Canada,
1985, 114 min
Shown in 1986
CREDITS
- dir
-
Brigitte Berman
- prod
-
Brigitte Berman
- scr
-
Brigitte Berman
- cam
-
Mark Irwin, Jim Aquila
- source
-
Bridge Film Productions, Toronto
-
COMMENTS
Opening Night film. Artie Shaw in person, who performed with his orchestra after the movie.
OTHER
Filmmaker Brigitte Berman delighted audiences at the 1981 SFIFF with her fine, expressionistic documentary about the legendary cornetist Bix Beiderbecke. This portrait so impressed Artie Shaw that he agreed to cooperate on the production of Time Is All You’ve Got, the first film to be made about the controversial clarinetist, band leader, composer and husband to some of Hollywood’s most glamorous ladies. Erudite, articulate and witty, Artie Shaw talks freely to the camera about his astonishing success during the big band era and the reasons why he twice quit the music business at the height of his fame; the notoriety he achieved with his “bad marriages” and “good divorces”; his brush with McCarthyism, his self-imposed exile and the years since his final Gramercy 5 recordings. Supported by interviews with many of his friends, including Mel Torme, Buddy Rich, Helen Forrest and Evelyn Keyes and liberally spiced with film clips, stills, actuality footage and plenty of music, this is an outstanding and definitive profile of a quite extraordinary man and his ideas.
—David Meeker
FACTOID #109
Though the film had won two major awards at the Berlin Film Festival, John Cassavetes’ Love Streams was pulled from the SFIFF program at the last minute by the distributor. According to Cassavetes, MGM/UA was concerned that showing Streams, which the director himself proclaimed ’a crazy film,’ at the SFIFF might hurt the film’s box office upon wider release
