by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night Charles and I watched a movie I had recently
downloaded in an unusually high-quality print for a public-domain download: I’ve
Always Loved You, a 1946 production from
Republic Pictures directed by Frank Borzage from a script by Borden Chase based
on a magazine short story he’d published called “Concerto.” Republic Pictures,
founded by Herbert Yates in 1936 when he forced three companies to merge under
his ownership because he owned Consolidated Film Industries, the largest
independent film developing lab in Hollywood, and they all owed him major
amounts of money for having developed their film. Originally they concentrated
on low-budget Westerns, some of them starring an actor named John Wayne who
seemed to have blown his big chance for stardom when his big-budget 1930
Western The Big Trail, directed
by Raoul Walsh at Fox, flopped; he’d worked his way down the Hollywood food
chain through Warners, Columbia and finally Monogram, where he made a series of
Westerns for their “Lone Star” subsidiary until Yates inherited his contract.
Wayne seemed like a permanent denizen of the “B” world until 1939, when Gary
Cooper turned down the lead in the Walter Wanger-John Ford production Stagecoach and Ford borrowed Wayne for the role, the film was a
mega-hit and launched Wayne’s career (and boosted Yates’s income both from his
Republic films and the loan-out fees he got from the major studios who wanted
to use him). In the mid-1940’s, as World War II was winding down, Yates, like other
Hollywood studio owners, saw that the “B” picture was doomed and decided to
push his company towards major-studio status by hiring important talents behind
the camera: Ben Hecht for Voice in the Wind, Orson Welles for Macbeth and Borzage under a long-term contract under which
Yates would bankroll him in the sorts of big, romantic tear-jerkers that had
been Borzage’s specialty since his star-making film, Seventh Heaven, in 1927.
Oddly, the first film Borzage wanted to make at Republic was a John Wayne Western called Dakota, but Yates took that film away from both Borzage and
Wayne and sent the script down his “B” Western assembly line instead. Borzage
ended up hooking up with writer Chase, who also was mostly a Western specialist
(his most famous film credit — also a script he wrote based on a previously
published magazine story that was also his — was the John Wayne Western Red
River, made by Howard Hawks at United
Artists and also featuring Montgomery Clift in what was probably the Gayest
Western ever made until Brokeback Mountain!). He was also briefly married to concert pianist Lee Keith, who
brought two children of her own to the marriage — though they weren’t Chase’s
kids biologically, they took his last name and one, Barrie Chase, became Fred
Astaire’s dance partner on his TV specials. Eventually the Chase-Keith marriage
broke up and Chase ended up dating Pat Chase, his former stepdaughter — and
just in case you thought only Hollywood liberals like Woody Allen did that sort
of thing, Chase was also a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the
Preservation of American Ideals, the group that supported the Hollywood blacklist and whose other members
included Cecil B. DeMille, John Wayne, Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck.
Anyway, Chase came up with a tale that served as an excuse for Borzage to put a
lot of great classical music on the screen, most of it played by pianist Artur
Rubinstein (there are a few bits by a Republic studio orchestra as well), as
well as staging the familiar romantic situations for which Borzage was famous.
The film opens in Philadelphia, where the world-renowned pianist and conductor
Leopold Goronoff (Philip Dorn, an actor Warner Bros. had signed and tried to
build into a sort of bionic combination of Paul Lukas and Claude Rains) is
holding open auditions for a one-year scholarship for piano students.
Goronoff’s old friend Frederick Hassman (Felix Bressart), himself a formerly
great concert pianist until he married an American woman and settled down in
the farm town from which she had come, retiring from music and ultimately
ruining his hands with farm work, shows up at the audition with his daughter
Myra (Catherine McLeod).
For all the money Herbert Yates threw at this movie,
including paying for three-strip Technicolor (which Borzage and his
cinematographer, Tony Gaudio, used quite effectively, shooting most of the
movie in pastel and managing to avoid the shrieking, overripe hues so often
associated with three-strip even though Natalie Kalmus was on hand as the color
consultant) and getting “name” talents behind the camera, he didn’t go for star
actors in the cast, and I got the impression Borzage had cast McLeod less for
any acting ability than that she was a good enough pianist herself she could
synchronize on screen with Rubinstein’s playing and we could actually see her
fingers striking piano keys instead of those awful shots with the body of the
piano interposed between the camera and her hands. Goronoff thinks Myra is so
good a pianist he offers to take her under his wing and let her move in with
him — though since this is a 1946 movie, he does not insist that she become his mistress as part of the
deal the way Lowell Sherman did with Madge Evans in a similar situation in the
1932 film The Greeks Had a Word for Them, a.k.a. Three Broadway Girls. Indeed, Myra’s virtue is in no danger because she’s protected not
only by the Production Code but the formidable chaperoning of Goronoff’s
mother, referred to only as “Madame Goronoff” (shouldn’t that have been “Madame
Goronova”?) and played by Maria Ouspenskaya, billed with the honorific “Madame”
in front of her name and easily taking the acting honors in this film. Goronoff
blows off a whole series of already booked concerts to concentrate on taking
Myra around the world and teaching her to be a great pianist until he decides
she’s ready for her concert debut, which will take place at Carnegie Hall and
consist of her playing the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 with him
conducting. (In 1945, one year before this film, David Lean’s Brief
Encounter had popularized the “Rach-2”
worldwide and given it a reputation as seduction music which lasted long enough
that 10 years later Billy Wilder ridiculed it in The Seven-Year Itch.) Only during the performance he gets jealous of her
because she’s copied his interpretation so well, and he decides to sabotage her
by speeding up the tempo and increasing the volume of the orchestra to drown
her out.
She makes it through the piece, but the experience and the quarrel she
and Goronoff have afterwards lead her to go back to daddy’s farm and accept the
marriage proposal of George Sampter (William Carter, a rather gangly but still
nice-looking man whom we first get to see wearing jeans below the waist and
nothing above it — yum! Especially since, unusually for a male in a 1940’s
film, we not only get to see him shirtless he was even allowed to keep a nice
little tuft of chest hair). The film then leaps forward several years and Myra
has not only married Sampter but they have a five-year-old daughter, officially
named Georgette but nicknamed “Porgy” for some reason and played by Gloria
Donovan (who looked closer to seven than five to me). Myra hasn’t played piano
in all this time but Porgy pleads with her to do so, especially when a
thunderstorm strikes the farm and Myra is worried their radio will act as a
conductor and lead the house to be incinerated by a lightning bolt (I’m not
making this up, you know!), and she does. Meanwhile Goronoff’s career has
declined as he realizes he was in
love with Myra all along, and Madame Goronoff dies while her son is playing
her, you guessed it, the “Rach-2.” Another jump cut brings the story 12 years forward — one wishes this movie
came with chyrons like a Lifetime film — and now Porgy is 17, is played by
Vanessa Brown and is secretly studying piano behind her mother’s back. She has
her own mentor, a conservatory teacher and conductor named Michael Severin
(Lewis Howard), and he’s convinced she’s good enough to make a Carnegie Hall
debut herself playing the Rach-2 with him conducting. Only on the eve of her
concert, Myra takes Porgy to meet, you guessed it, Goronoff, and Porgy realizes
she’s not good enough and the concert happens with Myra taking her daughter’s
place at the piano and Goronoff taking Severin’s place at the podium, thereby
reproducing the legendary performance of 18 years earlier when Myra played in
public for the first and only time. But Borden Chase has one more twist in his
plot: as the final movement of the Rach-2 is drawing to a close, Myra leaves
the piano bench in mid-performance, walks
over to her husband George in the wings, throws her arms around him, says,
“I’ve always loved you” — the only explanation we get for the title — and
kisses him, leaving Goronoff to finish the piece with the orchestral part alone.
I’ve Always Loved You is a
beautiful film when the characters are shown actually making music, but it’s
annoyingly sexist when they aren’t; not only does Goronoff make a couple of
blatantly anti-woman speeches to the effect that music is a man’s world and
women don’t belong in it (ironic since at the time the film was made one of the
world’s top classical pianists was not only a woman but had the same first name
as this film’s heroine and a similar last name, too: Dame Myra Hess), but the
whole story is framed as a contrast between Myra’s pursuit of a musical career
and her desire for a “normal” life as a wife and mother. Quite a few 1930’s and
1940’s movies set up that dichotomy for women seeking careers in singing,
playing or dancing, and one of the few that didn’t resolve its plot in that sexist fashion was a quite
remarkable film from Republic’s first decade as a studio, Follow Your
Heart, in which former Metropolitan Opera
soprano Marion Talley played a woman who’s encouraged at the end to “follow
your heart” and go for the big operatic career rather than marry the small-town
boyfriend and give up her dreams of stardom. Mostly, though, we got endings
like the sexist cop-out of the otherwise magnificent film Maytime (1937), the best of the eight Jeanette
MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movies, in which the aging diva Marcia Mornay (MacDonald)
tells the young aspiring opera singer that the career isn’t worth the
heartbreak it entails and she should stay home and marry her boring boyfriend
instead. In The Red Shoes (1948)
the dilemma literally tears the central character, aspiring ballerina Moira
Shearer, apart: torn between the choreographer who says she has to renounce
love for her career and the composer who wants to write for her and also to
marry her, she runs away after her performance and gets killed when she falls
off a trestle into the path of an oncoming train: another annoying sexist cop-out ending to what’s otherwise a
great film. I’ve Always Loved You
is hardly in the league of Maytime
or The Red Shoes as a movie, but
it shares with them this annoying streak of sexism that makes it a trial to sit
through and had me rewriting the ending in my head to see if I could come up
with something better — like maybe a 42nd Street-style finish in which Myra’s daughter Porgy takes
over the piano in mid-performance and triumphs while mom and dad are embracing
in the wings?
