1h 30min | Drama, Film-Noir, Music | 5 July 1946
Director: Ben Hecht
Stars: Judith Anderson, Michael Chekhov, Ivan Kirov, Viola Essen, Lionel Stander.
Tamara Geva ... choreographer
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038973/
Watched online, ok print.
Hard to believe this is Ben Hecht the journalist who wrote/produced/directed this. How did he choose madness and ballet as his subject? And why did he try to write as a poet instead of a realist? The dialog here is bad. Did he know people who really talked like this?
The young dancers, the focus of the piece, dance well, but don't act well, and they're obligated to do both.
LS is cast wildly off-type; is he the alter-ego of Hecht? He says things that seem pompously artsy, not really poetic (but I'm not a poetry fan).
I had to check if MC was really the same actor as portrayed Ingrid Bergman's mentor in Spellbound ('45). Yes. He seemed so old in that film, and is less than a decade older than the century. Here he's irritating, which is probably intended, but I don't see the value in it.
JA was good, as usual: the burned-out ballerina who teaches in a dingy studio, watching her knitting more than her pupils.
I was not surprised by the climax. It was clearly telegraphed, and by prolonging it we got more of IK's dancing, but in a confined space, and conveying madness not beauty. (This is IK's only film.)
So watch this with thumb on the Ffwd button: skip the story and relish the dancing. But I'm not putting this on my "worthwhile dancing" list; I don't even want to skim through this film again for a long, long time.
Republic, dir. Hecht; 5
