Monday, May 14, 2012

Opera in film: The Man Between

It's film noir weather in NYC, and with Fr. M. Owen Lee's Opera Quiz Book as my guide, I discovered "The Man Between," directed by Carol Reed of "The Third Man" fame. Lee's tantalizing teaser, from lists of films which use opera to underline an emotional point, or underscore a nuanced dramatic situation, is as follows:

Staatsoper, East Berlin, post-war, pre-wall. Onstage soprano launches into final scene from decadent German opera. Cue for black marketeer Ivo Kern and kidnapped Englishwoman Susanne Malleson to leave box for sinister streets in attempt to escape to Western sector.

Berlin. Still from "The Man Between"
This I had to see. As in the case of Reed's more famous "Third Man," a postwar city is perhaps the most significant character of the drama, shaping the lives (even, dare one say it, the souls) of the human actors whom we discover there. Filmed largely on location, "The Man Between" shows us a Berlin where banners in praise of Stalin flutter over bombed-out buildings and freshly-built guard towers. Children play in ruins, and spies hide there. An English military doctor is kept fully occupied with refugees. There are still nightclubs and cafes and skating rinks. James Mason is Ivo Kern, amoral opportunist extraordinaire. I say amoral... it would perhaps be more precise to say that he has decided to ignore his conscience because it is an instrument of torture. He wears a coat with an astrakhan collar. When inhabiting his public persona, he can be devastatingly charming; trying to keep his skin whole despite the best efforts of gangsters and police to make it otherwise, he is curt, with a blazing intensity of cynicism the sources of which are only gradually discovered by the audience. To summarize the tortuous plot would give important things away; it is, in the end, a drama of individuals.

Hildegard Knef, James Mason
The cast is a mix of English and German actors, which works well on the whole, but results in some oddities. Mason's German is casual, as scripted, so you can hear him say "Nanu, Bettine, du hier bei den Genossen?" in a convincingly offhand way, but with an accent which gave me pause. (My tentative diagnosis of this problem is that his cadences are sometimes off... which is to say, for English, they're idiomatic where they shouldn't be.) There's an East German gangster who is a fine actor auf Deutsch, but who, I suspect, must have learned his English lines by rote. Ernst Schroeder is excellent as an agent, and Hildegard Knef also very fine as the German wife of the English doctor mentioned above. The English doctor's radiantly beautiful and dangerously naive sister is played by Claire Bloom (at the age of 22.) She is quite taken with the dashing Ivo (unsurprisingly) and the more dangerous things get, the more caustic he becomes. The scene where they attend the opera is pivotal and superb. The fun begins when Claire Bloom is asked if she likes the opera; answering in the affirmative, she is offered tickets to East Berlin's opera, as it is judged superior to that in the west. After many vicissitudes, she and James Mason end up in a box, hearing Ljuba Welitsch sing Salome. Yes, really. I wished the camera had given us more details of Welitsch's on-stage performance, but was delighted with the choice of the director to linger here, on this singer, in this role. A pet peeve of mine is the careless use of "shorthand opera" in films, where characters are supposedly deeply moved by unexceptional performances of Tosca or Traviata or... insert Italian warhorse here. To wrap up a film noir replete with sexual and political tension, what better than this? Welitsch's incisive treatment of the text and incandescent defiance were shiver-inducing. A complete recording of Welitsch's Salome is available here; the entirety of the final scene (audio-only) here. In the film, we don't hear Herod's last line, but are soon given other things to worry about, as the fate of our protagonists hangs in the balance.

8 comments:

  1. I have to see this. I recently saw The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, which also has a very young Claire Bloom and which is also excellent.

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    1. I'd be interested to hear what you think of it when you do! I found the performances, as well as the camerawork, really fascinating. I'll have to look up "The Spy Who..." in turn. Despite the fact that it was my first Le Carré novel (the beginning of a beautiful friendship,) I've yet to see the film.

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  2. I love The Third Man, so I'll definitely have to take a look at this one (even though there won't be any Orson Welles!). But it's always so funny to me to hear old opera performances like this - that kind of voice is no longer fashionable. That kind of singing where the larynx isn't perpetually in a low position and where the throat and soft palate aren't always in the most open position (for optimal resonance and less optimal word formation) - a more verbal style of singing - probably wouldn't get most singers very far today. It's like when I watch The Red Shoes or Powell and Pressburger's Tales of Hoffmann - I don't think I've ever seen a modern professional dancer who looked like Moira Shearer (or Robert Helpmann, for that matter). There are so many great performers from previous generations like Ljuba Welitsch, Anja Silja, Callas who were not known for having particularly beautiful voices but were very talented singing actresses. If they were making their careers today I don't think they would be even remotely as successful as they were.

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    1. Hope you enjoy! Sounds as though we should have a nerd-out session about Powell & Pressburger sometime, as well. I agree with you that it's interesting to observe trends in vocal style. I remain skeptical of "what if..." situations; whether that's a result of opera-world ignorance or historian's scruple I'm not sure! It is interesting to trace the career, and following, of these "outlier" voices (Hildegard Behrens, perhaps not coincidentally also a noted Salome, comes to mind as a more recent example.)

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  4. Powell & Pressburger!!! I suppose this particular "what if" lingers in my thoughts because I don't have a good answer for it. There are a lot of good reasons (or reasons that make sense) for this shift in fashion - larger opera houses, less demand for singers/shift in operas place in popular culture, pervasiveness of sound recordings. As much as I like to say that people overestimate the influence of video streaming/broadcast performances, I do wonder how it will affect what we value in voices... HMM! Who knows.

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  5. This film looks fascinating, I will have to check it out. Being a second generation Viennese Besatzungskind, I was raised on The Third Man ('Harry Lime was a saint compared to the Russians' = my Oma, always pricelessly missing the point) and love every detail of it - Holly Martens blithely walking under a ladder in his first shot, genius.

    I guess Fr. M. Owen Lee would be the same M. Owen Lee who wrote a slim but informative companion to Die Meistersinger? Saw it in a faculty library a few years ago and flicked through, not much new to me except for some background to Johannistag I didn't know, but for those unfamiliar to the opera I can't think of a more intelligently written & concise introduction.

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    1. Your Oma sounds rather marvelous. I distinctly remember that "The Third Man" was one of the first 'grownup films' I was allowed to watch, far before I appreciated its brilliance. I'd forgotten how we were introduced to Martens; I should probably revisit it.

      This is indeed the same M. Owen Lee! I'm not actually familiar with his Meistersinger companion, but his "Wagner's Ring" volume is of a similar quality.

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