They Shall Have Music (Samuel Goldwyn/United Artists, 1939)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I ran Charles a DVD of a quite remarkable 1939 movie called They Shall Have Music, which was yet another one of producer Sam Goldwyn’s attempts to win prestige for himself and his boutique studio. He had signed the great and world-famous violinist Jascha Heifetz to a one-picture contract but without any clear idea of just what he was going to do with him. What he and the writers he put on the project, Irmgard von Cube and open Communist John Howard Lawson (he would later become one of the original Hollywood 10 and still later write Film: The Creative Process, which was intended as an introductory textbook for film classes but contained some fascinating reflections of his own history working in Hollywood, including for Right-wingers like Cecil B. DeMille), came up with was a mashup of Dead End -- Sidney Kingsley’s hit play about low-life tenement kids in New York City and the criminal temptations they’re subjected to, which Goldwyn had filmed two years earlier -- and Universal’s 1937 blockbuster One Hundred Men and a Girl, starring Deanna Durbin and Leopold Stokowski.

Cube and Lawson obviously were influenced by the writers of One Hundred Men and a Girl -- Hans Kraly, Bruce Manning, Charles Kenyon and James Mulhauser, in the tale they came up with of the impoverished Lawson School of Music (one wonders if John Howard Lawson named the school after himself!), with Walter Brennan as its founder and principal teacher (essentially the Adolphe Menjou role in One Hundred Men and a Girl), while Heifetz took Stokowski’s role as the grey (not-so-grey in Heifetz’s case) eminence from the world of classical music who comes in at the end and saves everybody and everything. The plot deals with Frankie (Gene Reynolds, who remained in the business though not as an actor: he was one of the producers of the 1970’s and 1980’s TV series M*A*S*H), who leads a gang of four street thugs who bully other kids out of their carfare home. Frankie is living with his mother and an evil stepfather (an obvious gender reversal of the Cinderella story!) who threatens to beat him and put him in reform school (and, as hardened 1930’s moviegoers well knew, “reform school” never reformed anybody; instead it just served as apprenticeship for a career as an adult criminal).

Locked by his stepdad in their building’s basement, Frankie finds a violin that belonged to his late real father and recalls dad having taught him a few of the basics. But he’s more interested in the $4 he can get from a pawnbroker for it to add to his gang’s “treasury” than in the instrument. Then, while he and his friend Limey (Terry Kilburn) -- so called because he speaks with an otherwise inexplicable British accent -- are busking outside Carnegie Hall where Jascha Heifetz is performing, a middle-aged couple have an argument and walk out without using their tickets. Frankie grabs them and tries to sell them, but everyone at the concert hall has tickets already, so he decides to use them himself. Limey goes in with him because at first he thinks “Heifetz” is a stage magician who’s going to saw a woman in half, and when he realizes it’s a concert of classical music he walks out but Frankie is rapt and sits through Heifetz’ performance of Saint-Saens’ “Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso” with a look of awe. He goes back to the pawnbroker to reclaim his violin, but he runs afoul of the other kids in his gang who resent that he took the money back from the “treasury” to get back the violin. He also runs afoul of his stepfather, who, convinced that he stole the instrument, smashes it, chews poor Frankie out and throws him out of the home.

Frankie lives on the street for a few days until he stumbles across the Lawson School of Music and for the first time since the Heifetz concert hears the same kind of music. The school is hanging on barely, depending on whatever money its head (Walter Brennan in one of his with-teeth performances -- Brennan was fond of asking directors who’d never worked with him before, “Do you want it with or without?,” and when they inevitably asked, “With or without what?,” he’d say. “Teeth”) can scrape together. Professor Dawson has a daughter, Ann (Andrea Leeds), whose boyfriend Peter (Joel McCrea, who’s billed second even though he has precious little to do) has helped the school by arranging an extended loan of musical instruments from his prissy piss-and boss, music-store owner Mr. Flower (Porter Hall). The students are rehearsing for a concert of their entire orchestra (played by a real-life student orchestra from Los Angeles led by Peter Meremblum, and the film’s musical director, Alfred Newman, was smart to do that because the music we hear is good, but not so good that we think, “Oh, they hired professional studio musicians” and lose any hope of suspending disbelief), and the film is a race against time as to whether the Lawson students can perform their concert before Mr. Flower repossesses his instruments and the building’s owner throws them out for being six months behind on their rent. When Mr. Flower insists that he needs the instruments back because his store needs to turn a profit, and that Lawson should throw all the poor students out and admit only kids whose families can pay for their lessons, he’s drawn as such a cold-hearted villain for saying that, you’d probably be thinking, “What’s this? Did a Communist write this movie? Oh, yeah, one did.”

Hearing that the school is in financial trouble, Frankie decides to organize himself and some of the students into a string quartet and busk in front of Carnegie Hall again -- and of course they run into Jascha Heifetz, who over the objections of his manager promises to send to the school a film of himself performing and to give the school some unspecified help as soon as he returns to New York from his concert tour two months hence. The kids take that as a commitment from Heifetz to perform as the soloist at their big concert, and Peter convinces Flower and the other capitalists in the movie to hold off on closing down the school until the concert date -- only on the appointed date Flower calls Heifetz’ manager and finds Heifetz is playing somewhere else that night and won’t be performing at the Lawson school. So the bad guys schedule the eviction and dispossession during the concert -- only to be met with a phalanx of middle-aged women, most of them mothers of the members of the student orchestra, who refuse to let them in. Meanwhile, Frankie and Limey try to hunt down Heifetz but his manager won’t let them see the Great Man. Limey steals Heifetz’ “Stradivarius” violin, which a newspaper headline announces is worth $70,000 (today they go for between $2 and $10 million and they’re usually owned by syndicates who loan them out to actual musicians; the reason I put “Stradivarius” in quotes is that Heifetz preferred instruments by Stradivarius’s principal competitor then, Guarnerius del Jesu, and that’s the violin he’s shown playing in the film; also a direct descendant of the original Guarnerius, jazz pianist Johnny Guarnieri, was involved in the music scene as pianist for Artie Shaw’s band when this movie was made) and the police end up arresting Frankie, Peter and just about everyone else involved with the school.

Then Limey realizes he’s stolen Heifetz’ violin and returns it, but Frankie refuses to answer any questions about it until Heifetz comes to the police station to reclaim it. Then he’ll have a chance to ask Heifetz to perform at the concert -- which turns out to be an exciting race to the finish as the police arrive to confiscate Flower’s instruments during the concert and Peter shows up with Heifetz ready not only to perform as the concert soloist but to pledge ongoing financial support to the school. I’ve seen They Shall Have Music before but I liked it considerably better this time around, partly due to the class-conflict “edge” John Howard Lawson put into the script, partly due to the honesty Gene Reynolds brings to his performance as a slum kid for whom classical music comes to symbolize his desire for a better life than becoming a street thug, and partly due to the surprisingly dramatic and intense direction of the plot portions by the usually hacky Archie Mayo. Though Mayo directed the film’s dramatic portions and received sole credit, the sequences showing Heifetz performing were directed by William Wyler.

Like the movie Heifetz, the real Heifetz had a busy schedule filled with concert performances, and he had so little time available to make the movie that producer Goldwyn had to shoot him catch-as-catch-can and use Wyler because he was the contract director who happened to be available that week. Wyler goes to town on the concert scenes -- especially the middle one that’s supposed to be a film within the film, for which Heifetz performs “Hora Staccato.” The piece was originally for klezmer clarinet and piano and was written by Grigoras Dinicu; the violin transcription we hear here is by Heifetz himself, and in 1946 Benny Goodman made an intriguing record of it with his jazz band, augmented by strings, using the original instrument and playing the first two choruses as klezmer and the last one as jazz. Wyler films Heifetz from above, Heifetz from below, and at times shows us only Heifetz’ fret arm as he makes the rapid-fire changes in position required to perform this difficult music. Indeed, every time during a Heifetz performance where the directors cut away from him I found myself resenting it much the way I do watching the surviving films of Jimi Hendrix: what we want to see watching a movie of a virtuoso is what he did with his hands to produce those amazing sounds.

They Shall Have Music is actually a quite enjoyable film that mashes up various movie formulae quite well (oh, did I tell you Frankie sprains his foot while he’s chasing Heifetz down through the streets of New York?) and with some appealing performances by other cast members, including the young Diana Lynn (in her first film) playing a Chopin nocturne and a child soprano named Jacqueline Nash, who later pursued an adult career as pop singer Gale Sherwood, doing “Caro nome” from Verdi’s Rigoletto (at which she’s surprisingly good despite a couple of flat high notes) and “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma (which she sings decently enough, though the whole idea of a child singing this aria is pretty preposterous: Gilda, the character in Rigoletto who sings “Caro nome,” is supposed to be a naive, overprotected teenage girl, but Norma is a mature woman who’s already had two kids!).