artcetera; THE WEEKLY QUIZ THAT TESTS YOUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE ARTS

1 Who was the piano-playing private investigator played by John Cassavetes in a classic Fifties TV series?

2 What jazz-based German opera set the world turning in 1927?

3 What film - described by Francois Truffaut as "the Beauty and the Beast of the western" - has Mercedes McCambridge and Joan Crawford as rival matriarchs getting het up over ownership of the local saloon?

4 Fill in the blanks: "Do not despair / For - - ; / He sleeps as sound /As - - -." Guess what the poem's called.

5 Another jazzy German: what musical ends with its lobotomised hero becoming an itinerant toy-seller, who won't stock military toys?

6 Who never ever learnt to read or write so well, but he could play a guitar just like a-ringin' a bell?

ANSWERS:

1 Johnny Staccato. 2 Ernst Krenek's Johnny spielt auf ("Johnny strikes up"), which famously ends with Johnny - a black jazz musician - dancing on a globe, an image that infuriated the Nazis. 3 Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar (1954). 4 Johnny-head-in-air, Johnny underground - from Roy Pudney's "For Johnny", probably best-known now through Anthony Asquith's RAF film The Way to the Stars (1945). 5 Kurt Weill's Johnny Johnson, a pacifist agitprop show (book by Paul Green), premiered in New York in 1936. 6 "Johnny B Goode".