Has anybody noticed?

He was an emotionally troubled man and occasionally received treatment in mental institutions. But he did have a sense of humor about it. he once said, "There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line."

First, Oscar Levant had had a major heart attack only a couple weeks before starting shooting on the film. Second, he was one of the all-time great users of prescription mood-altering drugs. Refer to his second book(he wrote three), entitled "Memoirs of an Amnesiac." Once, at a party, he embraced Judy Garland, a good friend of his, and then announced that their embrace had been a great moment in pharmeceutical history. He was like that.

I don't think anybody knows what was really wrong with Levant. He was a psychiatrist's field study. Depression mostly. If you look at the first THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT number with the four central characters in the beginning of THE BAND WAGAON, you'll see Levant supposedly balancing the other three on his shoulders, then stepping out to show it's an illusion. But you see Levant grimmace. He had had a heart attack and was in pain.

Levant appeared on the Jack Paar Friday night show in the early '60's. The public hadn't seen him in years and generally everyone was shocked: he twitched, referred to the drugs he was taking, appeared to be out of it. At first it was hilarious as he poked fun at himself: "I would bow to your applause, but I would only fall down." Then in subsequent appearances, his physical condition got worse and it wasn't funny. Paar himself looked unsettled.

Catch Levant sometime in the movie THE COB WEB. He's in a mental institution. Art imitating life?

Dennis Caracciolo

Poor guy. What a messed up life. It looked like he had a lot of talent too with music and such. I just watched "An American in Paris" again and he looks messed up in that too. He tries, but...you can't always hide being messed up I guess.

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"It won't do/to dream of caramal/think of cinnamon/and long for you..."

There seemed to be a running joke with his delicate state due to the heart attack. With the man banging into him before the taxi and there was a slap on the back that about knocked him down. I would think that it was more pain than drugs although he was probably on some heavy medication. You can see it much more in the performance scenes. It looks like he is just trying his best to get through it. I was wondering why his hands were still clenched at the end of his first routine and wondered why they didn't retake to fix it. It was probably the best he could muster and Minnelli didn't want to make him suffer through any more. I'm sure many things were re-worked to accomodate him and his condition. The show must go on. He is in top form in Humoresque if you want to see his wit at work.

Before making Oscar Levant out to be some kind if hop-head, consider that much of his persona, including the hypochondria, obsessive-compulsiv e (I can't delete that space!), manic-depressive "disorders" were shtick, like Dean Martin and Phil Harris with their drinking. I also read Memoirs of an Amnesiac, and I got the feeling that I was reading a routine rather than a memoir. Remember, Levant's epitaph reads, "I told you I was sick."

Consider that he looked the part naturally, with the squints and the tics and the fidgets. Compare him, for example, to Glenn Gould, another great piano prodigy, who was simply all over the place. You can always recognize a Gould audio by his grunt & groan singalong in the background. And Gould was no druggie. So, if Levant looked stoned, maybe it was because his natural look gave him a head start. A normal dose would have amplified the look. General Grant was popularly considered a drunk, but historians say he wasn't a drunk, in the sense of being an alcoholic, but that he was just a cheap drunk, who got stoned on a glass of wine. Maybe Levant got stoned on just one Miltown.

Certainly Levant took drugs. Psychotropic drugs were the cutting edge in Levant's era, and everyone who had access to them used them, sometimes recreationally, but mostly to self-medicate, without really knowing what they were doing. And the prescribing doctors didn't know much more. Jack Buchanan was probably "stoned," too, since he had just had serious root canal work, and Nanette Fabray had a big gash in her knee that she was expected to dance on for the "Triplets" number, so she had to be on pain killers as well.

Hey, that accounts for all the second leads! Maybe that's why they were more interesting than the stars.

In which movies does Van Johnson seem drunk to you, or Milland? I knew about Dana Andrews--he made public service announcements after he got sober later in life. Not disputing--just curious.

Milland was playing an alcoholic on a series of binges in "The Lost Weekend," so it's only natural that he would appear drunk. He won an Academy Award for the performance, so it might just have been good acting. Though I wouldn't be surprised if he drank a bit to help the performance.