Carnegie Hall

Carnegie Hall – Edgar Ulmer was a highly cultured German Jew who spent his exile in America directing low-budget thrillers and horror films. He is chiefly famous for the conviction that he lent the cheap, derivative material he was contracted to produce. Several of his genre films are masterpieces of their kind – most famously, the zero-cost Detour, a stylish and grim film noir, and The Black Cat, a dreamlike horror film starring Lugosi and Karloff. Ulmer worked on the sun-dappled erotic comedy Menschen on Sonntag, one of the landmarks of Neue Sachlichkeit, a picture conspicuously bright, merry, and cheerful unlike most other films of that kind. (Ulmer’s Weimar Berlin is idyllic, a landscape of parks filled with trysting lovers). Most critics think that there was a serious and profound film maker embedded in Ulmer and screaming for escape. On the evidence of Carnegie Hall (1947), I’m not convinced. Carnegie Hall is a melodrama about a stage-mother. An Irish girl, herself a refugee from the Old Country, works at Carnegie Hall as a charwoman. Her spunk and beauty convinces a concert pianist to marry her. The Irish girl longs for genteel respectability but her husband, a turbulent Italian musician, clashes with authority – he wants to play piano according to his own inspiration. The pianist gets fired, drunk, fights with his wife, and falls down the steps, conveniently expiring almost before the movie begins. The pianist has a son and the family tragedy is reprised in the second generation. The mother, who has risen to an administrative position at the Hall, forces her son to rehearse tirelessly to become a classical concert pianist. But, alas, the boy falls prey to the siren song of jazz, tours with a Big Band, and marries a dance-hall chanteuse. The mother is appalled until her son, in a turn of affairs that surprises everyone but the film’s audience, is summoned to Carnegie Hall to premiere a jazzy piano-trumpet sonata that he has composed featuring Harry James. This plot was probably ancient when The Jazz Singer brought sound to the pictures in 1927. And the continuing vitality of this plot in broad outline remains alive today – witness films like Eight Mile, Purple Rain, and Scorsese’s New York, New York, which contain various elements of this narrative. Ulmer uses the melodrama which is presented in very sketchy under-dramatized vignettes (his actors aren’t very good – they are all caricatures of the broadest sort), as a framework on which to hang a dozen or so concert sequences. These sequences are not integrated into the film and bring the action to a complete stop, although, I assume, that they are interesting in their own right – I understand that the film has a following among historians of classical music and performance practice. Ulmer is respectful to a fault and shows Heifetz, Rubinstein, Bruno Walter, and others strutting their stuff in extended sequences. He has a proto-MTV flair with these music sequences which are effectively, and respectfully, staged – but they don’t add anything to the story. The music played is mainly presented as an exercise in virtuosity invoking the trope that if you want to get to Carnegie Hall, you must “practice, practice.” One sequence with Lily Pons is so deliriously over-the-top that it reminds us that classical music, as well as any other art, has its own particular form of kitsch. The movie is dull, too long, and uninvolving – Ulmer’s famous skill with mise en scene is evident in the first two reels of the picture, where he drives the narrative forward with feverish intensity, but, then, the film collapses in concert scenes and stereotypes of the broadest sort: the young man’s devolution into pop music is signaled by showing a maid, “colored” as they would say in those days, swinging her hips to 45 rpm of his Big Band. Ulmer concept is fundamentally decent. He wants to show how classical and pop music can be reconciled. But the film is no good. If you want to see the reconciliation of the high and low culture, it’s best for you to turn to Detour, which is like Greek tragedy for trailer trash, or the eerie Black Cat with its bizarre expressionist architecture, a chateau filled with embalmed women built over the innumerable dead at Verdun – these films demonstrate what Carnegie Hall merely declaims.