Last night, I watched bits and pieces of the MGM Sigmund Romberg "bio-musical" "Deep in My Heart".
I say "bits and pieces" because I simply cannot just sit and watch this film any longer. Jose Ferrer is alternately wonderful and horrible. He has vast amounts of dialogue, which may or may not be as talky as Romberg, but such monologues just don't work any more (if, in fact, they did in the mid-1950s)
The numbers are very interesting, and a couple are dazzling. Dazzling is what they were going for. This movie was a dream project for associate producer/Freed Unit mastermind Roger Edens. He had Comden and Green to help with the screenplay.
"One Alone", danced by Cyd Charisse and James Mitchell, is too beautiful. "It", danced by Ann Miller, is amazing. Merle Oberon as Dorothy Donnelly is beyond glorious, but she does not sing. Helen Trauble is fun, too.
The most hideous scene in the film was intentional, but I doubt it was meant to be as hideous as it is. In fact, it seems to have been an afterthought, dropped in (possibly to give Ferrer a "big scene" for Oscar consideration). The play is "Jazzadoo" that Romberg is working on. What follows is one of the most egregiously excessive verbal and physical assaults upon the senses. Yes, "Romi" was meant to be embarrassing himself, but this scene kills the film for me.
The musical highlight for me is the finale...not all the yammer from Ferrer, but the conceit that he has just written a song that he is dedicating to his wife. He instructs his Carnegie Hall orchestra to pick up on it when they think they have it, and he begins playing and singing "When I Grow Too Old to Dream",
After the first verse, Ferrer gets up from the piano as the orchestra launches into a beautiful orchestration of the song (impossibly off-the cuff, of course), and then the studio choir (nowhere visible) takes up the song which becomes absolute tears-inducing perfection.
If only the entire movie had aspired to the heights of that finale!
