More movie maestros
Here are two earlier cinematic looks at the life of the conductor, including one in which a real-life conductor plays himself.
UNFAITHFULLY YOURS
Preston Sturges’ black screwball comedy wasn’t a box-office hit in 1948, perhaps because it takes a while for the comedy to kick in, unlike his earlier films. He got the idea for it in the early 1930s, when he realized how much the music he was listening to influenced the script he was writing at the time.
Now Unfaithfully Yours is held in high regard by critics and film professionals, with Pauline Kael calling it “One of the most sophisticated slapstick comedies ever made ... writers and directors have been stealing from it for years, but no one has ever come close to replicating [its] wild-man devilry,” and Quentin Tarantino naming it one of his 10 favorite flicks.
In the film, Rex Harrison is Sir Alfred de Carter, a distinguished orchestral conductor who mistakenly suspects his much younger, beautiful wife, Daphne, played by Linda Darnell, of adultery. During a concert, the plots for the three pieces he conducts suggest to him three very different methods by which he could conclude the affair.
The works in question are the overture to Rossini’s Semiramide, during which he imagines suavely dispatching Daphne with a straight razor and framing her lover for the crime; the overture to Wagner’s Tannhäuser, during which he nobly steps aside in favor of the younger man; and Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, during which he dispatches himself in a game of Russian roulette.
Sir Alfred becomes emotionally overwrought during each one, and the audience goes wild for his over-the-top interpretations. He returns to his apartment and attempts to enact each scenario, only to bungle them hilariously as skewed versions of the related music are heard on the soundtrack. Needless to say, he and Daphne reconcile.
105 minutes, no rating; available online from Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV+, and Vudu; DVDS are available at Amazon and other retailers and from the Santa Fe Public Library and Video Library. (Note: The 1984 remake with Dudley Moore and Nastassja Kinski is not an acceptable substitute.)
ONE HUNDRED MEN AND A GIRL
They didn’t have to teach an actor how to look convincing as an orchestra conductor for this one. They hired Leopold Stokowski to play himself, and he did so reasonably well, three years before Fantasia made him even more famous.
The girl of the title was Deanna Durbin, who was 15 when the film was released in 1937. Her specialty was classical music, which she sang with a flexible, light soprano, a style very much in vogue at the time. (Even so, Walt Disney turned her down for the role of Snow White, saying her voice sounded “too old.”)
The 100 men were unemployed musician friends of her father, an out-of-work trombone player. Deanna gets a wealthy society woman to sponsor the orchestra and, after several attempts, convinces Stokowski to conduct them by sneaking all 100 into the conductor’s home and playing an arrangement of Lizst’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 for him.
The concert is a big success, and when Stokowski brings her onstage to thank her for rounding up the money and the musicians, she gets tonguetied and decides to sing the drinking song from Verdi’s La Traviata instead. Durbin also sings the
Alleluia from Mozart’s “Exultate, jubilate” and “It’s Raining Sunbeams.”
As the girl-next-door type who rained sunbeams and high notes all over the celluloid, she was understandably popular during the latter part of the Great Depression. Winston Churchill’s favorite film, One Hundred Men and a Girl is by no means a masterpiece, but it provides charm in a fairy-tale type story, solid direction, and a skilled cast including Adolphe Menjou, Mischa Auer, and Billy Gilbert, alongside the chance to see and hear Stokowski.
84 minutes, no rating; not currently available on streaming platforms; DVDS are available from Amazon and other retailers.