Overwhelming! Two mega-movies, HEAT & RHAPSODY IN BLUE, light up TCM Fest 2025 3

There’s something lacking in the much-bantered trope, “You have to see it on the big screen.” And yet, those very words motivate film fans from across the country to converge on a densely populated corner of Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles once a year, for TCM Classic Film Festival. This event, which we have attended each of its sixteen years, also offers socializing, finding one’s tribe, learning cool stuff about film-making, wine-quaffing, and poolside viewing of audience-friendly fodder. But the core activity, the reason for all the schlepping and queuing, happens when the lights go down and the huge silver screen springs to life.

Of the several films I saw at TCM Fest 2025, two stood out for their searing high impact, a melding of the visual with ideas and emotion that seemed to wash off the screen in waves. Both movies left my heart beating!

The first was the in-your-face explosion of angst and grit, violence and passion, HEAT (1995), directed by Michael Mann, a blockbuster action film now celebrating its 30th anniversary. Presented in tandem with the screening was an entertaining, lengthy interview with director Michael Mann and TCM host Ben Mankiewicz. Oh yes, one other participant: HEAT’s brilliant co-star Al Pacino.

Pacino nattered genially in random memories of HEAT’s making. He described how the film was made with the minimum of rehearsal, not because of lack of time but as a strategic decision. Mann concurred, saying that he never liked rehearsing to the point that you “wished you’d filmed it.” Pacino described that Mann’s careful choreography of the huge gun brawl that forms HEAT’s center piece made it not hard to execute at all. He added that at the time he was in better physical condition to do so. Pacino told an amusing story about promoting HEAT at its opening in France. The ebullience of the show’s host, in a torrent of high speed French-speaking, was so effusive to have had Pacino “mesmerized.” Not only was he dumbstruck by this man’s voice and gestures, the earpiece translator could not keep up and the interview was a fiasco.

Except for catching snippets on television, I had never seen HEAT in toto, let alone on the massive 94 x 46 foot IMAX screen of the TCL Chinese Theatre. The stadium seating of the Chinese (in its latest design permutation) gave a heavenly, unobstructed view of the action, particularly the two stars, Pacino and Robert De Niro, rendering them as giants in more ways than one. Captured at truly the height of their powers the men play proverbial twins separated at birth. So similar are their two characters in terms of passion, dedication, pursuit of perfection and attention to detail that they would be a copacetic couple had one’s destiny not been as a cop (Pacino) and the other as a crook (De Niro).

My accelerated heart beat had already been tested by a very different film. It was the world-premiere screening of a most lovingly restored RHAPSODY IN BLUE (1945), a Warner Bros picture produced in 1941, but released only at the end of the war. (The great Gershwin composition of the film’s title celebrates its centenary this year.) In what looks to have been a gargantuan task, director Irving Rapper toggled between its so-so scripted scenes and performance tableaux of immense grandeur. At 162 minutes, RHAPSODY strikes me as the mother of all movie biopics. I left the theater enraptured.

The brand-new 2K restoration was sourced from 4K scans of the original nitrate negative, supplemented with a nitrate composite fine grain to reconstruct the complete feature. The picture was meticulously cleaned and graded at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging. The original mono audio mix was restored from the composite fine grain track and mixed for theatrical exhibition at WB Post Production Sound. Rhapsody in Blue and Concerto in F are two of the five orchestral pieces performed on screen, in addition to more than 20 Gershwin songs. Thirteen full minutes of previously suppressed footage cut from the original U.S. release are now part of RHAPSODY IN BLUE.

Of the cast, Broadway actor Robert Alda made his more-than-credible film debut as Gershwin, and the easy-on-the-eyes Alexis Smith, playing Gershwin’s wealthy paramour, brought pathos to a role that had a complexity it could easily have lacked. But it’s the real-life presence of several leading lights of entertainment “playing themselves” that convert the film into a celluloid music museum.

Gershwin’s real life friend and full-time advocate, Oscar Levant, plays himself. Any opportunity to watch Levant’s freewheeling keyboard showboating (he also hand-doubled Alda’s scenes at the piano) is, for me, time well spent. There’s Paul Whiteman, the original commissioner of Rhapsody in Blue, conducting two different orchestras in the work that opens with that, yes, iconic, tremulous upward glissando on clarinet. There’s “Summertime” from Gershwin’s opera, Porgy and Bess, sung by the Broadway show’s original star, Anne Brown, whose coloratura high notes ping right inside your head. And there’s Al Jolson, replete in Blackface, singing “Swanee.” Swaying from side to side and rocking from heel to toe, with his inimitable hand gestures, Jolson is fascinating to watch.

Also restored to the RHAPSODY IN BLUE is the original overture/medley of Gershwin songs. And there we sat (I closed eyes for parts of it) for a full ten minutes like real grown ups, not fidgeting, not checking texts or email, not cramming popcorn, but just imbibing the aural stage-setting for this admirable but never fawning biopic recently given so much love.

Dance critic Debra Levine is founder/editor/publisher of arts●meme. Debra celebrated forty years of published dance criticism in 2024.