What do you get when you mix ballet with film noir? Why, “Specter of the Rose,” of course.

Michael Chekhov (nephew of celebrated playwright Anton Chekhov), acclaimed by Konstantin Stanislavski as his most brilliant student, squanders an Academy Award nomination (for his turn as a Freudian analyst in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Spellbound”) to play an effete, cherubic-haired impresario, angling for a comeback of his star client, a dancer who may or may not have murdered his own wife. Admittedly, Chekhov does play the part well.

Ivan Kirov (a.k.a. John Joseph Kashkevich), born in Newark, plays the conflicted dancer, who suffers fits of psychosis (his character is named Sanine, transparently an anagram of insane), while looking all the world like Steve Martin in “Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.”

The indefatigable Ben Hecht, co-author of “The Front Page” (who probably did an uncredited rewrite of just about any Hollywood classic you can think of), here is the whole show. Not only is he the writer, but also the whacked-out auteur director, and he holds back on nothing: fruitcake premise, screwy dialogue, heightened performances, and Judith Anderson. If ever a screenplay sounded like it is being READ, it’s this one. How can this movie not be a camp classic?

To top it all off, the score is by Trenton’s own George Antheil, self-proclaimed “Bad Boy of Music,” whose “Ballet mécanique” sparked a riot in the streets following its premiere in Paris in 1926.

I’ve been looking for a copy of this overwrought curio for years, ever since I first saw it around the turn of the century, when I rented it on VHS from TLA Video, in its now-defunct brick-and-mortar incarnation, on Spruce Street near 16th, in Center City Philadelphia. To my knowledge, the film has never appeared on DVD, much less BluRay. I do a search periodically to see what I can turn up. (I no longer have a VHS player.) I am thankful to have discovered it here, on YouTube, in a pretty good print:

It’s listed as “currently unavailable to watch in your location” on Amazon Prime, under the title “Spectre of the Rose” (with the “e” and “r” reversed). Can there really be rights issues with a 1946 film released by a studio that no longer exists?

If this had been made by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, it would have long been part of The Criterion Collection.

More about Ben Hecht and “Specter of the Rose”:

https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fns03n12.html

Ivan Kirov:

Ivan Kirov, the dancing star of “Specter of the Rose”

Antheil’s “Specter of the Rose” Waltz:

Watching it again, I can’t help but think of Steve Martin’s “ballet parking”:

Sanine: Hug me with your eyes.

Haidi: I am.

Sanine: Harder.