer Jake. Mired in an unhappy marriage with current spouse Maggie (Anne Archer), Jake tries to cope with Read More

Betsy's Wedding

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Alan Alda, Madeline Kahn, Molly Ringwald, Ally Sheedy, Anthony LaPaglia

Synopsis: Offbeat fashion student Betsy Hopper (Molly Ringwald) and her straight-laced investment-banker fiancé, Jake Lovell(Dylan Walsh), just want an intimate little wedding reception, but Betsy's father, Eddie (Alan Alda), a Long Island construction contractor, feels so threatened by Jake's rich WASP Read More

Gremlins 2: The New Batch

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Zach Galligan, Phoebe Cates, John Glover, Robert Prosky, Robert Picardo

Synopsis: Where the original Gremlins was a horror film spiked with comedy, Gremlins 2: The New Batch is essentially a black comedy, with a couple of horrifying touches. As the film starts, the fantastical trinket shop in Chinatown, which sold the Mogwai in the first film, is demolished by a crazed Read More

Bolshoi Soloists Classique

Crew: Featured Music

Torch Song Trilogy

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Anne Bancroft, Matthew Broderick, Harvey Fierstein, Brian Kerwin, Karen Young

Synopsis: Harvey Fierstein's Pulitzer Prize-winning Broadway hit was adapted for the screen by Fierstein himself. The playwright also repeats his stage role of female impersonator Arnold Beckoff, aka nightclub entertainer "Virginia Hamm." The three-part plotline, whittled down to accommodate the film's Read More

Someone to Watch over Me

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Tom Berenger, Mimi Rogers, Lorraine Bracco, Jerry Orbach, John Rubinstein

Synopsis: Someone to Watch Over Me, a mystery thriller directed by Ridley Scott is the story of a police officer who falls in love with the woman he is hired to protect and the effect of this affair on his marriage and his life. Claire (Mimi Rogers) an extremely wealthy socialite is the sole witness to a Read More

Beyond Therapy

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Julie Hagerty, Jeff Goldblum, Glenda Jackson, Tom Conti, Christopher Guest

Synopsis: Based on the play by Christopher Durang, Robert Altman's Beyond Therapy is a comedy set in New York City but filmed in Paris, where Altman was living at the time. Arrogant Bruce (Jeff Goldblum) grows bored with his live-in lover, Bob (Christopher Guest), so he looks for a change by placing an ad Read More

'Round Midnight

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Dexter Gordon, François Cluzet, Gabrielle Haker, Christine Pascal, Sandra Reaves-Phillips, John Berry, Lonette McKee

Synopsis: A French music lover befriends a once-great American jazz artist and attempts to save him from self-destruction in this moody drama. Saxophonist Dexter Gordon portrays Dale Turner, a fictional musician inspired by a number of famed jazz figures, including Bud Powell and Lester Young. Largely Read More

City Heat

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Clint Eastwood, Burt Reynolds, Jane Alexander, Madeline Kahn, Rip Torn

Synopsis: This standard, tongue-in-cheek, gangsters and good guys saga is carried on the star power and screen presence of Clint Eastwood as Lt. Speer, a taciturn, tough, play-it-by-the-book cop, and on Burt Reynolds as Mike Murphy, Speer's old friend in the force, now turned private eye but still a Read More

The Music of Man [Video Series]

Synopsis: This eight part series follows the roles music has played in the development of mankind's culture and societies. ~ All Movie Guide Read More

Manhattan

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Woody Allen, Diane Keaton, Michael Murphy, Mariel Hemingway, Meryl Streep

Synopsis: On the heels of Annie Hall, the Oscar-winning romantic comedy that rocketed Woody Allen to the front ranks of American filmmakers, Manhattan continued Allen's romantic obsessions in a slightly darker, more pessimistic vein. Allen stars as Isaac Davis, a TV comedy writer sick of the pap he is Read More

A Matter of Time

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Liza Minnelli, Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer, Spiros Andros, Tina Aumont

Synopsis: Singer and actress Liza Minnelli teamed up with her father, legendary director Vincente Minnelli, to make this evocative drama. Nina (Liza Minnelli) is a popular film star who, in the midst of a press conference, finds herself remembering her life before her big break, when she worked as a Read More

Star!

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Julie Andrews, Richard Crenna, Michael Craig, Daniel Massey, Robert Reed

Synopsis: Touted by 20th Century-Fox as a follow-up to their enormously successful The Sound of Music, Star! reteams that earlier film's leading lady Julie Andrews and director Robert Wise. Andrews plays legendary musical comedy star Gertrude Lawrence, while Daniel Massey appears as Lawrence's friend Read More

Kiss Me, Stupid!

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, Felicia Farr, Cliff Osmond

Synopsis: The Catholic League of Decency gave Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid! a "condemned" rating. The Moral Majority charged the picture with debauchery and movie theaters across the nation discontinued its run. The bed-trick comedy had America's panties tied in a knot; one could not imagine a story so Read More

Judy Garland: Judy Garland & Friends

Crew: Featured Music

Synopsis: In this collection of clips from The Judy Garland Show, which ran for 26 episodes on CBS television in 1963 and 1964, the legendary singer and actress performs a number of songs, several of them collaborations with up-and-comer Barbra Streisand, grand dame Ethel Merman, and Garland's own daughter Read More

The Notorious Landlady

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Kim Novak, Jack Lemmon, Fred Astaire, Lionel Jeffries, Estelle Winwood

Synopsis: This uneven farce by director Richard Quine has its hilarious and witty moments as American diplomat William Gridley (Jack Lemmon) inadvertently gets caught up in a jewel theft and mayhem. After William lands in London to take up his new position and get settled in his new digs, he becomes Read More

Porgy and Bess

Crew: From Musical by

Actors: Sidney Poitier, Dorothy Dandridge, Sammy Davis, Jr., Pearl Bailey, Brock Peters

Synopsis: A stellar line-up of African-American actors and musical stars helped to bring DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin's classic operetta to this screen in this lavishly-produced adaptation. Porgy (Sidney Poitier) is a crippled man living in the shantytown of Catfish Row who has fallen in love with Bess (Dorothy Dandridge Read More

Funny Face

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, Kay Thompson, Michel Auclair, Robert Flemyng

Synopsis: This filmed version of the 1927 George Gershwin Broadway musical Funny Face utilizes the play's original star, Fred Astaire, and several of the original tunes, then goes merrily off on its own. Astaire is cast as as fashion photographer Dick Avery (a character based on Richard Avedon, the film's Read More

An American in Paris

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetary, Nina Foch

Synopsis: Gene Kelly does his patented Pal Joey bit as Jerry Mulligan, an opportunistic American painter living in Paris' "starving artists" colony. He is discovered by wealthy Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), who becomes Jerry's patroness in more ways than one. Meanwhile, Jerry plays hookey on this setup by Read More

The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Betty Grable, Dick Haymes, Anne Revere, Allyn Joslyn, Gene Lockhart

Synopsis: In this musical set in late 19th-century Boston, a suffragette secretary finds that her political beliefs are standing in the way of her romantic bliss with her beloved boss. Back then the notion of women's rights was considered scandalous and her lover will not stand for such nonsense in his Read More

The Man I Love

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Ida Lupino, Robert Alda, Andrea King, Martha Vickers, Bruce Bennett

Synopsis: Ida "Don't mess with me" Lupino takes a job as a singer in Robert Alda's seedy Santa Monica nitery. Lupino ignores Alda's advances to cultivate a romance with pianist Bruce Bennett. Alda uses his connections with the Mob to break up the relationship--and also, hopefully, to break up Bennett into Read More

Ziegfeld Follies

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Fred Astaire, Lucille Ball, Lucille Bremer, Fanny Brice, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly

Synopsis: The presence of William Powell as legendary showman Flo Ziegfeld at the beginning of Ziegfeld Follies might lead an impressionable viewer from thinking that this 1946 film is a Technicolor sequel to the 1936 Oscar-winning The Great Ziegfeld. Not so: this is more in the line of an all-star revue Read More

Rhapsody in Blue

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Robert Alda, Joan Leslie, Alexis Smith, Charles Coburn, Oscar Levant, Julie Bishop

Synopsis: There's slightly more fancy than fact in this lavish film biography of legendary American composer George Gershwin, but oh! That music! Director Irving Rapper had wanted Tyrone Power to play Gershwin, but Power was still serving in the Marines, so Rapper had to settle for Robert Alda--who isn't Read More

Girl Crazy

Crew: From Musical by

Actors: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, June Allyson, Nancy Walker, Gil Stratton, Robert E. Strickland, Rags Ragland

Synopsis: This second film version of the George and Ira Gershwin's Broadway hit Girl Crazy stars reigning MGM musical prince and princess Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. The 1932 version of Girl Crazy de-emphasized the main plot, building up the comic subplot involving a timorous temporary sheriff and a Read More

Lady Be Good

Crew: Featured Music

Actors: Eleanor Powell, Ann Sothern, Robert Young, Lionel Barrymore, John Carroll

Synopsis: The 1924 George Gershwin stage hit Lady Be Good was brought to the screen by MGM; any resemblance (beyond the Gershwin score) to the original play is purely accidental. The MGM scriveners came up with a new story concerning married songwriters Ann Sothern and Robert Young, who can't live with each Read More

The Goldwyn Follies

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Adolphe Menjou, The Ritz Brothers [Al, Jimmy, Harry], Vera Zorina, Kenny Baker, Andrea Leeds

Synopsis: A longtime admirer of Broadway impresario Flo Ziegfeld, Hollywood producer Sam Goldwyn hoped to emulate the success of The Ziegfeld Follies by producing an annual movie-musical revue. Goldwyn's dream began and ended with 1938's Goldwyn Follies, a film centering on Goldwyn-like movie producer Read More

A Damsel in Distress

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Fred Astaire, George Burns, Gracie Allen, Joan Fontaine, Reginald Gardiner

Synopsis: Fred Astaire's first RKO musical without his longtime partner Ginger Rogers is one of his best from any period -- even though it's obvious that leading lady Joan Fontaine can't dance a step. Written by P. G. Wodehouse, Damsel in Distress casts Astaire as Jerry, an American entertainer appearing in Read More

Shall We Dance?

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Edward Everett Horton, Eric Blore, Jerome Cowan

Synopsis: The seventh of RKO's Fred Astaire--Ginger Rogers musicals, Shall We Dance casts Astaire as a world-renowned ballet dancer and Rogers as a musical comedy headliner. Rogers' manager Jerome Cowan concocts a phony romance between his client and Astaire in order to garner publicity for them both. Read More

The Great Ziegfeld

Crew: Songwriter

Actors: William Powell, Myrna Loy, Luise Rainer, Frank Morgan, Fanny Brice

Synopsis: In MGM's three-hour-plus The Great Ziegfeld, William Powell stars as the titular theatrical impresario, whose show business empire begins when he stage-manages a tour for legendary strongman Sandow (Nat Pendleton). With nary a penny in the bank, he charms European stage star Anna Held (Luise Rainer Read More

The World Moves On

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Madeleine Carroll, Franchot Tone, Lumsden Hare, Raul Roulien, Reginald Denny, Dudley Digges

Synopsis: In the tradition of Fox Studios' Oscar-winning Cavalcade, The World Moves On covers over one hundred years in the lives of two Louisiana families: The Girards, of French extraction, and the Warburtons, formerly of Manchester. Forming an alliance by marriage in 1825, the families rapidly corner the Read More

Clark and McCullough: Inspired Madness

Synopsis: Broadway comedians Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough were as popular as the Marx Brothers during the 1920s and 1930s. While mustachioed straight man McCullough was essentially a fur-coated nonentity, Clark was hailed as a comic genius, a master of the instant adlib and zany nonsequitur. Certainly no Read More

Girl Crazy

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Bert Wheeler, Robert Woolsey, Eddie Quillan, Dorothy Lee, Mitzi Green

Synopsis: The 1930 George & Ira Gershwin musical smash Girl Crazy was refashioned for the screen in 1932 as a vehicle for comedians Bert Wheeler and Robert Woolsey. Most of the original play's romantic plotline has been jettisoned, shifting the emphasis to cabdriver Jimmy Deegan (Wheeler) and his larcenous Read More

Delicious

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, El Brendel, Raul Roulien, Lawrence O'Sullivan

Synopsis: Delicious represents the first time that George and Ira Gershwin ever wrote a musical score exclusively for the screen. Unfortunately, the film fails to come up to the standards set by the music, though it's not from lack of trying. Janet Gaynor stars as Heather Gordon, a poor Scotch immigrant who Read More

Song of the Flame

Crew: From Musical by

Actors: Alexander Gray, Bernice Claire, Noah Beery, Sr., Alice Gentle, Bert Roach

Synopsis: This lavish musical is based on a play by Oscar Hammerstein II and tells the story of a young girl who inadvertently causes a revolution with her rendition of "Song of the Flame." Later she falls for a captured Russian prince. She is determined to save him, even if it means sacrificing her Read More

King of Jazz

Crew: Composer (Music Score)

Actors: Paul Whiteman, John Boles, Laura La Plante, Jeanette Loff

Synopsis: Intended as Universal Pictures' entry in the "all-star musical" cycle of the early talkie era, King of Jazz is certainly the most elaborate of the bunch, though far from the most successful financially. Staged by Broadway impresario John Murray Anderson, the film is held together by the Read More