Does anyone else remember the time Kolchak the Night Stalker met Frederic Chopin?

I always assumed Kolchak was a Slavic name, but here’s photographic evidence that, indeed, he was a student with the famed Polish pianist and composer.

Darren McGavin was hard at work painting scenery at Columbia Pictures in 1945, when he caught wind of auditions being held for a Chopin biopic, titled “A Song to Remember.” Cornel Wilde would play the immortal pianist-composer, and Paul Muni his teacher. McGavin’s role would be so small, he wouldn’t even receive screen credit, but his very casting was momentous, since it would mark his film debut. Once he rinsed the paint out of his brush that day, he never looked back.

He had already clocked countless hours on stage, film, and especially television, by the time he donned the rumpled seersucker and crumpled raffia as Kolchak, muckraker of the macabre, in the early 1970s.

Here, McGavin appears second from the left. Wilde is second from the right, with Muni, center, as Prof. Joseph Elsner.

The great irony, of course, is that “A Song to Remember” is such a generic title that it is easy to forget – or at least to confuse with “Song of Love” (1947, about the Schumanns) and “Song without End” (1960, about Liszt).

Follow the link for McGavin. He’s on the left side of the room, wearing a cap, already a scene-stealer, at one point trying to draw attention to himself by scratching his head with a piece of straw, which he then holds in his mouth. The entire scene lasts a mere 90 seconds.