Big, misguided composer bio-pic from fast-fading Republic Pictures (in their ‘perfected’ full-spectrum TruColor process) asks director William Dieterle to do for Richard Wagner what he’d done for various ‘great men’ (Zola; Juarez; Pasteur) at Warner Bros. in the ‘30s. Good luck with that! Justifying Wagner’s self-centered contempt for others by claiming his operatic genius demanded it only gets you so much audience sympathy. And with nearly an hour of the original running time lost over years of re-edits, the story is all abrupt transitions and not enough music to compensate for the man’s nastiness. (Arranged, if not conducted, by Erich Wolfgang Korngold who only ‘conducts’ on screen as Hans Richter.) And forget about even touching on Wagner's rife anti-Semitism. Real waxworks stuff here, not helped by Dieterle staging scene after scene in long-take ‘master’ shots; a common enough dodge in mid-‘50s CinemaScope films, except this film isn’t shot in WideScreen format! A clueless curiosity at best.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Should you watch, three standout moments: Leonie Rysanek dubbing a truly outstanding Senta in THE FLYING DUTCHMAN; a tiny moment (no more than seconds) with the churning opening of DIE WALKÜRE used to accompany Wagner when he learns of a new war, showing how music & biography might have merged dramatically; some fabulous old-fashioned painted flats used for the RING OF THE NIBELUNGEN montage.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: As great composer Hollywood pics go: less embarrassing than Charles Vidor’s A SONG TO REMEMBER/’45 (Chopin); less successful than Clarence Brown’s unexpectedly touching, not too ridiculous, SONG OF LOVE/’47 (the Schumanns & Brahms).
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