ALL TWO U.S. FILM PLOTS IN ONE

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 450, 6 February 1948, Page 25

ALL TWO U.S. FILM PLOTS IN ONE

S her contribution to meeting the shortage of American films in Britain, the Sunday Times critic, Dilys Powell, has written a story which "embodies all the current American plots, all two of them: the one about the composer and the one about psychiatry." It is called Christmas Day in the Workhouse: The film opens with a shot of rooftops; it is Old Vienna, and the camera swings over the belfries and the beergardens, past the sound of old waltzes and old drinking-parties, to the backstreet where little ten-year-old Clancy is sitting in the gutter, playing on the mouth-organ which he has bought instead of a banana split. His mother calls him in: "Ach!" she grumbles, "der child after der moosic alvays running is!" But the Irish cop on the beat remembers Clancy pére. "Do you be lettin’ the brotheen alone, an’ ’tis in Carnegie Hall he’ll be playin’ one day, an’ him the image of his Da!" Little Clancy scampers off with his playmate, little Elsa, to the Old Vienna fun-fair, where Schubert is taking Beethoven’s niece in a gondola through the Grotto of Love. Little Elsa offers a

hamburger to a tame seagull, which bites her instead, setting up a dangerous conflict in her mind. ° The passage of years is indicated by shots of agitated calendars. Clancy is now piano-player in a Viennese saloon; he is trying over the first phrase of a song he is writing, but he can’t get the second. "Guy’s. kinda crazy about music," says the barman to a customer (shot of glass of beer sliding down counter). _At this moment Liszt, who has been knocking off a rhapsody, comes in accompanied by Elsa, just back from finishing school in Paris (shot of Eiffel Tower). Clancy hardly recognises her. "Gee," he says, "you used to have freckles!" "And a band round my teeth!" says Elsa, with a glittering smile. While champagne is being served Clancy plays a song he has managed to finish: "Watching for the bluebird in your eyes." Liszt is greatly struck by this, and suggests taking the composer to a reception being held by the Princess Katzenjammer. At the reception Liszt bangs out a couple of rhapsodies (close-up of somebody else’s hands), then drops into variations on ‘Watching for the bluebird in your eyes." One or two keys break off the piano, but he goés on just the same; there is frantic applause, under cover of which Elsa, excited by

the spectacle of a guest eating gull’s eggs, pursues a waiter into the pantry and shoots him dead.... Clancy is famous (general huggermugger of trains rounding curves, opera houses, clapping hands, posters, more trains); he is the rage of Paris (can-can dancers) and London (pearlies). But he still can’t get the second phrase of that song. Elsa, too, is worried by her schizophrenia. One day Liszt brings up the old marine trouble by composing a thapsody in C, which she mistakes for a sea rhapsody (trick shot of seagull reflected in piano-lid). "I don’t want any part of it,’ she screams, taking aim with the old equaliser. She misses, and the maestro bundles her off to a psychiatrist, who soon puts her right about seagulls. Elsa (for she is a sweet girl really) has rejected the suggestion that Clancy should wait for her. Breaking away from the psychiatrist, she climbs a cliff overlooking the sea; "I’m no good for you, Clance," she cries, and jumps off. In the voice of the wind, the waves, and the seagulls Clancy hears the second phrase of his song: "It’s Christmas Day in the workhouse," the writes, "But it’s paradise with you." And now everybody is singing it; a massed orchestra in Carnegie Hall is playing it, Liszt has turned it into another rhapsody, and in Buckingham Palace, where Queen Victoria is being married, it heralds the bride’s descent of the grand staircase. And the film fades out on a shot of Elsa flying into the sunrise between two seagulls.