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"She sang with heavenly art till echoes melt in death," every muse's story. Lang's Der müde Tod has the structure, three yarns at a tavern, just something to pass the time during the intermission at the ballet. Poet (Robert Rounseville) and nemesis (Robert Helpmann) and das ewig Weibliche in Technicolor, "eyes a-blazing" receive the spectacle. Marionettes in a vast yellow toy box, among them Olympia (Moira Shearer) in need of winding, ethereal and herky-jerky. "Ha ha ha it's too dramatic / His beloved's automatic!" Aboard a gondola amid Kirsanoff ripples, the raven-haired courtesan (Ludmilla Tchérina) in cahoots with the soul-collector, the smitten protagonist's reflection is her target. The young soprano (Ann Ayars) in a Böcklin isle, pushed into a fatal aria by a doctor who might be Dracula. "And what daydreams indeed." Offenbach's opera via Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, translated into an ecstatic play of forms, "quite demented." En pointe on painted lily pads for "The Ballet of the Enchanted Dragonfly," backstage the music mingles with the clinking of coins from the villain's purse. Artifice on a string, as it were, the mechanical damsel is last seen as a leg still writhing while metal springs pop from her decapitated head. (Powdered and rouged, Frederick Ashton caresses her severed hand as a fétichiste signature on the scene.) "So gleam with desire..." Candle wax turned into sparkling gems, Pamela Brown in boyish drag remembered by Bergman in The Magician. Saturated palette, paroxysmal choreography, baroque décor, cinema's most startling close-ups, a totality of mise en scène unheard-of since the days of Murnau, nothing like it until Powell's own Bluebeard's Castle. The hero deep in his cup misses the three beauties rolled into one, Sir Thomas Beecham brings it all to a close with baton and stamp, "Made in England." Renoir is nearby with an experimental proscenium-screen of his own, Le Carrosse d'or. Cinematography by Christopher Challis. With Léonide Massine and Mogens Wieth.
--- Fernando F. Croce |