Sometimes all it takes is one good scene for a film to become indispensable. Consider the remains of the Statue of Liberty in Planet of the Apes, or Gloria Swanson emerging from her mansion to face the cameras in Sunset Boulevard, or the moment in A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child when Freddy Krueger stuffs his victim’s mouth with cakes while uttering the immortal line: “bon appétit, bitch”. (Okay, maybe that last one is debatable.)
This crossed my mind recently while I was watching the 1939 film They Shall Have Music. It’s an enjoyably sentimental story about a juvenile petty criminal on the streets of New York City who finds redemption through rediscovering his love for the violin. It’s no cinematic masterpiece, but it has no pretensions to high art, and the central performance by Gene Reynolds as the teenage urchin Frankie is impressive. Moreover, there is one standout scene that I think works tremendously well.
It comes early in the film. Frankie and his British chum Limey (played by Terry Kilburn) are hiding from the police near a concert hall. A squabbling couple drop their tickets and Frankie picks them up in the hope of touting them for cash. He fails to secure a sale and so the boys decide to watch the show themselves. My favourite scene begins directly afterwards with these two grubby delinquents entering the auditorium and scrambling their way to their seats amid the preened and perfumed concertgoers. The show begins…
The violinist is Jascha Heifetz, the famed Lithuanian virtuoso, one of the most accomplished players of all time. It is said that after Heifetz’s debut performance at Carnegie Hall as a sixteen-year-old, the master violinist Fritz Kreisler remarked: “We might as well take our fiddles and break them across our knees”. It’s what we might call the Salieri effect: that sense of despair that an artist feels when confronted with a superior talent. One thinks of the narrator of Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser, who gives up the piano having heard the playing of Glenn Gould. “When we meet the very best,” he writes, “we have to give up”.
It’s thrilling to watch Heifetz at the height of his powers playing Camille Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso. The movie does us the service of preserving Heifetz’s genius, seizing in aspic this singular performance from another time. The scene is captured with aplomb, the camera lingering on Heifetz’s frenetic arpeggios before sweeping back to accentuate the swelling chord progressions of the orchestra.
Better still, it trusts its audience enough to allow Saint-Saëns’s piece to play out for its full nine minute duration, a choice that would surely be vetoed by any modern-day Hollywood studio. There is something refreshingly audacious about witnessing the complete composition performed on screen. Furthermore, what seems to us a digression is actually a key aspect of the storytelling. Just as a song in musical theatre typically advances the plot, Frankie’s state of mind at the beginning of the scene has entirely shifted by the final note. He is drawn into the alchemy of the performance, and we follow in his wake.
Watching this long-dead virtuoso in action seems like a form of time-travel. It is one of those bittersweet feelings that are so often evoked by older films. While we are always conscious that these joyous, breathing, human figures are now reduced to dust, we feel privileged to catch these glimpses of their lives.
Angela Carter distils this sensation perfectly in her novel Wise Children, the story of two elderly twin sisters Dora and Nora, former actors from the early days of Hollywood. In one particularly memorable chapter, they decide to take the bus to a rundown independent cinema in Notting Hill to watch a re-screening of an old adaption of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which they played Peaseblossom and Mustardseed. Hardly anyone is in attendance, just a few gay men who are fans of the movie’s kitschness (one is even being fellated by his boyfriend on the flea-ridden plush). But as they watch their younger selves, resurrected on the screen in streaks of light, Dora has a moment of realisation:
“Then I understood the thing I’d never grasped back in those days, when I was young, before I lived in history. When I was young, I’d wanted to be ephemeral, I’d wanted the moment, to live in just the glorious moment, the rush of blood, the applause. Pluck the day. Eat the peach. Tomorrow never comes. But, oh yes, tomorrow does come all right, and when it comes it lasts a bloody long time, I can tell you. But if you’ve put your past on celluloid, it keeps. You’ve stored it away, like jam, for winter.”
This isn’t quite nostalgia, that tricksy emotion which Carter describes as the “vice of the aged”. Dora and Nora are briefly experiencing that oneiric sensation of a life held in stasis. Their film offers the same promise of immortality one finds in the sestet of Shakespeare’s eighteenth sonnet.
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Here the poet exclaims that the object of his desire will remain forever young in these verses. They Shall Have Music, of course, reaches no such artistic heights, but the spectacle of Heifetz’s talent, preserved on film, is drawn from a similar wellspring.
And what of Gene Reynolds, the fifteen-year-old boy who plays Frankie? Well, after his stint as a child movie star, he served in World War II, and thereafter turned his hand to directing television sitcoms. He co-created and produced the hit show M*A*S*H, won multiple Emmy Awards and was elected as President of the Directors Guild of America. He married twice, had one son, and died four years ago at the age of ninety-six.
But as we watch that striking scene from They Shall Have Music, we are delivered back to a time before all the havoc of adult life. In that brief snapshot he is still that delinquent street boy, transfixed and transformed by the power of one of the greatest violinists who ever lived. The cynical might dismiss the impact as trivial or sentimental, but for me it’s a testament to the power of cinema. As Dora says, once you’ve put your past on celluloid, it keeps.
Dear Andrew. I thank you for moving me to tears by this piece; for reminding me of what we are defending in the culture war; and for teaching me a new word, oneiric. Bless you.
What a lovely piece! This film is added to my watch list (if only for Heifetz being in there) as is the novel Wise Children.
As an amateur violin player I'm usually hesitant to watch "violin playing" in films since it often looks absolutely ridiculous and is more of a distraction than anything else... But back in the days they had a proper budget for hiring real violinists to play crucial musical scenes. Heifetz is amazing and luckily kept on celluloid for us to enjoy.
I also like the slight melancholy (?) of your writing here. One thing I've learned is never to compare myself to geniuses. Playing a musical instrument is also to enrich your life and have a "screen free" hobby, forcing you to actively "create" instead of passively consume.
Hopefully you haven't given up on anything after seeing someone being superb at something. Thank you for this morning read.