This week on “Picture Perfect,” with another year nearly burnt to nub, it’s an hour of cinematic reflections on time and impermanence.
“Kings Row” (1942), based on the bestselling novel of Henry Bellamann (the one-time dean of the Curtis Institute of Music), takes place over a span of decades in a small Midwestern town. The community’s dark underbelly, gradually revealed, proves especially challenging to the story’s three protagonists, played by Robert Cummings, Ann Sheridan and Ronald Reagan.
The deteriorating health of Cumming’s character’s grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya, best known as Maleva, the gypsy fortune teller, in the 1943 version of “The Wolfman”) moves one of the film’s supporting characters to eulogize the passing of “… a whole way of life. A way of gentleness and honor and dignity. These things are going… and they may never come back to this world.” The story straddles the turn of the 20th century, even incorporating a New Year’s scene set in the year 1900.
Erich Wolfgang Korngold composed the music. The opening fanfare, which we’ll hear from a rare 1961 recording, is said to have been one of the principal inspirations on John Williams in the writing of “Star Wars.”
Director Orson Welles made his stunning Hollywood debut with back-to-back explorations of change and the passage of time: “Citizen Kane” (1941), about the rise and fall of a larger-than-life newspaper magnate – who, at his core, longs only for a simple pleasure of his childhood – and “The Magnificent Ambersons” (1942), after Booth Tarkington’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, documenting a prominent family’s declining fortunes over three generations. Both films sport scores by the ever-versatile Bernard Herrmann. We’ll hear some of the more upbeat selections assembled by the composer into a concert suite called “Welles Raises Kane.”
“The Leopard” (1963) must be one of the most poignant meditations on mutability and time. One could argue whether or not director Luchino Visconti manages to capture the images of decay so pervasive in Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel. What he does achieve is an achingly poetic study of the fall from prominence of an aristocratic Sicilian family, and the impact upon its patriarch (played by Burt Lancaster) during the time of Italian unification. Along the way, he also succeeds in staging one of the great set-pieces: an opulent ball that spans nearly a third of the film’s 187-minute running time. The operatically moving score is by Nino Rota.
The hour will conclude with one final selection for the New Year, a lively overture to “The Four Poster” (1952). Rex Harrison and Lili Palmer appear in a series of vignettes – bedroom scenes – featuring a novelist husband and his wife. Collectively, they encapsulate the history of a marriage. The film became the basis for the musical “I Do! I Do!” The music is by Dimitri Tiomkin.
Mark the sands of the hourglass and heed selections for the New Year. Nought may endure but Mutability, this Friday evening at 6:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.
