Song of Norway

Critically-lambasted musical adaptation of the successful play regarding the early years of Norwegian pianist/composer Edvard Greig (played by Toralv Maurstad, a Bruce Davison lookalike with oddly shaped eyes). Grieg--initially a rowdy scamp in the 1860s who pined after a lovely girl from a prominent family while trying to get his sonnets published--found himself frustratingly without a benefactor or any professional engagements in which to showcase his work, later marrying his cousin and barely scraping by giving piano lessons. For the most part, writer-director Andrew L. Stone has crafted a not uninteresting, frequently engaging romp with several intentionally funny asides and endearingly klutzy musical numbers. The on-location shooting in Norway and Denmark is lovely, even if the cinematography in general is poor and the editing mediocre. Frank Porretta is a robust presence as fellow composer Richard Nordraak (who sings to the heavens and, at one point, directly to Edvard while seated in a restaurant!). Yet, just about the time Grieg is gaining some prominence for his hard work, the narrative (loose to begin with) gets all balled up, with too many tragedies coming to a head at once. This patchy third-act, punctuated by a myriad of nature shots and sunsets, doesn't allow the viewer any emotional satisfaction, and the finale is flat. More genuine style and gloss was required, and classical purists will probably scoff, however the picture has a lively beginning. Results are far from terrible. ** from ****

The team of Robert Wright and Chet Forrest adapted the music of Edvard Grieg into a biographical operetta as they later did for Alexander Borodin in Kismet and it ran on Broadway for 860 performances in 1944-46.

In many ways the film shows imagination. The location cinematography in Norway and Denmark is spectacular and obviously influenced by the Sound Of Music as are the musical numbers. There's an animated sequence involving In The Hall Of The Mountain King that is most imaginative.

But the pace is that of escargot. The actors get no real direction at all. Some movie scene stealers like Edward G. Robinson and Oscar Homolka and Robert Morley have their own bag of tricks which are used.

The plot is simply promising composer Edvard Grieg is forbidden marriage to Christina Schollin by her rich dad Robert Morley. He marries Florence Henderson who sings well and probably was hoping she'd break into the big screen stardom after years on the Brady Bunch. The bad reviews Song Of Norway got killed any chance of that. Schollin who never married becomes Grieg's patron instead.

Toralv Maurstad is a big name in Norwegian cinema. But this also killed his career for international stardom.

But if you like the music of Grieg, Song of Norway is for you.

I saw this as a little kid taking piano lessons and loving Grieg's music. (That was in San Francisco - maybe I saw it at the same theater, the Paramount, as one of our earlier commenters?) All of 10 years old, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I suppose I wasn't a great judge of acting at that point, or of cinema in general (it was probably the third or fourth theatrical film I'd seen in my life at that point). So it was basically the music, voices, and scenery I was chewing on. I hadn't even heard the name "Carol Brady" then.

Haven't seen the film since, but I just wonder ... terrible compared to what? The soundtrack (a few cuts I have on a Grieg compilation) is miles better than the nursery-rhymes in Sound of Music, and for the most part the transliterated lyrics aren't a travesty. Florence Henderson doesn't make me gag any more than Julie Andrews or any other too-clean-and-scrubbed actor in the business. And what's wrong with casting an actual Norwegian as Grieg instead of ... I dunno, from the same era ... George Peppard? The movie even had a nice animated sequence for the kids.

Song of Norway was unlucky enough to arrive at the absolute tail end of the road-show-spectacular era of movie musicals, and I'm sure a lot of critics just had indigestion by that point, following Paint Your Wagon (with a singing, dancing Clint Eastwood!), Camelot (a singing, non-dancing Richard Harris!), The Happiest Millionaire (a singing, dancing Fred MacMurray!), and Darling Lili (Dame Julie's nadir). So what's so much worse about Song of Norway?

Got something against Scandinavian composers?!

Adjectives fail this film. "Dreadful" isn't enough. "Awful" seems mild. "Stupifyingly bad" can't convey the experience of it, either. If you are familiar with the poet Helen Steiner Rice, imagine one of her poems set to film and you will begin to dimly grasp how bad, how truly bad, how amazingly bad this motion picture is. Imagine a trailer park filled with lobotomized people sitting in lawn chairs watching a version of "The Sound of Music" made on the cheap especially for them. Imagine the film being projected on a bedsheet attached with clothes pins to a wash line. Imagine the wind blowing. Imagine no one paying attention. Then imagine you are there and you are shackled to a stake in the ground so that you cannot escape the evening's entertainment unless you chew off your own foot. If you can imagine all this, you can imagine the witch's brew of butchered classical music, litter-free travelogue sterility, and lifeless robotic acting that was captured for eternity on one unlucky batch of film stock from the Kodak factory and slapped with the label, "Song of Norway." It is truly the worst film ever made. The only advantage of viewing it is that from that day forth, ANYTHING you see at the movies will look passable by comparison. And I do mean ANYTHING.

Ignoring the scathingly critical reviews for this bomb, I paid admission to the Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood, California during its first-run engagement because I knew that the 70mm/stereo presentation at that theater, especially designed for the viewing of big-screen extravaganzas, would be optimal. Norway is a country I have always wanted to visit and the agony of viewing this film was insufficient to lessen that lifelong dream. But what a nightmare it was! I note that Frank Porretta, listed in the credits, had appeared in a stage production of "The Song of Norway" in Los Angeles and he had received special praise for his expressive singing and masculine stage presence. But you will note that his filmography consists of just this one title. Talk about the proverbial "Kiss of Death"!

The only clear memory I have of that evening's experience at the Cinerama Dome were the loud and ecstatic exclamations emanating from some poor soul in the audience, unprovoked, as far as I could tell, by anything happening on the massively curved screen. She sat off to the side and her outbursts were the prime source of entertainment as the film's lengthy reels unspooled. Management did not eject her, perhaps because she sat through every showing, considerably boosting the meager box-office receipts. Her overwhelming pleasure, I shall always prefer to think, was, perhaps, due to her longing to revisit (I'm presuming here) her native Norway, this film's handsomest attribute.

Florence Henderson's karma must have been extraordinarily good, since her role as the matriarch on TV's long-running and insanely popular family sitcom, "The Brady Bunch," began its hold on the hearts and minds of so many American moppets while coinciding with the theatrical release of this surefire career-killer. She must be a tolerant soul for, were I to enjoy the residuals which must flood her bank account year after year during the syndication of "The Brady Bunch," I'd have long ago investigated the cost of permanently suppressing all evidence of this turkey.