8 Movies | Wednesday, February 8th and 15th
After winning two awards at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and earning an Oscar nomination for Best Writing, Story and Screenplay for his semi-autobiographical The 400 Blows (1959), French New Wave filmmaker François Truffaut made a 180 degree turn for his second film, 1960’s Shoot the Piano Player.
While The 400 Blows revolved around a troubled adolescent boy living in post-war Paris, Shoot the Piano Player was a film noir based on the crime novel “Down There” by David Goodis. The film, which was his tribute to American gangster films of the 1950s, revolved around a former concert pianist (Charles Aznavour) now working in a dingy dive bar in Paris who finds himself the target of gangsters.
“There isn’t much story to tell,” Truffaut explained when the film was released. “I have tried to give a portrait of a timid man, divided between society and his art, and to show his relationship with three women. But no treatise, no message, no psychology. It moves between the comic and the sad, and back again. I don’t assume any right to judge my characters like Jean Renoir. I think that everyone has his own reasons for behavior.”
Shoot the Piano Player airs on February 15th, and is part of our two nights of Piano Players programming on February 8th and February 15th. The programming features the Truffaut classic, six biographical dramas, and a romance—all involving pianists.
Hollywood always loves a good biopic. But the studios always played fast and loose with the facts. In fact, when A Song to Remember, Columbia’s lavish Technicolor drama based on the life of legendary Polish composer/pianist Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), was released in 1945, critics were very vocal about the “perverse” inaccuracies in the film.
Chopin (Cornel Wilde) was considered a top composer and renowned pianist in Warsaw at the age of 17. When Warsaw was put under Russian military rule, he left for Paris. But in the film, the idealistic Chopin is involved in a secret revolutionary organization who wants to rid Warsaw of the Russians. After he confronts a military leader, he is forced to flee Warsaw and go to Paris where he embarks on an affair with writer George Sand (Merle Oberon) over the protestations of his old piano teacher (Paul Muni).
A Song to Remember had been kicking around Hollywood since 1938. In fact, Frank Capra had originally been slated to direct and Marlene Dietrich had been mentioned to play George Sand. Charles Vidor (Gilda, 1946) ended up directing the production while Merle Oberon was cast as the writer.
This film, plus his other 1945 hit Leave Her to Heaven, made Cornel Wilde a star. In fact, he earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination for A Song to Remember but Ray Milland won that year for The Lost Weekend. Wilde had been kicking around Hollywood mainly in secondary roles. Wilde nearly didn’t get the role because he was considered too robust to play the sickly Chopin.
Renowned pianist José Iturbi dubbed Wilde’s piano playing without receiving billing because he was under contract to MGM. Pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi’s hands were Wilde’s “hands” in close-up.
The Oscar-winning Muni seems to have wandered in from another movie as Chopin’s devoted piano teacher. Sporting mutton chops, an indescribable accent and some weird hats, Muni chews the scenery whole providing some needed comic relief. Supposedly Muni, who received top billing over Wilde, decided how he wanted to play the character before production began and would not listen to Vidor’s directing advice.
The New York Times review noted that the script was a “dramatic hodgepodge, which provides absolutely no conception of the true character of the composer, or of such varied artistic contemporaries as George Sand, Chopin’s paramour or Franz. Chopin’s liaison with the brilliant, unconventional writer… has been twisted so that she becomes the ‘heavy rather than the inspirational factor in his music development.”
Audiences didn’t care. And you won’t either. The film was a huge hit and bobbysoxers went wild over Wilde. Besides Wilde, A Song to Remember also scored five more Oscar nominations including Best Music, Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture for Miklós Rozsa and Morris Stoloff.
Chopin also became a chart-topping success with Iturbi’s recording of Chopin’s “Polonaise” hitting the charts. Even more of a success was Perry Como’s “Till the End of Time,” which was “Polonaise” set to lyrics.
Ken Russell’s surreal 1975 Lisztomania starring Roger Daltrey of The Who as Hungarian composer/pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886) also appears in this showcase. Ironically, the term Lisztomania, which was also known as “Liszt” fever, was first mentioned by Heinrich Heine in 1844. The Hungarian pianist was the Harry Styles of his day, whipping the audience, especially women, into a frenzy.
Russell had just worked with Daltrey in his hit Tommy which had been released earlier in 1975. “Roger is a natural, brilliant performer,” Russell once noted. “He acts as he sings and the results are magical. He also has a curious quality of innocence which is why he was perfect Tommy and the only person to play Liszt.”
One report stated, “Liszt once threw away an old cigar stump in the street under the watchful eyes of an infatuated lady-in-waiting who reverently picked the offensive weed out of the gutter, had it encased in a locket and surrounded with the monogram ‘F.L’ in diamonds and went about her courtly duties unaware of the sickly odor it gave forth.”
Russell had previously made a series of acclaimed biographies for British TV, including most notably 1968’s Song of Summer about composer Frederick Delius. But the beauty and grace of Song of Summer gave way to jaw-dropping scenes in Lisztomania including one musical number in which Daltrey sports a gigantic phallus while enjoying a song and dance number with several chorus girls.
Ringo Starr plays the Pope who enlists Liszt to exorcise or excommunicate his arch-rival Richard Wagner described by the New York Times as a “kind of Nazi antichrist.”
Despite the incredible excesses, Lisztomania is worth watching because it is so gonzo. Let’s face it, this movie would never be made today.
David Puttnam and his Goodtimes production company had made a deal with Russell to do six films about composers including one on George Gershwin starring Al Pacino. Puttnam and Russell first collaborated on Mahler in 1974 which won the Technical Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
Puttnam would later say of Russell: "The problem was he never finished his screenplay, and frankly, he just seemed to go off his rocker.” Reviews were decidedly mixed with Roger Ebert giving it three out of four stars describing it as a “berserk exercise of demented genius, and on that level (I want to make my praise explicit) it functions and sometimes even works. Most people will probably despise.”
The New York Times was less enthusiastic calling it a “tiny, potentially appealing weed of a picture, absurdly dragged down by a mass of post-Beatles rococo. For Mr. Russell, the shortest line between two points is a pretzel, preferably painted gold and doped.”
The film was not a success and proved to be death knell to the duo’s composer biographies.
Liszt is also the subject of 1960’s Song Without End. This time around, dashing British actor Dirk Bogarde, sporting a pompadour Austin Butler would envy, plays Liszt, while model Capucine played Princess Carolyn Wittgenstein.
Just as with A Song to Remember, the film is filled with inaccuracies and falderal. According to TCM.com Bogarde and Capucine hated the script. And when director George Cukor asked Walter Bernstein to do rewrites, the screenwriter said, “My best advice to you is to get rid of Dirk Bogarde and get Sid Caesar.”
Columbia was inspired to do Song Without End because of the success of A Song to Remember. Studio head Harry Cohn finally announced in 1952 that it was on the production schedule. But it would be seven years before cameras began to roll. Charles Vidor, who had helmed A Song to Remember, was hired to direct this film. But three weeks into filming, he died of a heart attack. Rumor has it that he was having an affair with an extra when he succumbed.
Cukor was brought in to finish the film shooting about 85% of Song Without End. But it is Vidor who received director credit. According to TCM.com, Cukor turned down the credit because the film was not his “conception nor anything he would have done on his own.”
Bogarde studied with the same pianist as Wilde had done for A Song to Remember.
Initially it was reported that Van Cliburn would record the piano solos, but it was eventually Jorge Bolet who provided the lush piano music. The Los Angeles Philharmonic recorded the orchestral music.
Though Song Without End didn’t make beautiful music at the box office, it won the Oscar for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture for Morris Stoloff and Harry Sukman, in addition to the Golden Globe for Best Picture - Musical.
