"Carnegie Hall" (1947): Great Classical Music, Predictable, Pedestrian Plot

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I came home after the organ concert in Balboa Park and eveutually we watched a movie together, the 1947 film Carnegie Hall. It was produced by Boris Morros – the former musical director for Paramount, who at the time he made this film was also ostensible owner of the American Recording Associates (ARA), a short-lived label that according to Morros’s own account later on was actually secretly funded by the Communist Party, U.S.A. (nd when he reported this to the FBI, they told Morros to stay involved with the Soviet-backed party and report to them) and former RKO studio head William LeBaron. Carnegie Hall was directed by Edgar G. Ulmer – and at nearly 2 ½ hours it’s twice as long as most of the vest-pocket “B” movies on which his reputation rests – from a story by former actress Seena Oewn turned into a script by Karl Kamb. The conceit of Carnegie Hall is that a young orphan girl shows up at Carnegie Hall on its opening night in 1891, with guest artist Peter Illich Tchaikobsky conducting a bit of his own Fifth Symphony (in reality the Tchaikovsky piece he conducted at Carnegie’s opening night was a lesser-known work, the “Marche solennelle”) and grows up to be actress Marsha Hunt, playing Nora Ryan Salerno. While working as a cleaning lady at the hall Nora meets and falls in love with temperamental pianist Tony Salerno, Sr. (Hans Jaray). They marry in 1916, on the eve of America’s entry into World War I, and they have a son, Tony Jr.

Nora is determined to steer Tony, Jr. into a career in classical music and takes him to innumerable concerts there featuring the greatest musicians of the day – or at least the ones Morros and LeBaron could induce to be in this movie. Tony, Sr. takes himself out of the equation when he returns home drunk, tells his wife he’s just quit his job as anb accompanist at Carnegie Hall, and then takes a drunken tumble down the flight of stairs leading to their room. Tony, Jr. grows up to be played by actor William Prince, whose blond good looks help make up for his decided lack in the way of acting chops. From there the film turns into yet another reworking of The Jazz Singer, as Tony, Jr. discovers modern dance music and jazz – Nora catches him one night as he’s playing a Chopin waltz relatively straight for the first chorus and then turning it into boogie-woogie – and eventually falls in love with Ruth Haines (Martha O’Driscoll on parole from her usual salt mine at Universal). Ruth turns out to be one of the sox female backup singers for Vaughn Monroe, and she drags him to the club where Monroe is performing and ultimately gets him a job as pianist with Monroe’s band. We hear Vaughn Monroe croon two terrible pop songs, “The Pleasure’s All Mine” and “Beware, My Heart,” just after we’ve heard Ezio Pinza do two excerpts from Verdi’s Simon Boccanegra and Mozart’s Don Giovanni, and while a truly great pop singer like Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra would have been better able to handle the comparison, Vaughn Monroe’s stentorian tones and total inability to phrase create an embarrassing musical nose-dive. (Ironically, two years after making this film, Pinza would become a pop singer himself by starring in the Broadway premiere of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific.)

Nora and Tony, Jr. have a falling-out as Nora’s dreams of her son making a spectacular appearance at Carnegie Hall seem dashed, but fortunately the hall commissions him to write a jazz rhapsody for symphony orchestra with himself as pianist and conductor and Harry James as trumpet soloist. Quite a few musicals in 1947, including The Fabulous Dorseys (a biopic of the two famously competitive Dorsey brothers) and New Orleans (with Lee Patrick singing “”o You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?” in a horrendously inappropriate quasi-operatic style that sounds even worse because earlier in the movie, Billie Holiday and a Louis Armstrong small band had done it to perfection) ended with these gargantuan neither-fish-nor-fowl attempts to fuse classical or jazz. Charles found himself wishing that Morros and LeBaron had just done a straight-on concert film with the top-flight classical artists and not bothered with a plot. Oddly, Ulmer’s direction seems more visually assured in the plot portions, and in the scenes featuring glass paintings of Carnegie Hall to symbolize its omnipresence in the characters’ lives, than in the musical sequences. His direction of Jascha Heifetz’ performance of the3 Tchaikovsky violin concerto, with Fritz Reiner conducting what was then awkwardly called the “Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York,” is mostly awkward and hardly manages the genuinely creative staging William Wyler gave to Heifetz’s performances in the 1939 film They Shall Have Music. (In 1859, 12 years after they made this movie, Heifetz and Reiner would reunite for an incandescent recording of the same work with the Chicago Symphony, of which Reiner was then music director and principal conductor.) New York had once had two major orchestras, the New York Philharmonic and New York Symphony, and it was the latter, conducted by Walter Damrosch – who’s played by actor Harold Dyrenforth as a young man and Damrosch himself later on – that actually opened Carnegie Hall. Later they merged during the Depression and adopted the awkward “Philharmonic-Symphony” name until the early 1950’s, when it was simplified to “New York Philharmonic” again.

Not surprisingly, the main interest in Carnegie Hall today lies in the stars of classical music as seen in 1946: conductors Bruno Walter and Fritz Reiner, who used batons; and Leopold Stokowski and Artur Rodzinski, who didn’t; soprano Lily Pons, whose rendition of the “Bell Song” from Delibes’ opera Lakmé is one of the film’s highlights (it’s true that she doesn’t bring any dramatic weight to this music and instead uses it as a way to show off her voice, but goodness, what a voice!), mezzo Risë Stevens doing “My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice” from Saint-Saëns’ opera Samson et Dalila and the “Seguidilla” from Bizet’s Carmen (I remember an RCA Victor album from the early 1950’s in which Stevens sang five excerpts from four different operas – Richard Srauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, Gluck’s Orfeo ed Eurydice and Bizet’s Carmen – and Carmen was the only one in which she actually played a woman instead of being cast cross-gender), Rodzinski doing a mash-up of bits from the last two movements of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Arthur Rubinstein playing Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise and his own arrangement of the “Ritual Fire Dance” from Manuel de Falla’s El Amor Brujo, cellist Gregor Piatigorsky playing a cello-and-piano transcription of “The Swan” from Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animais (and using way more finger vibrato than a modern-day cello teacher would allow one of his or her students), tenor Jan Peerce doing the Neapolitan pop song “O sole mio,” and the wild Heifetz-Reiner performance of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. I love that piece of music but it’s also easy to see why the notorious Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick said of its 19th century premiere in Vienna, “The violin was not so much played last night as beaten black and blue.”

Though at least one imdb.com reviewer said of this movie that they liked the plot portions better than the music, largely because of the limitations of 1947 sound recording (the version we were watching was a DVD from the Bel Canto Society, which specializes in releasing classical and opera music on film, but they didn’t do much to reprocess and improve the sound), for the most part Carnegie Hall is a feast of excellent music-making stuck like raisins into an all too boring, interminable and clichéd plot. One of my two favorite stories about Carnegie Hall the movie is the reminiscence of Artur Rubinstein about how he was approached to be in it. A representative of the production company approached him and outlined the plot. Rubinstein interrupted him and said, “And at the end of the movie Harry James comes out and gives a big concert at Carnegie Hall to end the film!” The studio representative got indignant and said, “Who told you?” “Nobody,” Rubinstein replied. “I knew you guys would have some big swing star come out at the end, and Harry James was just a lucky guess on my part.” The other story was that in order to film the performances inside the real Carnegie Hall – something made much of in the ballyhoo surrounding the film – the technicians cut big holes in the back walls to make room for the bulky cameras of the day. The filmmakers never bothered to fill in the holes after they left, and they were not discovered until nearly 30 years later, when Carnegie Hall was remodeled and restored.