Film Revival Offers a Look at the Life of Bandleader Artie Shaw, in All Its Difficult Glory

“Everytime I change the toilet paper, I think of Artie Shaw.” This quote comes courtesy of Evelyn Keyes, the actress best remembered by noir enthusiasts for her turn as a femme fatale in “The Prowler” (1951) and by the general public as Scarlett O’Hara’s sister in “Gone With the Wind” (1939). Keyes was married to the musician and bandleader Artie Shaw for close to three decades. In round terms, theirs was a union that lasted three decades longer than Shaw’s previous seven marriages. Among his wives were a scion of songwriting royalty (Elizabeth Kern), an author of best sellers (Kathleen Winsor), and a veritable bevy of starlets, including Keyes, Doris Dowling, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. The marriage to Turner was the shortest, lasting about seven months. The 19-year old starlet married Shaw after one date. She was, after all, “stirred [by] his eloquence.”And eloquent Shaw most certainly was, if we can take at face value “Artie Shaw: Time Is All You’ve Got” (1986), an Oscar-winning documentary by Brigitte Berman that will be having a one-week revival at Film Forum on the occasion of its 4K restoration.Shaw resisted previous attempts by filmmakers eager to make documentaries on his life and music, but agreed to Ms. Berman’s on the basis of her film about the musician Bix Biederbecke, “Bix: ‘None of Them Play Like Him Yet'” (1981). Having worked with Biederbecke, Shaw must have felt that Ms. Berman did right by the ill-fated cornetist.Did she do right by Shaw? Then a robust 76 years old, he claimed that Ms. Berman’s interviewing process felt “like my head was being vacuumed.” Forget Shaw: What did the filmmaker’s head feel like after talking with the famed composer and clarinetist? Pretty early into “Time Is All You’ve Got,” we get an idea that Shaw wasn’t just a tough nut to crack, but that he was, in fact, uncrackable. Was he eloquent? Absolutely. He was also terse, indomitable, irascible, and, if not impossible, then notoriously hard to please.Arthur Jacob Arshawsky was born on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and came of age in the relatively genteel surroundings of New Haven, Connecticut. “Relatively” because it was in Connecticut that the young Arshawsky first encountered antisemitism. He took up the saxophone at age 13 and was on the road as a professional musician a few years later. By that time he had taken up the clarinet and gained the skills to become a session musician in New York City.Shaw got around, listened hard, and went on to achieve a level of fame that proved increasingly untenable for a temperament as restless as his own. He caused a sensation in 1935 at Manhattan’s Imperial Theater with his own composition “Interlude in B Flat,” but later scored big with versions of “Stardust” and “Begin the Beguine.” Shaw fused jazz with the trappings of classical music: He liked to swing with a string section. Audiences were more equivocal in their admiration.The trajectory of Shaw’s career was bumpy — often because of his own decisions. At the height of his fame, he quit show business and left for Mexico in a move the New York Times described as “a beautifully incautious burning of all his bridges behind him.” Shaw detested celebrity culture. “This policy of trying to maintain some vestige of musical integrity has, naturally, earned me enemies,” Shaw wrote in the Saturday Evening Post. You know the kind: “people who think I’m a longhair, impressed with my own ability.”The thing is, Shaw was a longhair impressed by his own ability. He was a voracious reader, relentlessly inquisitive, and a musician of natural gifts. He also had an eye for talent: Among those he featured in his band were Billie Holiday, Buddy Rich, and Mel Torme. Shaw famously quit his band during a stage performance on December 7, 1941, when the stage manager handed him a note about the bombing of Pearl Harbor. At that moment, Shaw felt that playing “Begin the Beguine” for the umpteenth time seemed “fatuous.” Before the concert ended, he passed word to his band members that they had been given two weeks’ notice. Shaw joined the Navy soon thereafter.“Time Is All You’ve Got” is an odd document largely because its subject comes across as adamantly guarded even as he tells it like it is — about love, marriage, fishing, mathematics, and his rivalry with Benny Goodman. Goodman, Shaw said, “played the clarinet. I played music.” That bon mot, sharp but not unconsidered, gives a good idea of what to expect from Ms. Berman’s film: a peculiarly gifted musician and an unapologetic perfectionist who insisted that his toilet paper unfurl just so.On January 7, filmmaker Brigitte Berman will participate in a Q&A session with the Film Forum’s Bruce Goldstein and The New York Sun’s Will Friedwald.

Film Revival Offers a Look at the Life of Bandleader Artie Shaw, in All Its Difficult Glory

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