Strano fascino

Hugo Haas is a famous European piano virtuoso who's brought to the States by wealthy widow Mona Barrie. Haas goes on a concert tour where he meets dancer Cleo Moore, and they end up getting married. As Haas struggles to break thorugh in the States, he also struggles to keep both Moore and Barrie happy. But Barrie isn't crazy about Haas's marriage and cuts off her financial support. And when Moore is also thinking about going back to her old dance partner, Haas gets desperate and thinks about collecting the insurance on his hands, somehow...

This was director, writer, actor and producer Hugo Haas ('Pickup') and Cleo Moore's ('On Dangerous Ground') first of 7 collaborations. Moore is far less of a femme fatale in this one than their subsequent movies, but Haas plays essentially the same role as in most of the other ones (ditto in his movies with Beverly Michaels), a 'simple' man who gets involved with the wrong woman and ends up in a downward spiral. Noone can accuse Haas of having too much talent as a writer, director or actor, but as with the title of this movie, he's strangely fascinating to watch. In some close-up's it almost as if you can see him thinking about how to portray emotions. In any case, and for whatever reason, with Haas I don't mind it, I find him very likeable somehow.

Haas's movies are almost invariably low budget affairs, but he does a nice job here with limited means, with a surprising high amount of sets. And experienced DoP Paul Ivano ('The Shanghai Gesture', 'Black Angel') also added a bit of noir aesthetic to this movie, unfortunately not a lot tho. But this is not one of Haas's best efforts, also because Moore's character is nowhere near the sultry and sleazy characters she would portray in her later movies under Haas. It's a decent noir-ish melodrama, but no need to go out of your way to see this one.

Entertaining run of the mill 1950s b movie brightened by the beauty and charisma of Cleo Taurus Moore.

I won't belabor you with plot details -- other reviewers have done that just fine.

I do disagree with most of the ratings that precede mine. Greatness here? No. But definitely watchable with two very real characters (that's scripting) and two solid performances.

I have no idea what the cost of making Strange Fascination was. It seemed low-cost but not corner-cutting. I'm no high-brow musically, I never heard of Hugo Haas and barely knew of Cleo Moore. I didn't enter with great expectations. I came away pleasantly surprised. I found a good mix of on-screen chemistry, despite the characters' wide variance in background and age.

Directors who act in their own films would probably want to be their own lawyers. (This means you, Heywood Allen.) Here, Haas comes out OK both in front of and behind the camera. Moore is appropriately attractive, as well as being effective.

Good, tight, well executed B-plus film. Worth your while. Mine, anyway.

A European pianist comes to America and falls for a dancehall girl. Written, directed, produced and starring Hugo Haas, who doesn't do a particularly good job in any of those roles. The script is lifeless and poorly written (including a second act twist that doesn't make a lick of sense), a lot of very prosaic drama that never catches fire. The camera-work is entirely uninteresting, and borderline amateurish. The performances and characterizations are bland. This is the first of seven films that Haas did with pin-up gal Cleo Moore, which is odd because here they have little chemistry together. The film is categorized as noir, but that seems like a stretch by any definition of the genre. Only in the final 10 minutes do we get any compelling plot material, and I will say I quite liked the ending. But otherwise it's a snooze.

A well directed, well written and sad film like this calls to mind the works of Max Ophüls and Stefan Zweig, it's the same kind of deep melancholy pervading the whole work, giving it a dimension of bottomless despair. Josef von Sternberg's "The Blue Angel" bringing Marlene Dietrich to Hollywood also comes to mind, it's the same kind of story, an accomplished master in his field is brought down by his own strange fascination with a cheap nightclub dancer, who actually originally is intent on bringing him down and sabotaging his concert, but instead she gets a kick out of his fantastic Chopin interpretations although she understands nothing about classical music, and he commits the mistake of taking her seriously and falling for her, making of himself a self-destructive idiot. Of course he is foolish, getting carried away by his jealousy of a woman who could be his daughter, but he just can't help it, and Hugo Haas makes a very convincing character of a great man at a loss against his own weakness. Almost all Hugo Haas' films have the character of a sad pathetic self-revelation and self-confession, and here he plays the lead in his own film of such a case. It is extremely sympathetic in all its pathetic deplorability, but the case is saved by the fact that he actually keeps smiling. And the music, like in all Haas' films, is absolutely exquisite in its blend of the highest quality and the lowest vulgarity.