As famous on B’way as he had been in Germany before emigrating, composer Kurt Weill was luckless on all his stage-to-screen Hollywood transfers. LADY IN THE DARK/’44; ONE TOUCH OF VENUS/’48; LOST IN THE STARS/’74; and this satirical piece, all of them hits or succès d’estime on stage, each butchered on film. Some further insulted with added tunes by lesser hands. Here, Maxwell Anderson’s book, a not so great anti-tyrannical comedy about Peter Stuyvesant lording it over New Amsterdam (the target was FDR), largely survives intact. (Though nearly half of it purloined from Gilbert & Sullivan’s THE MIKADO.) And Weill’s much finer score? Not so lucky. The big hit, ‘September Song’ remains; the equally fine ballad ‘It Never Was You’ reduced to a few measures of background music; only two other songs from the show retained. Made on the cheap by producer Harry Joe Brown in his last directing gig, visually it’s drab as a ‘50s TV Spectacular. With Charles Coburn, a wily Stuyvesant but showing none of the devilish appeal Walter Huston must have brought to the role in the original stage run, though Nelson Eddy surprises with more animation than usual as a rabble-rousing newspaperman, in very fine voice on the few numbers left to him. One more missed opportunity for Weill, but worth a look as a historic curiosity and for a very young Shelley Winters, cute & funny as the second ingenue.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT: Weill also wrote original material for two semi-musicals, Fritz Lang’s troubled YOU AND ME/’38, with George Raft & Sylvia Sidney (not seen here), and the little seen delight, WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE/’45, a late WWII pic at its best in a fantasy one-reel opera parody with lyrics by Ira Gershwin, Weill’s collaborator in LADY IN THE DARK and THE FIREBRAND OF FLORENCE.
LINK: An archival specialty arrangement of a cut number from KNICKERBOCKER showing what Anderson was aiming at. https://archive.org/details/78_how-can-you-tell-an-american_radio-city-four-anderson-weill_gbia0065085b/How+Can+You+Tell+an+American%3F+-+Radio+City+Four.flac
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