Song of Love (1947)

Such a frustrating disappointment

Awesome Movie

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

In this biopic of Robert Schumann, Paul Henreid plays the struggling pianist and Katharine Hepburn plays his wife, also a pianist. While Paul felt fine about using a hand double during the musical scenes, Kate trained so that she would be believable as a piano player. Not only do you see her playing during the scenes, but you actually hear her, too! Usually, music is dubbed over, but Kate was so flawless in her playing that director Clarence Brown opted to let audiences hear her music. So, if you want to see Katharine Hepburn showing an enormous amount of musical talent, this is the movie for you! Robert Walker costars as Johannes Brahms, as well as Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt. It's an interesting story to see the three famous musicians together, but the main focus of the plot is the Schumanns. Kate puts her career on hold to give her full support to Paul as he pursues his musical dreams, but will the pressure prove to be too much for him? You'll have to watch the film, or know your history, to find out.My favorite scene in the film is during one of Katharine Hepburn's concerts. There she is, in a beautiful ball gown, playing a slow concerto to hundreds of people in a theater, when a nurse shows herself in the wings and tries to get Kate's attention. She holds up Kate's newborn baby, indicating that the child is hungry and needs food from Mama. Kate immediately speeds up the piano concerto, to the audience's confusion and entertainment, so that she can finish the piece as quickly as possible and attend to her baby. It's hilarious and adorable. If you like musical movies, or if you found that scene too cute to resist, go ahead and rent Song of Love. It probably won't be your all-time favorite Katharine Hepburn movie, but it's pretty good.

Anybody fascinated by Robert and Clara Schumann's story, who loves Schumann's songs and who loves Katharine Hepburn will find good reason to see and at least moderately like Song of Love. Song of Love is not a great film but it is a decent one. It is hurt by some pedestrian pacing, stilted dialogue and that Robert Schumann's gradual descent into insanity could have been explored in much more depth(it did feel rather shallow, maybe a little less on Brahms, whose subplot takes too much time to develop and evolve, might have helped a little). Song of Love looks very beautiful however, and is directed with great class and taste. The music is just glorious as well, a healthy dose of Schumann, Brahms and Liszt and performed beautifully. While the insanity angle could have been explored much more, the story is still quite interesting and moving if somewhat shallow at times. And the performances were fine, Katharine Hepburn fared best in the acting department, charming and sympathetic as well as with a commanding and arch side too. Paul Henreid's role as Robert was the most difficult, and he carries it with dignity and later on austerity. Robert Walker looks eerily like Brahms and he is nuanced, good-natured and sympathetic as him. Henry Daniell is very neurotic and virtuosic as Liszt, Elsa Jensson is amusing and Leo G. Carroll is very effective at being an over-bearing and disapproving father figure. In conclusion, not great but interesting and worth watching. For a history lesson look elsewhere, for a decent way to spend 2 hours judging Song of Love as a film stick with it. 6/10 Bethany Cox

I recently gave a dismal review to "A Song to Remember," the 1945 biopic about Frederic Chopin. That film was a poor Hollywood attempt to tell the story of a great composer. "Song of Love" was made at almost the same time, about a composer who was a contemporary of Chopin, but it does a better job, both biographically and in terms of the lead actors.Hepburn/Henreid/Walker are a much stronger combination than Muni/Oberon/Wilde (especially the latter two), bringing real passion to the roles and making them seem like actual human beings. It's a bit of a stretch seeing Hepburn at age 40 playing Clara Wieck as a teenager, but we'll cut her some slack because of her glowing personality and quite remarkable finger-syncing. (Bad on-screen piano playing is a personal pet peeve of mine.) The plot is loosely based on the truth. The love triangle aspect is played up here, as could be expected in Hollywood. Another possible error is that scholars have speculated that Clara was not all that sad about having Robert away in an asylum, because it gave her freedom to resume her career. (The movie makes it seem as though she went into seclusion and had to be coaxed out by Brahms.) She did devote her later performances to Robert's work, but she was a fine composer herself (never mentioned in the film). Far too much time is taken with the sub-plot involving Brahms as the Schumann's virtual live-in houseboy (another stretch of the truth), but I suppose that was done so we could have the cook character as the only real comic relief.There's a lot of nice piano music here and a decent enough representation of the lives of Robert and Clara Schumann. What I'd really like to see, though, is a more in-depth dramatization of Robert's gradual descent into insanity. But that's a little too grim for MGM in the 1940s!

First of all, Katherine Hepburn is badly miscast as Clara. She just can't be convincing as the devoted, selfless, rather smarmy wife that the writers have created.But the real weakness of the film is its shallowness in the face of a potentially great piece of drama. Schumann's bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder amounts to "Oh, oh, I have a headache" and the occasional angry word. Suicide? The word is used, but there's no sign of it in domestic scenes and when we see him in the mental hospital he's calm and subdued and smiling and optimistic. A superficial treatment. And Brahms is so upright and bourgeois - no sign of his gruff humour, his love of tweaking the noses of the establishment, no sign of his tortured attitude toward sex and women resulting from spending his youth playing piano in brothels. And was Clara's long concert career entirely about promoting Robert's music, or was she, in fact, a remarkable pianist who wanted a career for herself, a female pianist carving out a place for herself in a male world? Any sort of treatment of the lives of great artists is better than none, but this is a standard Hollywood, middle-of-the-road approach, particularly disappointing because the real story is so much more dramatic, so much more interesting, so much more human.