Star-Crossed Artists
Star-Crossed Artists
Falling through the crackles in Old Quebec
I love classic films. The best ones are like magic lamps that can lead you to treasure rooms of forgotten art. One such film led me to explore the lives and work of two star-crossed artists—a director and a composer— whose brilliance could not transcend their utterly bad fortune. A heavy fate hung over both of them, inexorable as something from Euripedes. And my unexpected guide to these dual biographies was a decent film noir set in Quebec City.
It was the setting that made me choose the film. I love Quebec City. The first time I visited, I had driven six-and-a-half hours from Manhattan to Montreal with some friends. As a transplanted Californian, it seemed relatively close. None of my east coast friends saw it quite the same way, but I was willing to drive, so we set off for a long weekend.
One of our crew insisted that we take a day and go on to Quebec. I was reluctant, because it was another long drive in a weekend full of them, but he was adamant that we would love it.
When we arrived, it was a gray, blustery day, and the city looked extremely nondescript.
“Hooray,” I said, “we’ve driven another three hours to look at Denver.”
“Just wait,” he replied.
Then I saw the ramparts. We drove through one of the fortified city gates into the old town, and I couldn’t believe I was in North America. The vast stone walls, centuries old, surrounded a downtown of cobblestones and cathedrals. Here was an America built by the ancien regime. We toured the Chateau Frontenac and ate dinner in a candlelit bistro with white tablecloths. To one of my travel companion’s absolute horror, I ordered frog’s legs.
So when the PizzaFLIX1 channel had an old film noir set in Quebec City, I thought hell yeah, Quebec plus noir. I’m in. Also, I’d never heard of it. The only French Canadian noir film I knew was Hitchcock’s I Confess starring Montgomery Clift as an extremely sexy priest. But I Confess was released in 1953 and this film, Whispering City, was from 1947. What was I missing?
(I tried to write this part without spoilers, though I am reasonably confident no one reading this is going to watch some black and white film from 1947 with intermittent crackle sounds. Here’s the real spoiler: It sounds like someone’s running a lawnmower outside through half the movie. I’m sure PizzaFLIX did their best to clean it up.)
Whispering City stars the debonair Paul Lukas, academy award winner for 1943’s Watch on the Rhine. He plays a wealthy lawyer obsessed with beauty, art, music. Culture is his life. His protege is a romantic music composer played by handsome Helmut Dantine, famous at that point for playing Nazis, even though, like many actors pigeonholed into Nazi roles, he had barely escaped them in real life.2
In the film, composer Michel is working on an opus for Quebec. It sounded so much like Rachmaninoff that I googled “Whispering City Rachmaninoff”. That search led me to my first star-crossed artist: composer and pianist André Mathieu.
Mathieu was a child prodigy of the interwar period who played his first recital at 6 and was known as the Canadian Mozart. He played the great concert halls of Europe and the United States as a child. The piece in the film, Concerto no.3 in C minor op. 25, was one of his last before he fell into alcoholism and obscurity. To make drinking money, he used to perform piano-thons where he would play for 20 hours straight. Like Mozart, he was dead before 40.
Mathieu’s tragic story illustrates not only the often brief lifespans of prodigies, but how fame depends on fashion and politics, even at the highest level of the arts. For Mathieu was a romantic composer at a time when tastemakers and patrons were leaning heavily into experimental and avant-garde music, like twelve tone.
I’ve been working on Francis Stonor Saunders’ book Who Paid the Piper? The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. It’s not easy—the book bristles with names of people long passed, closed committees, half-forgotten conferences and concerts. However, with patient reading a byzantine system is revealed, developed by Ivy League American Brahmins who shaped post-war culture using mountains of filthy lucre. Sometimes they were in the CIA and sometimes they were wealthy private citizens. The difference between them was nebulous.
In charge of developing the US cultural propaganda programs, the elites at the CIA and their pet foundations hated romantic/neo-classical composer Shostakovich because he was working under Stalin. In addition, they were fixated on the idea that abstraction and dissonance were key components of American Art. Because they knew best. In their secret cultural war against communism, they were dumptrucking money into any art or music that met those standards. Good for Schoenberg and his acolytes, but not very good for anyone wanting to write romantic or neo-classical work. Romantic music was not the money move - at least not in the West.
Obviously, I don’t think that there was any concerted effort to diminish the reputation of Mathieu in the same way as Shostakovich. He had his own terrible personal issues. However, one can see how the former child prodigy of the interwar years might be brushed aside. And he had come so close. He performed extensively in New York City in 1942-3, including a radio broadcast of his concerto on CBS and three shows at Carnegie Hall.
Leonard Bernstein wrote to André Mathieu asking him when he could come to New York, "so you can play for [music director of New York Philharmonic] Dr. Rodzinski, who is anxious to hear you". Nine days later, André wrote to Pelletier that "Mr. Rodzinski and Mr. Bernstein were very kind to me, and I believe something may come of it. I must return to New York shortly about this matter". But instead was the deafening silence of expected replies that never came.3
In the film, the composer Michel is at least partly based on André Mathieu. His struggles as a romantic composer become a part of the plot, only his war is against popular music, not the American avant-garde. Near the beginning of the film, we meet Michel’s wife, Blanche, a dissatisfied and neurotic woman who is jealous of Michel’s dedication to his craft. She refuses to turn off her hot jazz records when he comes home to work on his concerto, asking him why he bothers so much when he’s only going to make $300.
“Why don’t you write popular songs?” she asks. “You used to in college.”
But Michel has turned his back on what is popular and is making art from a personal vision. His craft is supreme, but it can’t lift him out of his poverty and obscurity. In one powerful moment, he breaks Blanche’s jazz record in two. Fuck you, popularity.
But popularity is not just about the mass market. It’s about elite preference. I suspect the deafening silence from New York City after 1943 was at least in part because the music composed by André Mathieu had fallen out of political fashion.
When you’re star-crossed, you don’t need to actively turn your back on fashion or politics. You just never quite sync up with the times. This is also the story of the director of Whispering City, Fédor Ozep, born Fyodor Otsep in pre-revolution Russia.
The moment where this film stopped being an evening’s pastime for me and became my new obsession was when a leitmotif from the concerto became a meaningful plot point. Michel visits the home of intrepid lady reporter Mary under an assumed identity. But when he sees her piano, he cannot help himself and plays an excerpt from his concerto. Later, when Mary is at a rehearsal of the Quebec philharmonic, she hears the music, recognizes it, and realizes that her mysterious visitor had been the composer.
The leitmotif, then, became a cornerstone of the story. Film cues more often use the visual medium. Not always, but more often. Using sound made the moment seem much more real. Mary didn’t recognize his face from a poster. She recognized the music, which was swirling all around her and all around me at the same time. A moment like this transcends the dichotomy of diegetic and non-diegetic. This moment sparked my investigation of the film, which led not only to André Mathieu but to the director Fédor Ozep.
Born in Czarist Russia, he was a successful early filmmaker in the brief pre-Revolutionary era, a fact that turned into a strike against him once the Bolsheviks took over. When it comes to classic film, everyone knows Soviet Sergei Eisenstein and his magical montage. There goes the baby buggy over the steps. But Ozep was his contemporary, making fun and commercially successful movies at the same time (most notably Miss Mend), which, again, made him suspect.
Less and less well-received in Soviet Russia, he left for Germany and absorbed German expressionism, embracing sound, too, as a technique that could be fully incorporated into film. Silent films didn’t have soundtracks—they just played contemporary popular music over the story. Ozep was one of the first to deliberately apply sound effects and music to visuals in order to deepen the film experience.
While in Germany, he directed his first sound film— a version of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, filmed in both French and German. A famous scene from the film marries sound and visual elements in an unforgettable fashion. In an extensive essay on the classic film blog Nitrateville, writer Mike Gebert explains the impact of the film.
Karamasoff is one of the most fascinating and innovative of all early sound films …for its attempt to create a new sound film aesthetic in which the soundtrack and the visuals work together for a synesthetic emotional effect.4
Like so many others, Ozep was forced to flee the Nazis and start over again in the United States. He made a few small films in Hollywood and then was invited to Quebec. He still had a dwindling reputation as a famous director, and he was fluent in French. Quebec was a beautiful backwater, with no native film production industry, and so Ozep came to Quebec as the biggest name they could get. There, he made two movies at the same time: Whispering City in English and La Forteresse in French, using different actors with the same sets. As a director who had worked in many nations, Ozep was accustomed to this type of multi-lingual production5. The dual-movie release was a success, but a sterile one, as it did not spark the hoped-for launch of the French-Canadian film industry.
Two years later, Ozep died of a heart attack in Hollywood at the age of 49. By then, his reputation was quite diminished. He had fled Soviet Russia for the capitalist West, so they belittled his accomplishments in their developing film canon. His work was also termed proto-fascist in response to his German Brothers Karamazov. Gebert examines the unfair and politically-tinged critical judgments that resulted in Ozep’s faint footprint. He also makes strong connections between Ozep’s innovations, Orson Welles, and film scorer Bernard Herrmann. However, Gebert doesn’t think much of Whispering City/La Fortresse, calling it a bit of a travelogue that doesn’t get going fast enough. These are legitimate criticisms.
Still, in this little scrap of film noir, the genius of an avant garde director and a doomed romantic composer was so palpable that I have spent a fair amount of time over the last two weeks reading about them and absorbing their work.
In spite of their brilliance, in spite of their skill, obscurity smothered them like a blanket. Their artistry had no impact on their fate.
But they still created. And in spite of Gebert’s legitimately lukewarm response, I believe Whispering City is an important film. If the flashes of genius from André Matthieu and Fédor Ozep are not enough to make it so, then the setting of Quebec City establishes its position.
For where else could this collaboration have occurred but Quebec City—the perfect place to provide Fédor Ozep and André Matthieu their final accolades. The fully French North America, the capital city of the alternate timeline, showcasing what was simultaneously fantastic and never-to-be.
Links
André Mathieu: Concerto No. 3 “De Québec” (1943-47)
The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
If you like old movies, I recommend the YouTube channel PizzaFLIX. Here’s an excerpt from their about page
PizzaFLIX is a passion project created by two film industry professionals with 50 years of combined experience. We control one of the largest, privately-held broadcast-quality film & TV libraries of its kind. These films are the foundation for our channel, an educational platform for preserving and discovering the Golden Age of Hollywood and Television.
He spent three months in a concentration camp near Vienna until his wealthy parents were able to get him released. He also played the young man in Casablanca who Rick helps at the roulette wheel so his wife doesn’t have to sleep with Louis to get a visa.
George Nicholson, liner notes for a recording of André Mathieu’s Concerto No. 3, performed by the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra. Conductor Joann Falletta, pianist Alain Lefévre. https://outhere-music.com/en/albums/mathieu-concerto-no-3-gershwin-american-paris
Michael Gebert, “The Erased Auteur: Rediscovering Fedor Ozep.” Nitrateville. https://www.nitrateville.com/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7438
Scott Mackensie, “Soviet Expansionism, Fedor Ozep’s Transnational Cinema,” Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Vol. 12, Issue 1, Spring 2003. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24405653 Mackensie suggests that Ozep’s cosmopolitan and multi-national career disadvantaged him because he hybridized styles in a time when each nation was trying to establish a distinct filmmaking culture.