Movie Without End

Dirk Bogarde was TCM's Star of the Month last fall, and it gave me the opportunity to record several of his films that I hadn't seen before. One of these was Song Without End, which I mentioned briefly a few months back due to the short that preceded it when TCM ran it.

Song Without End is a biopic of Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt. As the movie opens up, he's finished his time in Paris, where he set the world on fire with his piano concerts. He left for a village in the Alps due to the insisitence of the Countess D'Agoult (Geneviève Page), the mother of his children, who wanted him to raise his children rather than being a rock-star performer. Since then, another man, Thalberg, has become the pianist toast of Paris, so Liszt's friends Chopin and George Sand come down to the Alps to visit him. Them having visited him, it gives him the idea to go back to Paris and put on another concert to show he's the one who still has the drawing power, not this upstart Thalberg.

Liszt's concert is, a you might guess, the one that's a big hit. Among the few audience members at the concert that Thalberg ultimately cancels is Princess Wittgenstein (Capucine). She decides she should go to the Liszt concert to see what Liszt is all about. This gives the viewer the chance to listen to a lot of piano music, and it's not just Liszt's music, as he was known to promote quite a few composers, from the aforementioned Chopin to the tragic Robert Schumann and, later in the movie, Richard Wagner.

Anyhow, the Princess, having seen Liszt, falls for him just like all the girls in Lisztomania which I blogged about over the summer did. Except that there's a slight problem, which is that she's already quite married to Russian Prince Nikolai. Still, despite having children by one woman, Liszt also falls for the Princess, and follows her to Vienna looking for any excuse to do so. He then follows her to imperial Russia when the Prince asks him for a command performance for the Czar.

A further problem for Franz is that despite not being faithful to one woman, he'd really like to consider himself an observant, even devout Catholic, having thought about joining the clergy. And for Catholics, when it comes to marrige, the marriage is supposed to be eternal, only to be broken by the death of one of the partners. Just watch A Man for All Seasons. Yes, you can get an annulment, but that's only supposed to happen in very limited circumstances. Granted, for the class of people Liszt was pursuing, it was just as much political. But politics might always go wrong.

The story in Song Without End isn't the most exciting one, as Liszt was "just" a celebrity anot not a political leader, when the whole political marriage thing would carry overtones of serious foreign relations. The story is also given somewhat short shrift, which I think is a deliberate choice. Liszt composed a lot, but also performed a lot of other people's music, and there's a ton of music from multiple performers put on the screen here. If you like classical piano, you'll definitely like the music. It would just be nice if it could be in service of a better story.

A competition

I did a review of the Elizabeth Taylor movie Rhapsody not too long ago. I was thinking of that movie when I recently watched The Competition, as both have decided classical music themes and a stock plot.

The Competition opens up with Paul Dietrich (Richard Dreyfuss) winning third place in a midwestern piano competition. You'd think that's pretty good, but there's a glut of would-be concert pianists out there, and third-best in one region isn't quite going to cut it for trying to become a concert pianist. It doesn't help that Paul is the stock character type of the standoffish heterodox player, similar to the sort of cop you see in 70s and 80s police movies, only with the character traits transferred to a classical pianist. He's got a job offer to become a... public school music teacher. Yippee.

His parents suggest he take one last chance, to submit an audition tape to a prestigious competition held every year in San Francisco. They've been subsidizing him to this point, and don't want to see him fail. Paul feels that if he can only come in third in the midwest, how can he win a much bigger national competition. But he enters anyway, since it's the last year he can enter before he reaches the age limit. Besides, he's not so certain he wants to become a school teacher, having seen what it's done to his best friend.

Then there's young Heidi Schoonover (Amy Irving). She clearly comes from a much richer family, and they have the money to have a prestigious music teacher like Greta Vandermann (Lee Remick), who can trace her musical tutlage back to Beethoven, give her one-on-one masterclasses. Heidi isn't certain she's good enough for a competition like the one out in San Francisco, so Greta greases the skids by sending in a tape for Heidi. Unsurprisingly, both Heidi and Paul are selected among the 12 semifinalists, or else we wouldn't have much of a movie.

So our two protagonists make their way out to San Francisco, where they find they've been pitted against a bunch of other stock characters. There's Jerry DiSalvo (Joseph Cali), who looks like he could be the same character John Travolta played in Saturday Night Fever, only moved from disco over to classical music. He figures that the competition might be a good way to get a gig at one of the Las Vegas hotels. I mean, have you seen how much money Liberace makes?. There's a nice enough but slightly odd black guy who thankfully isn't there to go on about racism (I say thankfully because that would have been a supremely easy trap for the screenwriters to fall into); a nondescript guy; and, the other important character Tatjana, a young Soviet pianist who was obviously invited in the spirit of détente. Tatjana and her music teacher are kept on a close leash by their Soviet handlers, but the teacher has been planning this as a way to defect in what is the big subplot of the movie.

I suppose you could technically call it the second subplot. The competition is supposed to be the main plot, but alongside that is the relationship between Paul and Heidi. They apparently know each other from music school days, but Paul has that reputation for being a bit of a rebel and difficult to deal with, and Heidi has certainly had to deal with that before. But you also know that the two are going to fall in (and possibly back out of) love while the competition is going on.

The big problem with The Competition is the extent to which it relies on hoary plot lines and characterizations. The bright spot is the piano music. Now, none of the actors involved could play piano at a competition level, but a music teacher was brought in to train these actors in how to fake it to look like they really were playing the pieces, to a more realistic standard than a lot of other movies and TV shows. The producers hired real up-and-coming pianists to do the actual playing of the concerti in the competition. They didn't get a real conductor, instead casting Sam Wanamaker to play the temperamental (what a surprise) conductor.

If you like classical music, then you'll probably enjoy the classical music scenes in The Competition. Having said that, the rest of the music is terribly dated to late-era disco. Surprisingly, the movie also received an Oscar nomination for the song that plays over the closing credits. I say surprisingly because, as I've mentioned in posts on other movies from 1980, that year was an extremely strong year for original songs and there was a lot that could have gotten the fifth slot over the song here.