Una voz en la tormenta

***SPOILERS*** At first you think your watching the sequel of the movie "I walked with a Zombie" as the what looks like brain dead concert pianist Jan Volny, Francis Lederer, walking around the island of Guadalupe, with foghorns blowing in all directions, as if he was dropped off there from a UFO after being experimented on by the spacecrafts' alien crew members. Known by the people in town as "The Crazy One" Volny just sits in his shack endlessly playing on the piano Smetana's touching melody "Moldau" for endless hours at at time. Yes the guy is crazy but it was the music he played back home in Prague that got him to be that way.

It was in Nazi occupied Czechoslovakia that Volny makes the mistake in playing music forbidden by the Reich. That had him arrested and about to be interned in a mental institution to be deprogrammed by Nazi doctors and psychiatrists. On his way there Volny ended up killing the two SS men who ware taking him there thus making him a fugitive from the law, Nazi law, who was to be shot on sight for murder. With him now somehow getting to the island of Gaudalupe his troubles were far from over. It was his old lady Marya, Sigrid Gurie, who tracked him down there and is now herself suffering from double pneumonia because of the trip there that wrecked her health.

The film tries to show its audience that the Nazi's among other things didn't appreciate good music like hard rock rock & roll and country & western as well as the classics that Volny was so found off. It wouldn't have been a big deal for Volny to play the Nazie's music requests but his conscience wouldn't let him. He ended up playing himself into madness and obscurity that cost him not only his sanity but his both wife's, Marya, life as well as his own. And it wasn't the Nazis that did him in it was his fellow escapees from Nazi occupied Europe that did.

After playing Smetna's Maldau in Czechoslovakia, and accused of inciting anti-German feelings, pianist Jan Volny finds himself running from the Nazis in "Voice in the Wind" from 1944. This is a rarity - it's an independent film at a time when very few were made, due to the power of the movie studios.

Volny is tortured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp; however, he overpowers his captors and later boards a ship for Guadalupe. There he is known as El Hombre -- he has amnesia and remembers nothing of his past.

His wife, whom he left in the care of a friend in Czechoslovakia, finally lands in Guadalupe as well, but she is quite ill. She hears El Hombre playing the piano and realizes that it is Jan.

Very sad and depressing but full of heart and the human spirit.

As a teenager I rarely saw a movie I didn't like, but this was the first one I actually hated. I saw it in 1944 at a naval base in Newfoundland after months of isolation in the North Atlantic, so what few critical facilities I had were numbed and I was ready to enjoy any junk Hollywood threw my way. But this... I walked out of the theater actually angry!

So how come it still sticks in my memory? Nothing could be that memorably bad. I suspect from reading other reviews that it had many haunting, persistent film-noir images unlike anything the major studios were grinding out then.

If it ever shows up on Turner Classic Movies I'll certainly watch it with an eager, open mind.

This film is quite atmospheric. It certainly captures the essence of the nazis bouncing a Czech from his native land (but he does have the pleasure of killing two of them). He migrates to Guadaloupe with two thugs from Portugal. The film is decidedly overdramatic and maudlin; however, the situation was overdramatic and maudlin at the time. Francis Lederer gives it his best wide-eyed try, and we are taken in by the beautiful music the film evokes. However, a real nazi would not have sent him to prison; he would have merely smashed his hands to bits, so he would never have been able to play again. That part of the film is a bit unbelievable. The rest is rather depressing, but an accurate account of thousands of lives ruined by WW2. Interesting.

I saw this film at least six times. I grew up a fan of Francis Lederer and I am also a musician. This film was premiered by my uncle at the Hawaii Theater in Hollywood. It was unique in more than one way: Not only was it an intensive dramatic story of a pianist who tries to recover from abuse by the Nazis, but elegantly portrays nationalism. The Moldau by Smetana is the background music which holds the film together. Keep in mind that I saw the film in the 1940s, and not since; perhaps no one has since. Another uniqueness: my uncle managed to bring a pianist on stage; he began playing the Moldau and it bled into the film music. The pianist, as I recall, was Vladimir Brenner, who sought to restore a career after the war. I do not know if other theaters included an on-stage pianist. Critics suggest the film was moody, even dull, but I found it then, as I remember it now, a film classic.