Song of Norway

I had great expectations when this film opened with beautiful scenery and masterful cinematography. Norway is truly spectacular. I thought it would be very refreshing to watch a film that didn't rely on special effects, but sorrowfully my expectations soon gave way to mind boggling reality.

The pacing was slow, the dialogue was forced, "real" reactions were practically nonexistent, even from the stand-ins, kids, dancers and supporting actors who were used more like set pieces than human beings. The directorial style was old fashioned Rome opera. Traditionally in Rome, the singers rarely move. They just plant their feet and sing, and the chorus is draped around them. The sound is great, but the dramatic elements are totally sublimated to the music. I think they tried to do the same here, but what's good for Rome sure ain't good for the movies! Frank Porretta as Richard Nordraak touches me with his gorgeous voice, and he reads well on screen, but his character, like the rest, lacked any depth.

Once footage was "in the can" scenes were chopped up like confetti. Smooth transitions, probably 86'd for the sake of the score, were the first to go. Our "suspension of disbelief" was shattered continually. The sound was also very uneven, and the choreography was quite stilted and cloned from just about any Rogers and Hammerstein film. "Production numbers" just meant more people on stage, crammed into boxcars if necessary, and "don't let them move around too much". oi. They even teamed Florence Henderson up with a gang of "cute kids" who had absolutely no personalities, and had her stomp through the town singing ala "Sound of Music". Nothing worked.

How Edward G. Robinson managed to retain his dignity in this horrible flick is a total mystery. The leading men might have done well as characters in "Mr. Ripley" if only their makeup had been feathered into the hairlines. Florence was lovely and animated and saved the day as best as she could. The costumes were obviously high budget as was the film itself, but budget alone could not save this unfortunate disaster.

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.

This wretched film was inflicted upon me at a weekend house party, when the hosts insisted that we all watch this "absolutely lovely movie" together. Imagine being trapped for 2 and a half hours with a VIDEO of this travesty, on a small TV screen, seeking brief respites ("could you pause it while I visit the 'facility'?"), having to mumble polite monosyllables of assent in response to the hosts' appalling praise of what turned out to be absolute drivel. The film does have exquisite scenery...Norway's a beautiful country! It has lovely music...Grieg was a decent enough composer! It also has the most atrociously awful acting (the lead is one Toralv Maurstad, who has mercifully vanished from sight, Florence Henderson is in this, for Pete's sake---and what on earth are Robert Morley, Edward G. Robinson, Oscar Homolka, and Harry Secombe doing in this?), a sophomoric (or worse) script, amateurish direction, incompetent film editing. And it is SO BORING!!!! No, it's worse than boring, it is profoundly IRRITATING in its boredom.

SONG OF NORWAY is an unbearably dull musical pastiche of clichés heard in every musical ever made that purported to be the saga of a composer's struggles to find recognition for his music. Edvard Grieg's struggles are so dull as to be non-stop in this awful compilation of Norwegian scenery by the truckload with no story to carry it.

It is notable that the man who plays Grieg, TORALV MAURSTAD, never did make another American film, so disastrous were the reviews and box-office for this dull saga. Note also that FLORENCE HENDERSON was not able to make another film in Hollywood but went directly to television and stayed there for a very successful run on "The Brady Bunch". See the film and you will judge yourself why it was an abject failure. And don't be fooled by the presence of OSKAR HOMOLKA, EDWARD G. ROBINSON and ROBERT MORLEY in the cast. They have little or nothing to do.

Music lovers may be enchanted by Grieg's works, but not the way they are presented here. Nor is there any resemblance between the zestful SOUND OF MUSIC and its picturesque way of dealing with the Von Trapp Singers and this dull as dishwater musical that would work better as a travelogue of Norway with the plot excised.

See it at your own risk.

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.