Serenade (1940)
Sérénade is a 1939 French film drama directed by Jean Boyer with Lilian Harvey , Louis Jouvet and Bernard Lancret , which tells the story of Franz Schubert's love for an English dancer.
action
The story is purely fictional and based entirely on the scriptwriter's imagination. Vienna around 1825. One day the Austrian composer Franz Schubert meets the English dancer Margaret Brenton and falls head over heels in love with her. The young woman reciprocates his feelings, but realizes that she threatens to get into a creative crisis. In addition, Vienna's stubborn, possessive and all-powerful police chief, Baron Hartmann, has an eye on the British woman and threatens unpleasant consequences if Margaret turns not to him but to the delicate musician. Margaret then leaves Schubert with a heavy heart, so as not to endanger him any longer and to hinder his artistic creativity. He then processes his pain of farewell and love in the eponymous serenade, which composes in a fit of artistic ecstasy.
Production notes
The shooting of Sérénade took place in the late summer / autumn of 1939, the premiere was on February 28, 1940. In Germany, the film was first seen in September 1949, immediately after Harvey, ten years after her departure, for the first time back in Germany (in As part of a theater tour).
Georges Wakhévitch designed the film structures, Maurice Colasson provided the equipment.
As in her German films, Lilian Harvey also appears here as a singer.
Reviews
Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times : "The blissfully romantic notion that all great musical composers were inspired by the passionate - but unusually hopeless - love of a beautiful woman for her most beautiful works is given in Schubert's Serenade," a new French film fiction, which is based fairly freely on the life of Franz Schubert ... again a pleasant distribution. (…) One might wonder whether Schubert was as resolutely solemn and thoughtful as Bernard Lancret plays him. One could also doubt whether he would ever have been deeply connected to a lady who is so obviously older than him ... As a film everything is slow and a bit stilted, but there is a good composer "
The lexicon of international films ruled: “An extremely unsuccessful attempt to make Schubert a romantic lover in the context of a purely novel-like plot. Lilian Harvey, whose role has an unusually dramatic accent for her image, played here in her first French film immediately after emigrating from Nazi Germany. "
Individual evidence
- ^ Schubert's Serenade in The New York Times of September 3, 1940
- ↑ Serenade. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed June 1, 2020 .
Web links
- Serenade in the Internet Movie Database (English)