Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen.(Video recording review)

Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen. DVD. Produced by Daniel Iron, Niv Fichman, and Larry Weinstein for Rhombus Media. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2003. ISBN: 1-59458-074-X. Available from Bullfrog Films (www.bullfrogfilms.com). $275.00.

As a popular stage and screen songwriter, Harold Arlen composed such classics as "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," "It's Only a Paper Moon," "Get Happy," "The Man that Got Away," "Down with Love," and of course, "Stormy Weather." During his lifetime Arlen mingled within the Gershwin salon, collaborated with lyricists Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg. Ted Koehler, and Johnny Mercer to name a few, and was often compared to George Gershwin in terms of his ability to compose substantial songs with pathos for the blues.

And speaking of the blues, that's what I got when I viewed Stormy Weather: The Music of Harold Arlen (2003). The film begins with a misty scene where Ranee Lee sings "Stormy Weather" in a blues style (with annoyingly mediocre lip synchronization). The action continues as we follow Arlen (played by actor Paul Soles) over the course of one evening late in his life, while he views various television documentaries of his own career, which subsequently trigger fictional flashbacks and strange performance visualizations and stylizations of his own popular songs.

This film takes a depressingly dim view of Arlen's career by obsessing over a guilt he may have felt by not properly caring for his mentally-ill wife during her lifetime. While it is well documented that Arlen was not productive as a composer after Anya Taranda Arlen's passing in 1970, it seems that only a filmmaker with a propensity toward depression and psycho-analysis would choose to spend an entire 78 minutes on hallucinogenic-like moments during the unproductive time of a brilliant career such as Arlen's. ...