A Dream of Love

It's hard to judge a short that was cut from 37 minutes to 17 minutes for U.S. showings as a two-reel short. A DREAM OF LOVE uses sets that look suspiciously like left-overs from a Jeanette MacDonald/Nelson Eddy musical.

IAN COLIN as Franz Liszt lifts his tenor voice in song very effectively (that is--whomever dubbed the song for Mr. Colin) but the story is a trite one about an ill-fated love affair smacking of class snobbery by the young woman's father. At the end, an aged Franz Liszt (played by Bertram Wallis who looks nothing like Mr. Colin), clutches a rose sent to him for a typically sentimental ending.

In certain shots, Mr. Colin looks a lot like the Errol Flynn of "Captain Blood" (similar wig, similar profile) which probably makes his singing seem even more mythical.

This short film is basically a music video with only the tiniest amount of story used as an excuse to feature the music of composer Franz Liszt. You hear selection after selection and see dancers paying tribute this the famous man.

The film clearly has the nice MGM polish and lovely music. But because it really tells you very little about the composer, you may leave feeling like "Is that all there is?"...which is how I felt about it.

This was Franz Liszt's (1811-1886) first love: Carollne de Saint-Cricq. He was a poor budding pianist and she was a seventeen year-old daughter of a wealthy aristocrat. She was Liszt's pupil and they soon fell in love. Caught by her father Liszt was soon fired and she was forced into an arranged marriage to someone of her status.

Liszt had a major vocational crisis after the forced breakup and seriously thought of entering the priesthood. He did not and instead lived to have other loves during his life.He eventually received the four minor orders of the Church.

Yet Liszt never forgot his first love and treasured the memory as the film shows. Although she died fourteen years before Liszt she was remembered in his will in which he left her his signet-ring.

The fascinating life of Liszt is best told in the three-volume biography by Alan Walker "Frank Liszt."

Before he produced and narrated Technicolor travelogues for MGM, James A. Fitzpatrick got his start in the late silent era producing and directing early musical shorts. Although he had been doing his Traveltalks for five years by the time this short came out, he still sometimes produced a musical short, heavy on the shmaltz. Usually he picked some old-timey composer like Stephen Foster. Here, it's Franz Lizst, who gets the kitschy treatment.

I hasten to agree that Liszt did have a romance with a young woman whose uncle broke it off, just as this short subject would have you believe. However, he also lived five years with a countess ("a rich countess with money" as my grandfather would have said), got married, and had children. All of us have had romances that ended badly. We get over them.

The music is quite beautiful. It's Liszt's music, after all. The arrangements are too ornate.

Dream of Love, A (1938)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Docu-drama about composer Franz Liszt who, we're told, lived a very unhappy life due to a woman he loved that got away from him. One day a priest brings him a box that contains a single flower, which causes Liszt to think back about his life with this woman. This is a hard film to judge because it was originally 34-minutes but MGM forced the director to cut it down to 17-minutes, which is the very that has been shown ever since. FitzPatrick is best known for his TravelTalks shorts but he did manage to get away from them a few times and this is one example. What's left here is pretty uneven because it's never quite clear if the film wants to focus on the love story or the music itself. It's pretty clear that this was meant to be a lot longer as we start things off with an expanded song before we then head straight for the story only to have the music re-appear towards the end. The direction is fair throughout and the actors seem comfortable in their roles. Hopefully one day the complete version will show up so we can see exactly what the director wanted us to.