Music changes everything. How do we start? Mahler. I doubted myself. Barber. But I was right. It is that one dissonance which should have convinced me. The notes rubbing against one another.
And then I slipped. Like Betty Balfour. Dvorak? Berlioz? No, it’s Sibelius.
A music scholar doesn’t need Shazam. But I’m a shabby music scholar. Rags to rags.
Betty Balfour gets to mingle with the ragpickers for awhile, but for her it is riches to riches.
This is a silent film. Which is to say, it is not silent.
That is the history of cinema. A misconception.
And music changes everything. If it’s Giorgio Moroder providing the soundtrack for Fritz Lang…that makes a big difference.
I really lost my way at some point. I thought I was hearing Mozart…
We thought he wrote a requiem for his pet starling. Perhaps not.
Yes, at some point we became very lost. Flying over the Atlantic. Like the Mary Celeste. Bermuda Triangle.
It wasn’t the Flying Dutchman. I think we would have recognized Don Giovanni. Maybe not.
Betty doesn’t know when to stop. Lots of seasickness in these early Hitchcock films.
There’s no missing Bolero. Ravel’s worst piece. Worlds ahead of most music ever written.
But nothing beats the Piano Concerto in G.
When Betty is weightless…remembering the good times…champagne. And now she is merely a wage slave. Trading places.
No talking. Some intertitles. And prominently (most prominently) that music! A choice…by someone. It makes a difference.
Put a murder to the tendresse of Beethoven. A birth to Schoenberg.
The orchestra makes a difference. That flat, unwieldy oboe line…
Yes, I know it’s polytonal, but the intonation is rubbish. Like the Salvation Army rendition of “Abide with Me” at the beginning of Fist of Fury. Makes Monk and Coltrane sound absolutely polished.
No, I can’t stand it. Gordon Harker is great…just as he was in The Farmer’s Wife. Without italics that sounds positively lascivious. Thank god for capitalization.
Did Hitchcock predict the stock market crash of ’29? A case could be made. Yet here it is charade.
Betty falls prey to Bresson’s predecessor…pickpocket filmed from the waist down. Rage Over a Lost Penny. Op. 129. I’m just venting.
Gordon Harker parenting. Like Gregg Popovich. Pride in the name of love.
Nothing’s going very well for Betty. Taken literally, this is a nihilist coup. But just ask Bert Williams: nothing don’t put food on the table. Nobody.
More like “nothing to see here”… Hitchcock would lament to Truffaut. Nevertheless, the particular transfer I have (and the Romantic soundtrack) made this an interesting journey. Most of all we learn that the auteur theorists were right: geniuses never make bad films.
-PD
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