Waltzes from Vienna

Waltzes from Vienna (1934) 

Notable cast/crew: Jessie Matthews as Rasi.  Edmund Gwenn as Johann Strauss the Elder.  This was Gwenn's second of four Hitchcock films.  Fay Compton as Countess Helga von Stahl.  Esmond Knight as Johann Strauss the Younger.

Running time: 76 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: The story of the writing and performance of The Blue Danube

MacGuffin: None

Hitchcock cameo: None

Hitchcock themes: None

How do you turn this thing on?

Verdict: Hitchcock described this film as the low ebb of his career.  He only took it on to keep working as he had no other projects that year.  It is his only musical.  He experimented with using music to set tempo and guide the cutting: " . . . naturally every cut in the film was worked out on script before shooting begins. But more than that, the musical cuts were worked out, too." In certain sequences the images were deliberately cut to conform to the rhythm of the music.  "Film music and cutting have a great deal in common. The purpose of both is to create tempo and mood of the scene. And, just as the ideal cutting is the kind you don't notice as cutting, so with music".  "There is a dialogue scene between a young man and a woman. It is a quiet, tender scene. But the woman's husband is on his way. The obvious way to get suspense is to cut every now and then to glimpses of the husband traveling towards the house. In the silent days, when the villain was coming, you always had the orchestra playing quickening music. You 'felt' the menace. Well, you can still have that and keep the sense of the talk-scene going as well. And the result is that you don't need to insist pictorially on the husband's approach. I think I used about six feet of film out of the three hundred feet used in the sequence to flash to the husband. The feeling of approaching climax can be suggested by the music. It is in the psychological use of music, which, you will observe, they knew something about before talkies, that the great possibilities lie."  It was released as Strauss' Great Waltz in the US.

It's just not that good.  Edmund Gwenn is woefully underused.  This may well be the only Hitchcock movie I will only watch once and never again.  Unless you're watching all of his movies or you're into 19th century period-piece musical biographies, don't go to the trouble of tracking it down.  It's hard to get a copy of for a reason.  But cheer up, the next six films are what launched Hitchcock's reputation for great thrillers.

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: The Man Who Knew Too Much