I recently gave a dismal review to "A Song to Remember," the 1945 biopic about Frederic Chopin. That film was a poor Hollywood attempt to tell the story of a great composer. "Song of Love" was made at almost the same time, about a composer who was a contemporary of Chopin, but it does a better job, both biographically and in terms of the lead actors.
Hepburn/Henreid/Walker are a much stronger combination than Muni/Oberon/Wilde (especially the latter two), bringing real passion to the roles and making them seem like actual human beings. It's a bit of a stretch seeing Hepburn at age 40 playing Clara Wieck as a teenager, but we'll cut her some slack because of her glowing personality and quite remarkable finger-syncing. (Bad on-screen piano playing is a personal pet peeve of mine.) The plot is loosely based on the truth. The love triangle aspect is played up here, as could be expected in Hollywood. Another possible error is that scholars have speculated that Clara was not all that sad about having Robert away in an asylum, because it gave her freedom to resume her career. (The movie makes it seem as though she went into seclusion and had to be coaxed out by Brahms.) She did devote her later performances to Robert's work, but she was a fine composer herself (never mentioned in the film). Far too much time is taken with the sub-plot involving Brahms as the Schumann's virtual live-in houseboy (another stretch of the truth), but I suppose that was done so we could have the cook character as the only real comic relief.
There's a lot of nice piano music here and a decent enough representation of the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann. What I'd really like to see, though, is a more in-depth dramatization of Robert's gradual descent into insanity. But that's a little too grim for MGM in the 1940s!
Hepburn/Henreid/Walker are a much stronger combination than Muni/Oberon/Wilde (especially the latter two), bringing real passion to the roles and making them seem like actual human beings. It's a bit of a stretch seeing Hepburn at age 40 playing Clara Wieck as a teenager, but we'll cut her some slack because of her glowing personality and quite remarkable finger-syncing. (Bad on-screen piano playing is a personal pet peeve of mine.) The plot is loosely based on the truth. The love triangle aspect is played up here, as could be expected in Hollywood. Another possible error is that scholars have speculated that Clara was not all that sad about having Robert away in an asylum, because it gave her freedom to resume her career. (The movie makes it seem as though she went into seclusion and had to be coaxed out by Brahms.) She did devote her later performances to Robert's work, but she was a fine composer herself (never mentioned in the film). Far too much time is taken with the sub-plot involving Brahms as the Schumann's virtual live-in houseboy (another stretch of the truth), but I suppose that was done so we could have the cook character as the only real comic relief.
There's a lot of nice piano music here and a decent enough representation of the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann. What I'd really like to see, though, is a more in-depth dramatization of Robert's gradual descent into insanity. But that's a little too grim for MGM in the 1940s!