At the
beginning, Andersen’s a cobbler who’s reprimanded by a schoolmaster who tells
him “the cobbler should stick to his last.” Apelles the painter said it first,
to a shoemaker who criticized the latchets in one of his paintings as
inauthentic, and then went on up the leg.
Aesop told a
fable to the Delphians who’d arrested him, they didn’t
get it and put him to death. Borges mentions an artist who aped the realm so
well the king had him put to death as a usurper.
The film takes
place in a storybook Denmark recognizable as far back as Chaplin’s The Kid.
Andersen is a memory of Balanchine, who was famous for being fertile of
invention, and who worked at Goldwyn in the Thirties. He’s also Andersen, whose
story about the piece of chalk is a spontaneous invention like Monroe Stahr’s
little tale in The Last Tycoon (“I’d like to know how it ends myself,”
says Andersen). All his stories are minute and charming.
In Copenhagen,
street cries evoke his inspiration in a manner Howard Nemerov would recognize.
The Royal Danish
Ballet is represented by Roland Petit and troupe. His pizazzy choreography is
presented in a manner shortly to be made perfect in Black Tights.
“The Little
Mermaid” also bows to The Red Shoes. It opens like Ken Russell’s The
Devils a little, and ends on a note of Balanchine.
Andersen is
subjected to cruel infatuation and humiliation, but finds consolation in his
gift, which is meat and drink to the multitudes.
Thunder in the East
A very ironical,
desperate situation filmed in quasi-historical terms (India, 1947) that meant
absolutely nothing to the New York Times
reviewer, or is it the complexity of its images? Friedkin’s Deal of the Century has a similar two-man
partnership in arms dealing, Alan Ladd is a Flying Tiger now headquartered in
Bombay, he flies into Ghandahar alone on spec with a cache of arms for the
Maharajah against outlaws about to descend upon the city. Charles Boyer as Ram
Singh the palace minister presents an able characterization on which the drama
pivots, the man of peace in a bind. He refuses to accept the arms and won’t
fire on his own people, he says.
There is no
British regiment, people are fleeing, a convoy out is massacred,
the Maharajah flies to the Riviera.
Deborah Kerr is a
blind English tour-guide who remembers Ghandahar from her childhood. John
Williams is a general with no uniform and no army. Philip Bourneuf gives a
remarkable performance as Nawab Khan the outlaw leader. The charming score by
Hugo Friedhofer has a song in it. Corinne Calvet, whose presence A.W. of the Times couldn’t fathom, is a Frenchwoman
of dubious character seeking passage to America.
Rhapsody
Charles Vidor’s
concerns are probably not your concerns, and that’s a concern of his. His
particular interest is the situation of the artist, not so much personally as
in the case of Hans Christian Andersen but with respect to the great
public, let us say, or the nation or the time. He posits a violinist playing
the Tchaikovsky Concerto, demonstrates (as Russell does) the music’s power to
sustain existence, and imagines the player as representing the ideal artist
outside of time or nation. Opposite to this is a pianist in the Rachmaninov
Second Concerto, a man bereaved by his love of a girl who loves the violinist.
All of this is brought to the fore in the pianist’s concert.
The girl is
wealthy, her father is the same sort of independent-minded sophisticate as the
violinist and turns down an invitation to the latter’s concert by saying, “I’ve
heard the Tchaikovsky Concerto.” She is a dilettante who is jokingly said to
“play on men’s hearts like a xylophone,” and that is the way she plays at her
entrance examination for the Zurich Conservatory, recalling Beckett’s pianist
who played every note of Mozart “with xylophonic precision,” and not even
precise. Music bores her, save such “tongs and bones” and a little tune the
pianist remembers as his first piece, one she sang as a child, a Flemish
folk-tune which begins, “See how I’m jumping”.
Klee recalls for
us the boredom of a Swiss orchestra, compounded by the local composers and only
relieved by occasional visits from Richard Strauss to conduct. The ennui of
musical training is insisted upon throughout the film.
Vidor’s delicate,
complex, elegant and profound Technicolor compositions are mainly keyed to
Swiss sensibilities, but there is a Braque chiaroscuro in one shot of the
pianist approaching the girl’s room, the Ritz Bar in Paris is bright and
streamlined. His monumental settings of the two concert performances (Michael
Rabin and Claudio Arrau filling in) are like representations of music itself,
and a well-known gypsy melody in the student café brings out everyone’s fiddle.
There are
countless subtleties, all of which were lost on Halliwell’s Film Guide,
which described itself in these words, “Tedious romantic drama which vainly
attempted a smart veneer but boasted a splendid musical sound track.” What is
cinema to Halliwell but musique de fond?
Love Me or Leave Me
Vidor organizes
the double-wide screen right and left, principally, as the basis of the
technique. The Gimp is nearly always seen to have just come in the door, Etting
across from him at her dressing table or wardrobe. Loomis the agent adds a
significant composition, Etting at the bar left, the Gimp at the fireplace
center (or the door far right), Loomis on the sofa center right. The main
statement of this is first given before the marriage, the scene is articulated
in a foyer, Loomis is associated with a grandfather
clock, the Gimp with an open bedroom door in the center background, Etting with
a chair and nook right.
Minnelli applies
a version of this technique (champ contre champ in the camera) to Some
Came Running,
Losey moves the camera through a direct articulation of image in The Go-Between.
Intelligibility is the entire concern of Vidor’s usage,
every composition conveys its significance.
Etting early on
takes the stage, short steps on the far left tell how she got there. Centrally,
the dilemma in a spotlight is amplified and isolated by steps on either side and wings. The final scene is a monumental
expression of the whole film, Etting onstage at the Gimp’s nightclub, under his
wreathed monogram, with tables both to right and left, a column right.
Precisely this
method of working is shown on a sound stage where Etting sits on a swing with a
camera attached to it, the entire apparatus passes behind a dark tree left and
up toward the lights right.
The complex
variations and minute interweavings of theme and character
make this an ideal form in Vidor’s repertoire.
Cagney is pure
New York, immensely carried to the point of ultimate expression, very much in
the line of thought proceeding through Ford’s What Price Glory. Day’s
musicality is especially evident, the diffident, restless, green-eyed blonde
hoofs it and modulates a number into a sort of contraption studied intently by
the Gimp with great appreciation, he is a true æsthete, Etting
is a great singer his screw-eyed appraisal can’t miss.