Lord knows, there have been plenty of eyerolling movies about classical musicians, especially classical music composers. How many times have I seen Liszt portrayed (by Dirk Bogarde, Henry Daniell, Julian Sands, Roger Daltrey, etc.)? Sometimes, these historical figures are played by actual musicians (Gustav Leonhardt as Bach, Gidon Kremer as Paganini; there was even talk at one point about Leonard Bernstein playing Tchaikovsky, with Greta Garbo as Nadezhda van Meck!), but can even the most skilled virtuoso, or maestro, as the case may be, ever live up to accrued legend?
I know I’ve posted a link to the Leonhardt Bach film here in the past (“The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach,” 1968). Now, on the anniversary of the birth of Franz Liszt – the progenitor of the piano recital, the creator of the symphonic poem, and perhaps the greatest pianist in an era teeming with great pianists – is footage of one of his most renowned interpreters, Sviatoslav Richter, portraying Liszt in a Soviet film about Mikhail Glinka.
Can even Richter live up to the legend? See for yourself in this clip from “The Composer Glinka” (1952).
BONUS SECTION:
Henry Daniell, one of Hollywood’s most supercilious villains, as Liszt in “Song of Love” (1947)
Roger Daltrey as the Abbé Liszt, in cassock, having his blood sucked by vampire Wagner in Ken Russell’s “Lisztomania” (1975)
Corny Hungarian peasant sequence with Dirk Bogarde as Liszt in “Song without End” (1960)
Frustration of the day: only 60 seconds of Richter playing Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor
Richter talks about the Liszt sonata, with more footage from the same read-through
Richter playing the complete work in concert (audio only)
Figurative laurels for Franz Liszt (1811-1886) on his birthday!
I confess, at first I was a little hesitant to watch the documentary “Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story,” given its National Geographic TV premiere earlier this month (now with other streaming options). Anything to do with animals always gets me right in the heart. Even if there’s not death, there’s bound to be separation, and nothing has the potential to devastate me like separation from an adorable otter. I was taken to see “Ring of Bright Water” when I was a kid, and I think it must have traumatized me for life. If the film doesn’t end with an otter wearing a houndstooth vest having tea with a guy, chances are I probably won’t be able to handle it.
I am proud of myself, then, that, the likelihood of sobbing be damned, I committed to viewing it. This artistically-framed, gorgeously-shot, deeply-moving film not only delivers on the promise of love, but is full of wonder and wit and, yes, depending on your level of sensitivity, pretty much guaranteed to have you furtively wiping away a few tears as it quietly restores your faith in humanity.
A lost otter turns up on a man’s dock outside his home in the Shetland Islands (the northernmost region of the United Kingdom). It’s undernourished and unsteady and wrestling to get meat out of a crab. The man, Billy, quickly deduces this must be the pup of a mother otter he had seen dead at the side of the road. He has no idea what to do, but he decides to name the pup Molly, and his little, loving gestures deepen into a kind of paternal bond. They also have evident effect, as Molly begins to regain her health and, in her way, repay the investment. Soon Billy and the otter are inseparable.
What follows is a parallel revivification of both their lives, and also a revitalization of the lives of Billy and his wife, Susan. The movie is as much about the human couple, who take turns narrating the film, as it is about the otter who changes them. Seesawing between patience and exasperation, Susan assists with the installation of a second freezer, as the first has been packed solid with haddock for Molly. At the same time, she shrewdly observes the transformative effect this unusual friendship is having on her husband. A later wrinkle, concerning the installation of WiFi, is hilarious.
The film’s tone is simple, occasionally wry, and unsentimental, as stoic as Billy is, in fact, understanding that all the warmth and emotion is inherent in the story itself. At points, narrative is stripped away entirely, and we are left only with the beauty of loving interaction. Okay, there are one or two places where you may be overwhelmed by cuteness. I don’t want to ruin anything for you, but just imagine what kind of shelter Wes Anderson might create if he were to befriend a wild otter.
There’s also an unflappable sheepdog named Jade, who just loves her ball so much, carrying, catching, and headbutting it everywhere (including in a highly-amusing, fabricated dream sequence).
Director Charlie Hamilton-James finds beauty everywhere. What could be less prepossessing than the idea of winter in sub-arctic Shetland, you might think? But Hamilton-James discovers poetry in raging black seas and austere crags, and amusement and philosophical reflection in a local ceremony involving the ritualistic construction and destruction of a Viking longboat.
It might be tempting to dismiss Billy’s job at a utility plant as soul-crushing. But again, Hamilton-James frames his visuals such as to imbue the hard hats, the file boxes, the blast furnaces, and the grapple claws with an appealing dignity. There’s organization and purpose to be found even in Billy’s tendency to fold his empty crisps bag into what any American school kid would recognize immediately as a triangular “football.”
Billy and Susan text back and forth during the course of his workday, as he checks in on Molly. In the meantime, Susan puts together the puzzle pieces of the widening scope of the otter’s freewheeling adventures.
The human race as a whole may be a lost cause, but every once in a while, one of us exhibits a little grace. That’s certainly the case here with Billy, and God bless him for it. I don’t care what this man’s politics are, how he worships, or what goes on in his bedroom. As Susan observes, “I would rather have a man who cares than one who doesn’t.” What’s important is that Billy cares about the right things.
He’s so laconic, he would never say so, but his love for Molly is evident from the start. She awakens his paternal instincts, as he does the best he can in the roles of protector and teacher. Ultimately, however, the dynamic flips, and it is Molly who opens Billy’s eyes to the expansive beauty of the world around them – there’s a point where he recognizes a dead animal as another being, “just like us,” as opposed to simply gull food – and he learns the important lesson that the supposed barrier between man and nature is, in the end, a fiction.
The film makes a powerful conservationist argument while at no point lecturing about conservation. What words are there to equal the persuasive impact of the sublime drone aerial footage and underwater photography? The images, the narrative, the moving simplicity of this love story between man and animal, all speak for themselves.
“Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story,” at 1 hour and 17 minutes, is a lesson in trust and the appreciation of simple things and how powerful and transformative they can be. Human and animal, we’re all in the same boat – in this case, quite literally! – and everything is so exquisitely beautiful and fragile.
I can’t even make it through the trailer now without getting choked up. If you want to feel hopeful about people, our place in the world, and what it means to be alive, watch this movie.
With all the brouhaha surrounding Bradley Cooper’s Leonard Bernstein nose, it’s not even on most people’s radar yet that John Malkovitch is playing Romanian maestro Sergiu Celibidache. I’m not sure there’s enough make-up in the world to effect that transformation!
Celibidache, one-time conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic, gained notoriety for his uncompromising pursuit of “the transcendent moment,” his exhaustive rehearsals, and his refusal to record.
Of course, the market is flooded with Celibidache recordings, many of them from his years in Munich, but these are all byproducts of actual live concerts. Few of them could be described as pedestrian.
Equally, few would be described as “definitive.” When Celibidache was “on,” he could be like nobody else; but when he was “off” – again, he could be like nobody else.
How do you even say his name? Repeat after me: Cheh-lee-bee-DAH-keh.
In June, Malkovich conducted an orchestra before 4000 extras in Bucharest, reenacting a concert that Celibidache gave in Philadelphia with the Munich Philharmonic in 1989. No word yet as to whether or not he’ll be donning a Shemp Howard wig.
“The Yellow Tie,” directed by Serge Ioan Celibidache, the conductor’s son, costars Miranda Richardson and Sean Bean. The film is expected to be released next year.
On Anton Bruckner’s birthday, Celi conducts the Symphony No. 7
Celi documentary, “The Garden of Celibidache”
Malkovich interviewed on Romanian television
Celibidache has a fever, and the only prescription is more viola!
Throughout his career, Ken Russell alternately tickled and tried the patience of audiences and critics alike with his excesses in films like “The Devils” (1971), “Tommy” (1975), “Gothic” (1986), and “Salome’s Last Dance” (1988). (The latter was memorably reviewed in the Philadelphia Inquirer and given a rating of three question marks.)
But he had a parallel fascination with the great composers and also directed features or short subjects about Bartók, Bax, Bruckner, Delius, Elgar, Mahler, Martinu, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Vaughan Williams, and perhaps most notorious of all, Franz Liszt.
In “Lisztomania” (1975), The Who’s Roger Daltrey plays Liszt and Wagner is portrayed as a kind of zombie-Nosferatu-Frankenstein’s monster-Hitler, whose electric guitar doubles as a machine gun. (I’m not kidding.)
Occasionally, Russell also directed staged opera, including a production of Boito’s “Mefistofele,” with Faust reimagined as an aging hippie.
On Claude Debussy’s birthday, would you buy Oliver Reed as the great French composer? Why not?
Words on the printed page captivate us so completely that it’s natural to assume that the lives of writers must be rich, full of incident, and very dramatic indeed. Surely that is sometimes the case. Who among us could keep up with a Byron or a Pushkin or a Poe?
Yet even with the most outlandish writers, Hollywood, for some reason, often feels the need to fabricate. How else to explain “Devotion” (1943), Warner Brothers’ salute to the Brontës? Then again, the temptation must be strong to characterize the sisters who penned “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights” as tortured Romantics.
Ida Lupino plays Emily, the creator of Cathy and Heathcliff, and Olivia de Havilland, Charlotte, who conceived Jane and Rochester. Nancy Coleman is their sister Anne, who wrote “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall,” and Arthur Kennedy, their dissolute brother Branwell. The film also features Sidney Greenstreet as William Makepeace Thackeray, Paul Henreid as an Irish priest, and – well, you get the idea. The casting, at times, strains credibility.
However, the music by Erich Wolfgang Korngold is up to the composer’s usual high standard. Korngold himself became so enamored of one of its themes that he recycled it for use in the first movement of his Violin Concerto.
The behind-the-scenes drama on “Devotion” is nearly as colorful as anything that made it to the screen. De Havilland had originally been cast to play Emily, and her real-life sister, Joan Fontaine, was to play Charlotte. De Havilland and Fontaine had an uneasy relationship, at best, their entire lives. At times they competed for the same men (Howard Hughes) and the same roles (Melanie in “Gone With the Wind” and the “second Mrs. De Winter” in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rebecca”). In 1942, they were both in contention for the Academy Award for Best Actress. Fontaine won. De Havilland wouldn’t win her first Oscar until 1946. To say that the two were competitive is putting it mildly.
Fortunately for everyone on the set, an offer had come through for Fontaine to play Charlotte Brontë’s most famous creation, Jane Eyre, opposite Orson Welles’ Rochester, over at 20th Century Fox. So De Havilland assumed the part vacated by Fontaine.
After shooting wrapped, “Devotion” actually sat on the shelf for three years, as De Havilland successfully sued Warner Brothers to terminate her contract without her having to make up the six months she had been kept on “suspension.” Until then, actors under contract to the major studios had been considered suspended between jobs, thereby extending their obligation to their employers, so that, for instance, a seven year contract was spread out over a much longer period, fulfilled only during the time an actor was actually working. The legal victory became informally known as the De Havilland Law.
In addition to Korngold’s take on the Brontës, we’ll have music from movies inspired by Iris Murdoch (“Iris,” with music by James Horner), the Bard of Avon (“Shakespeare in Love,” with an Academy Award-winning score by Stephen Warbeck), and Samuel Clemens (“The Adventures of Mark Twain,” by Max Steiner).
I hope you’ll join me for real-life writers who appeared as characters in the movies, on “Picture Perfect,” this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network at wwfm.org.
