Friday | October 6, 2006 7:00 pm

Delicious

Screening on Film

Directed by David Butler .
With Janet Gaynor, Charles Farrell, El Brendel.
US, 1931, 35mm, black & white, 104 min.

George Gershwin’s first original screen musical starred the popular romantic duo of Gaynor and Farrell in an immigrant saga about a Scottish lass who falls in love with a wealthy New York polo enthusiast. Though Gaynor performs only one song (“Somebody from Somewhere”), she’s the focal point of several major set pieces: the elaborate “Dream Sequence” that presages her welcome to the melting pot; and “New York Rhapsody,” an impressionistic urban tour that captures Gaynor’s fear and alienation as she wanders despairingly around Manhattan. Delicious combines the best of Broadway musical comedy with the visual dynamism unique to the medium of motion pictures.