Il grande valzer

Before I started these comments, I first read many of the others made by a wide range of people - I was amazed to find that some were reading far too much into the storyline,( which everyone who has seen the movie knows it is pure hokum) or belittling the film for its treatment of the life of Johann Strauss. Why not go and see it, and enjoy the sheer entertainment of the Music, the acting of Luise Rainer, the voice of Miliza Korjus (who will ever forget her rendition of "One Day When We Were Young" - who cares if Strauss did or did not write it!), So "The Tales from the Vienna Woods" was written overnight - does it matter that free licence was taken, surely the name of the game is to entertain, and this film does that. Hugh Herbert and Lionel Atwill add fun and spice to one of the more entertaining musicals of the 1930's.

Perhaps the number one Hollywood musical film of all time. "Gorgeous Korjus" was coined and used by Louis B. Mayer to promote her film career, which understandably would be short. Not only is she gorgeous in GW but turns in an excellent acting performance which drew an academy award nomination. Her acting role rivals or exceeds consummate actress and two-time academy award winner, Luise Reiner. Displaying the temperament of a real primadonna, Miss Korjus turns on her good and bad sides when you least expect it. Vocal waltzes are extremely difficult to sing and Korjus with her coloratura soprano does admirably. Frenchman Fernand Gravet is believable as Strauss (as far as the film is believable) and ably supported by the likes of Lionel Atwill and Hugh Herbert along with many others, few of whom have a Teutonic accent, but we still have a romantic view of old Vienna. It is not a factual biography, which is stated at the beginning of the film, but there are elements of truth in the composite of Strauss the Elder and Strauss the younger as performed by Gravet (Strauss the Younger was a womanizer and while married actually had a liaison with an opera singer, among others). The Vienna Woods segment is pure joy. Strauss playing Tales from the Vienna Woods on his violin and Carla Donner singing in accompaniment's, their whirling dancing, ending up on the ground, where Strauss goes no further and wistfully admits "Carla, I'm married." The audience, I think, expects a tantrum from Donner at this revelation, but she gracefully takes it in stride and fools us once again with her unpredictability! This scene, to me, was the high point of an exceptional film of the type we shall never see again.

This fictional account of Johann Strauss' life is highlighted by one of the most exquisite scenes in musical history--far from real of course--in which the composer and an operatic diva are driven through the woods in horse and buggy while the countryside comes alive with the sound of music. The pastoral beauty of the scene itself combined with the intricate way 'Tale of the Vienna Woods' is woven into the musical scene (as composer Strauss begins humming the tune along with his diva friend) is just one of the charming highlights of this MGM musical.

Swirling waltzes are captured with such superb angles in the Oscar-winning camerawork, it's no wonder David O. Selznick was impressed enough to insist that his own technical staff derive inspiration from viewing the film.

Soprano Miliza Korjus does some excellent trills as the operatic diva who steals Strauss from his wife (temporarily) until the obligatory happy ending. Luise Rainer suffers gracefully (in an insufferable role as the wife!!) and Fernand Gravet does well as the composer. His scenes with Miliza Korjus are what makes the film the gem that it is. She all but steals the film and was nominated for a Supporting Actress Oscar and then disappeared from the American scene, returning to Europe to resume her operatic career.

If there is a genre in which even die-hard contemporary fans of old movies seldom care to delve, it is the once-popular musical operetta. I have steeled myself to watch several Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy movies, and have occasionally been pleasantly surprised, as in my first viewing of ROSE MARIE. I recently caught THE GREAT WALTZ on TCM as part of a festival of Luise Rainer movies, and despite myself I was won over by the skill of the director as well as the opulence of the production.

Miss Rainer's charms elude me. She was pretty and not a bad actress by any means and yet the clammy, self-congratulatory air of masochism and eye-brimming sadness of each of her performances is hard to take. Even when you have to admit that she isn't bad in a given scene, she is insufferable, sometimes almost unwatchable. And she had her most cringing, masochistic and melodramatic role in this picture as the long-suffering wife of a faithless Strauss as played by a puffy Fernand Gravey.

It is Gravey and Miliza Korjus that are the real stars of the film, and this is curious to a modern viewer since neither had the classic good looks of movie stars of the period. What they did have was a stars' confidence and because of the considerable imagination of Julien Duvivier, you believe them as a romantic couple and as stars intoxicated with their own love and talent.

But what is impressive about THE GREAT WALTZ is the way Duvivier transforms potentially dull and static numbers into surreal flights of fantasy. He isn't afraid to be delirious or silly so a few set-pieces unexpectedly catch your attention, make you laugh and then impress you with their theatricality and verve. Such is the orgasmic waltz sequence that takes place in and around a bandstand in the Vienna Woods in which Korjus decisively seduces Gravey. It is Duvivier's attention to detail that makes it: the way Korjus jackknifes to the ground in Gravey's arms and removes her organdy picture hat, the gorgeous line of trees hung with Japanese lanterns on a moonlit set, the way she staggers and tumbles onto the grass after her trilling climax, inviting greater liberties (despite the all-girl orchestra looking on), all of these images make the scene breathless, ludicrous, memorable.

And just because we have blessedly forgotten Strauss's dreary wife, Duvivier concocts a spectacular scene for Rainer too: publicly confronted by her husband's faithlessness, she hurriedly dresses in silks and crinolines determined to kill herself or someone else on the night of his opera debut. Sweeping out of their huge house and down their long staircase to the strains of a waltz, sweeping into a baroque opera house and up an even longer set of steps, she stops, awestruck while several jump cuts reveal the enormity and grandeur of the theatre, the rapt audience and the triumph of her rival, who defiantly swirls into a lavish stage waltz. In contrast, Rainer's smiling-through-tears routine afterward seems an anti-climax, though it is an admirable piece of showmanship and hugely entertaining despite a shrill note of barely controlled hysteria she has cultivated throughout the sequence. Or maybe because of it. Rainer's few strengths as an actress are utterly linked to her considerable weaknesses.

So I'm now not surprised to learn of this film's great success at the time, though I do wonder why the Mac-Eddy productions never got as creative a craftsman as Duvivier to plan and film their pictures. If he had they might be more widely admired today beyond the group of fast-ageing fans who first loved them in the '30s. But maybe nothing can revive interest in this most unfashionable of movie genres.

Sandwiched,in Duvivier's oeuvre,between two absolute masterpieces "Un carnet de Bal" and the overlooked "La fin du Jour" (some kind of French "Sunset Blvd" ) where the director's pessimism reaches new heights ,"The great waltz " ,unlike another movie made in Hollywood "Flesh and fantasy" cannot be looked upon as a "film d' Auteur".

It's impersonal but it nevertheless displays Duvivier's extraordinary eclecticism."The great waltz" is a good work,made with care and taste and shows that Duvivier could have been a great musicals director,if he had wanted to.Half of the movie consists of instrumentals or songs,which makes sense,for it is a movie dealing with Strauss's life.His private life does not interest that much Duvivier who avoids the traps of a linear biography.However,there are snatches of melodrama towards the end,mainly in the scenes between the moving Luise Rainer and Miliza Korjus in the theater.Fernand Gravey (spelled "Gravet" in the cast and credits)is the only French actor here.He had begun his American career with Mervyn LeRoy in 1937.

All the musical scenes are dazzling ;the "blue Danube" treatment is excellent,a waltz which would be used by dozens of directors,from Renoir ("Boudu Sauvé des Eaux" ) to Kubrik ("2001" ) to Cimino ("Heaven's gate"). Other good sequence: Strauss composing a new tune while he is hearing a horse' s trot.