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Russell in Mahler remembers the opening gag on a musician's inspiration, "the house is burning but he goes on playing!" Lubitsch's storybook Vienna, a family affair, the most obscure Alfred Hitchcock dilemma. Johann Strauss the Younger (Esmond Knight) has the talent but not the confidence, Strauss Senior (Edmund Gwenn) is by far his harshest critic: "Admirable. Formidable. Such masterly contempt for form." The regal countess (Fay Compton) is encouraging while the toothy fiancée (Jessie Matthews) prefers the security of the bakery, a circular pan on the former at a grand piano is interrupted by a tracking shot on the latter warbling on a swing. Composing is a mysterious process, the protagonist has a melody in mind as he ponders chocolate and bread and rhythmic batter-stirring et voilà, The Blue Danube. (Songs and pastries are for consumption, he's told, why Schubert himself put the Unfinished Symphony on hold to enjoy cakes.) The fleet technique is best appreciated by Duvivier (The Great Waltz is a few years away), towering doors slam shut behind Matthews as she sweeps toward the camera from long-shot to close-up. "Tonight will go down in the history of music!" The presentation of the magnum opus is a warm-up for the Royal Albert Hall sequence in The Man Who Knew Too Much, a pulsing interplay of instruments, faces and swirling couples for the tuneful slaying of the father. (The aftermath is an illicit rendezvous with a duel-happy husband in hot pursuit, plus a seed of Vertigo in the switch of blondes and brunettes.) "Musician or confectioner?" is the quandary for a popular artist like Hitchcock, it dissolves with lights out at the pavilion and a smile. With Frank Vosper, Robert Hale, Hindle Edgar, and Betty Huntley-Wright. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |