of early silent film, the way in which preclassical filmmaking privileged visceral thrill and self-contained attraction over narrative integration and the illusion of a self-sufficient story world. At the same time, however, the introduction of widescreen cinema pointed toward a future of blockbuster productions eager to sacrifice stylistic coherence for the sake of spectatorial excitement and box office returns. Second, widescreen films of the 1950s, in heavily drawing on historic sources and epic narratives, may have sanctified the thick materiality of the past, but in recasting history as spectacular event they just as much anticipated the waning of historical depth frequently attributed to the postmodern condition.5 And third, in trying to bestow mechanical reproduction with the bliss of cultural elevation, widescreen films may have perpetuated some of the ideological operations of Fordist mass culture; it falsely reconciled what Horkheimer and Adorno described as the antithesis between high art and the popular.6 Yet, at the same time, the wide-film rage of the 1950s offered a foretaste of our own post-Fordist age—an age in which autonomous art has been so thoroughly incorporated into the global circuits of capital that Horkheimer and Adorno’s notion of a great divide between aesthetic modernism and mass culture has lost its grasp.
It is the goal of this last chapter of The Dark Mirror to situate Curtis Bernhardt’s 1955 Interrupted Melody, produced in CinemaScope for MGM, in the nonsynchronous force field of widescreen filmmaking. Shot by the same director whose 1933 The Tunnel had mobilized bodies and emotions for a new political cause, Interrupted Melody takes recourse to German cultural material—Wagnerian music drama—to tell a narrative of physical recovery and spiritual healing but also to reconstitute nineteenth-century opera as a source of audiovisual attractions for the new postwar middle class. A cinematic extravaganza of the first rank, Bernhardt’s Interrupted Melody sheds light on basic continuities and ruptures in the makeup of postwar Hollywood filmmaking. More important, however, in its peculiar use of Wagnerian music drama Interrupted Melody adds another important chapter to the narrative of Berlin in Hollywood. A sumptuous Hollywood showcase of particularly German operatic sounds, Bernhardt’s film offers an instructive negotiation of different cultural codes and temporalities.
It mobilizes Wagner to close the gaps between modernism and mass culture, Europe and America, the auratic and the postauratic, art and money, and in so doing allows us better to understand the Wagnerian aspirations of both Hollywood and Nazi cinema in their respective historical contexts.
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t h e wo r l d ’s favo r i t e m u s i c
“The world’s favorite music / Interrupted Melody / in magnificent color / in the greatness of CinemaScope.” The film’s original theatrical trailer announced Interrupted Melody as a melodrama casting lavish sounds into majestic images. It praised the film as a story of courage and faith, a gripping narrative of tribulation and recovery. But it commended the coming release even more so for offering a panoply of self-contained operatic numbers and thus for bringing the blessings of legitimate culture to a wider audience:
“Not since the great Caruso has any motion picture presented the world’s most beautiful music as it was meant to be heard.” Operatic music, according to the trailer’s male voice-over, should be experienced with the ear and eye at once. And CinemaScope excels in offering this sense of synesthetic plentitude. The trailer, then, presents Interrupted Melody as performing a double mission. On a narrative level the film is meant to celebrate the greatness of nineteenth-century opera as a source of individual empowerment and recuperation. As a showcase of audiovisual attractions, however, Interrupted Melody is designed to prove the power of widescreen film— of the apparatus itself—to enable middle-class audiences to participate in traditional elite activities. Seeing opera as it was meant to be heard, the viewer of Interrupted Melody is promised a transcendence of former cultural distinctions and thereby an overcoming of the handicap of listening to opera merely in front of the radio or the record player.
Based on the autobiography of the Australian prima donna Marjorie Lawrence, Interrupted Melody tells the story of a farmer’s daughter and her rise to international fame and recognition.7 Lawrence (Eleanor Parker) receives her musical education in Paris. Her father’s unexpected death forces Lawrence to take on an engagement at the Monte Carlo Opera, where she becomes enamored of Dr. Thomas King (Glenn Ford), a New York pedia-trician ready to embark on a medical career. King returns to the United States to open his new clinic, whereas Lawrence moves on to Paris and then to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Her debut as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Götterdämmerung is a great triumph, and so is her American reunion with Dr. King—they pick up their earlier romance and are married in spite of ominous frictions caused by their career paths. Shortly after the wedding Lawrence takes off for a six-month tour to South America, where her career will come to a dramatic halt as she contracts polio. Rehearsing the “Liebestod” scene from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Lawrence breaks down onstage, deprived of her ability to walk. King takes her home to New York, relocates them to Florida, and subjects Lawrence to a rigorous program
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Figure 29. Isolde resurrected: Eleanor Parker as Marjorie Lawrence as Isolde in Curtis Bernhardt’s Interrupted Melody (1955). Courtesy of Filmmuseum Berlin—
Deutsche Kinemathek.
of physical recovery. Lawrence falls into a state of depression and rejects King’s therapy. Their fate takes a turn when King, threatened with bank-ruptcy, returns to New York to take up his job again, and Lawrence, left in Florida, is invited by an army doctor to entertain hospitalized veterans. At first reluctant to accept the offer, Lawrence visits the hospital in her wheelchair and sings “Over the Rainbow” to an audience of injured soldiers, some of them confined to wheelchairs themselves. Having thus recuperated her public voice, Lawrence is drafted by the army to entertain Allied troops abroad and to bolster combat morale. In the final sequence Lawrence returns to New York, King, and the Met to recommence her opera career with a dramatic performance of— Tristan und Isolde. Although still unable to walk, Lawrence, to the utter surprise of both King (backstage) and the audience, manages to stand up during the “Liebestod” aria before collapsing onto Tristan’s dead body (fig. 29). The film’s final image shows Lawrence onstage as she stands amid the set of Tristan und Isolde and listens to the frenetic applause of her audience: Isolde resurrected.
In Interrupted Melody music signifies motion and mobility, whereas physical stagnation corresponds to silence, to the loss of Lawrence’s oper-
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atic voice. This linkage between melody and movement is best illustrated by Lawrence’s various performances for the army. The recital of “Over the Rainbow” entrances Lawrence’s afflicted listeners to such a degree that they fuse into a virtual ballet of wheelchairs. Likewise, Lawrence’s later “Waltzing Mathilda” opens up a space in which melodic progression and physical movement provide allegories for each other, a space in which vocal music moves the mind and literally mobilizes the body. This association of sound and action not only typifies the protagonist, however; it also pertains to the film’s formal organization in general. From the very beginning Interrupted Melody ushers the viewer through a whole series of different generic allusions.8 What starts out in the Australian outback with references to the western and family-film genres quickly changes into a music film, an amorous romance, a conglomerate of doctor’s, woman’s, and social problem film, a musical-cum-war film, and finally a music film again. Driven by a notion of melodrama as a vessel of emotional turmoil and excess, the pace of the film’s generic transformations directly correlates with the rhythms of Lawrence’s career: when polio strikes the prima donna with immobility, Interrupted Melody decreases the speed of its genre switches as well.
Although the early 1950s can be considered MGM’s musical golden age— An American in Paris (1951, Vincente Minnelli), Show Boat (1951, George Sidney), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952, Gene Kelly) representing the most illustrious musical features of the period—MGM’s decision to produce Interrupted Melody in CinemaScope might come as somewhat of a surprise. Based on an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, CinemaScope theater installations had soared dramatically throughout 1953 and 1954. One of the casualties of this rapid proliferation of the widescreen format, however, was the initial prospect of four-track stereo sound.9 Hastily adopted as a shared industry standard, CinemaScope may have offered awe-inspiring images, but it reversed the various revolutions in sound recording and transmission that had distinguished the immediate postwar period.10 Whereas the images became big indeed, sound technologies in the 1950s remained small—
a discrepancy that clearly thwarted at least one purpose of films such as Interrupted Melody, namely to broadcast the world’s favorite music as it could be heard in the opera house.
What should be less of a surprise is MGM’s decision to engage Curtis Bernhardt as a director for Interrupted Melody. Like Siodmak and Sirk, Bernhardt left France in 1939 and immigrated directly to Southern California. Although Bernhardt’s work prior to his arrival in Hollywood showed little evidence of topical, stylistic, or generic unity, he was able not only to secure a seven-year contract with Warner Brothers as early as 1940 but
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also to establish himself—unlike Siodmak and Sirk during the 1940s—as a director of lucrative A productions. Bernhardt quickly emerged as one of Warner’s experts for directing the women’s picture. In contrast to his earlier work most of Bernhardt’s Warner productions of the 1940s revolved around strong female protagonists (played by stars such as Jane Wyman, Ida Lupino, Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford) confronting repressed emotions and rectifying Oedipal dilemmas. After his contract with Warner expired, Bernhardt moved to MGM, where he directed five pictures with highly impressive production values during the 1950s (The Merry Widow, Miss Sadie Thompson, Beau Brummell, Interrupted Melody, Gaby). Similar to the careers of other German émigré directors, Bernhardt’s successes in the 1940s and 1950s resulted in great measure from his ability to meet Hollywood’s professional standards. Contrary to Lang, Siodmak, and Sirk, however, Bernhardt’s Hollywood work by and large lacked any urge for stylistic experimentation or cross-cultural mimicry.11 Never seen or later theorized as an auteur, Bernhardt was reputed for his skill as an effective master at melodramatic material. His women’s films of the 1940s and 1950s excelled in exteriorizing psychological conflict through acting, setting, decor, and music. They embraced Hollywood cinema as a crucible of dramatic gestures and theatrical effects and offered engrossing tableaus that handled feelings and ideas “virtually as plastic entities.”12
Bernhardt’s Hollywood work remains interesting not because it abounds with authorial signatures or subversive slippages but because it allows us to examine the vicissitudes of melodramatic filmmaking vis-à-vis shifting social, political, cultural, and industrial conditions. With its numerous generic crossovers, its deliberate stylistic bricolage, and its intense theatricality, Interrupted Melody was clearly in tune with Bernhardt’s overall Hollywood track record. To be sure, it might be considered ironic that Bernhardt, when interviewed about the film in the 1970s, stressed the fact that prior to the making of Interrupted Melody he had been largely unfamiliar with the operatic works staged within the film.13 Although a lover of classical music, he had to rely on various musical experts to carry out the film’s stagings of Verdi’s Troubadour, Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, Bizet’s Carmen, Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delila, and Wagner’s Götterdämmerung and Tristan und Isolde. But seen in the larger context of this study, Bernhardt’s professed operatic illiteracy once again attests to the curious dialectic between professional adaptation and performative repetition so typical of German émigré filmmakers in the Hollywood studio system since the late 1930s. A director known to accommodate commercial needs with competent solutions, Bernhardt attempted in Interrupted Melody to reference exoticized no-
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