Deep in My Heart

Tonight is the final night of Merle Oberon's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I haven't blogged about before, but had on my DVR, is Deep in My Heart, which airs overnight tonight at 12:45 AM (which is technically December 31 in the Eastern time zone but still December 30 in more westerly time zones). So, with that in mind, I held off on watching the movie and putting up a review until I could do it in conjunction with tonight's TCM showing.

Deep in My Heart starts off with the MGM orchestra performing an overture. This is actually a medley of songs composed by Sigmund Romberg, who is the subject of the movie. After the overture and opening credits, we're introduced to the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a young Sigmund (José Ferrer) works as a waiter at a Viennese-style café owned by Anna Mueller (Helen Traubel), composing Strauss-style music for the band to play. A musical agent shows up and likes Romberg's ability, but notes that this is a type of music that's old fashioned: if Romberg wants to make it as a composer, he's going to have to write music that's more with the times.

Romberg does do this, coming up with a formulaic song called "Leg of Mutton", which brings him to the attention of J.J. Shubert (Walter Pidgeon), an impresario who together with his brother was about to open what is the Shubert Theater on Broadway that still stands to this day. Shubert is putting on a show with star Gaby Deslys (Tamara Toumanova) and would like Romberg to write a song for her. This leads to part of the dramatic tension of the movie, such as that is, in that Romberg has artistic principles while Shubert and a bunch of other people all know better than Romberg what would be commercially successful. Indeed, there's a scene late in the movie where an adolescent girl says she likes one of the songs, but decries the show as a whole as opera.

Back to the meeting with Shubert, and Romberg's song is enough of a hit that he gets to keep working with Shubert and makes a lot of money. Unfortunately, he spends even more money than he earns, which ultimately results in his declaring bankruptcy and being forced to go back to Shubert to work on the sort of material that Shubert knows will be a commercial hit and make Romberg a tidy sum of money. Along the way, Romberg meets another actress, Dorothy Donnelly (Merle Oberon), who is a bit of a champion of Romberg's and who has some pretentions to higher art of her own. While on a tour of Europe just after the Great War, she comes across a play called Old Heidelberg that she snapped up the rights to, to work on a translation with lyrics that could be set to music. She wants Romberg to write the music, and the result is the successful operetta The Student Prince.

To fill out the plot, there's a romantic angle involving how Romberg meets his wife Lillian (Doe Avedon) in the Adirondack resort town of Saranac Lake while trying to work on songs for a musical where he faces a very tight deadline. (In fact, this was Romberg's second wife; his first wife isn't mentioned and IMDb doesn't even list her.) But a lot of the movie is just an excuse to bring in MGM's stars to do musical numbers of Romberg's songs.

Not that this is a bad thing, of course; people who like the Freed Unit musicals that MGM was putting out in this era are probably going to love Deep in My Heart even if it is a slightly different type of music. For me, the one big problem with the movie is the sense that, the way things play out, Sigmund Romberg comes across as the sort of person whose life wasn't quite interesting enough to be the subject of a Hollywood biopic. The actors all do quite well with the material they're given, and the stars performing the musical numbers -- including Gene Kelly with his brother Frank; Rosemary Clooney; Cyd Charisse and her husband Tony Martin in different numbers; Ann Miller; and more -- are more than competent at what they're asked to do. But the music may not be to everyone's taste, and the dramatic scenes in getting to the musical numbers are slow.

Still, for anyone who wants a bit of musical history or who wants to see an MGM musical that isn't as well remembered, Deep in My Heart is a movie of a high technical standard.