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The first shot has it, sometimes cinema is a tranquil vista and sometimes it's a house on fire. "Why is everyone so literal these days?" Birth on a rocky shore, a long expiration aboard a train back to Austria for Gustav Mahler (Robert Powell), memories and dreams along the way. A bashful Pinocchio as a boy, sallow and neurotic like Kafka in adulthood. Composing in his lakeside cabin, he calls for silence—wife Alma (Georgina Hale) hops to it, hushing babies and bells and bands in a charming interlude out of Duvivier's The Great Waltz. Her own art however withers under his shadow, her composition boxed and buried and mourned to Liebestod like a stillborn child. The brassy homecoming, avoided: "What shall I tell them?" "Tell them their music gives me the shits!" Ken Russell's rollicking reverie is explicitly a dig at Visconti, at the first station Mahler watches the Death in Venice characters with a wry smile before a journalist barges in. Father's pricey investment is no match for a walk in the woods, the "divine spark" is strange like that. The silent scream inside one's own coffin (cf. Dreyer's Vampyr), just a pair of eyeballs out of the crematorium while the widow cavorts with the nemesis (Richard Morant). The brush with the Emperor is a sketch expanded in Forman's Amadeus, Hugo Wolf bare-assed in the catacombs reappears in Valentino and Altered States. Harpo Marx's horn announces the Jew's conversion in showbiz, why not, Lang's Die Nibelungen with fire-breathing pork and Cosima Wagner (Antonia Ellis) as Brunhilde as Ilsa She-Wolf of the SS. "O magnum mysterium!" The revelation turns out to be conjugal therapy, the doctor's prognosis waits at the end of the line. With Lee Montague, Miriam Karlin, Rosalie Crutchley, Peter Eyre, Dana Gillespie, and George Coulouris.
--- Fernando F. Croce |