Anybody else remember this piece of corn? I saw it in the theater back in 1980. Two pianists (Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving) improbably fall in love while preparing for the biggest competition of their lives.
Of course, I enjoyed “The Competition,” even if it was preposterous, but it gained an awful lot from Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 – a mid-performance substitute for a Mozart concerto (!) – and those creepy trees that were so memorably featured in the remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Sam Wanamaker makes a good caricature of a Bernstein-type conductor.
The whole thing is an eyeball-rolling throwback to the kind of classical music melodramas once overseen by middlebrow movie moguls in the 1940s. Was the always-pugnacious Dreyfuss the John Garfield of his day?
Limp trailer employing Lalo Schifrin’s love theme
More compelling TV ads using the Prokofiev 3rd
What’s the last Hollywood movie that gave us something like this?
