This love letter to several major classical music artists of the mid 20th century came from Edgar G. Ulmer, a director who specialized in working on low budget movies. He was known in Hollywood as “the King of PRC”. Producers Releasing Corporation was a Poverty Row studio that was considered Tinsel Town’s bottom rung. Most of their movies were shot in less than a week and cost around $50,000 to make. CARNEGIE HALL was not a PRC production and the budget was 5 times what Ulmer was used to working with. He had always loved classical music (which figures prominently on the soundtracks of his movies) and this project which was co-financed by some of the performers themselves gave Ulmer the opportunity to focus directly on them.
In order to make the movie appealing outside of classical music circles, Ulmer gave it a typical Hollywood back story. A young widow who works behind the scenes and lives at Carnegie Hall dreams of having her son become a classical pianist. She exposes him to all the great artists who perform there. As he grows up (the story covers a number of years), he decides that he prefers jazz to classical and that causes a rift between him and his mother and they don’t see each other for several years. She remains at Carnegie Hall and becomes a fixture there while he becomes a big success on the jazz circuit. They finally reconcile when he gives a performance of a Jazz Concerto that he has written…in…Carnegie Hall!
Talented and later blacklisted actress and activist Marsha Hunt (she died in 2022 at tha age of 104) portrays Nora Salerno, an Irish immigrant who literally grows up in Carnegie Hall. When her Italian pianist husband is killed in a domestic accident shortly after their son is born, she raises him to be a classical musician. As a young man, the son has a chance encounter with jazz great Vaughan Monroe which is what causes him to devote himself to jazz and to keave his mother and Carnegie Hall behind. William Prince portrays the grown-up son. Hunt must age 25 years over the course of the movie and this is done simply with theatrical make-up and a wig. The same applies to character actor Frank McHugh who portrays a Carnegie Hall doorman.
Woven throughout this family drama are numerous (they make up 75% of the movie) stellar perfomances by a who’s who of classical musicians of the time. They include soloists Jascha Heifitz, Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein, singers Lilly Pons, Rise Stevens, Ezio Pinza, and conductors Bruno Walter, Leopold Stokowski, and Artur Rodzinski. Unforgettable highlights are Pons singing the Bell Song from Leo Delibes’ LAKME’, Rubinstein performing Chopin and Manuel de Falla, Heifitz playing the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, and Rodzinski leading the NY Philharmonic in the finale from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Unlike today, these people are not just classical musicians, they are true show business performers.
Surprisingly, CARNEGIE HALL was not a success when it was released in 1947. The outfit that produced it went bankrupt, the musicians that helped to finance it got no royalties, and it eventually became the property of a bank. It then disappeared for many years before resurfacing in the 1960s in a variety of edited versions that altered the order of the performances and in some cases, removed the back story altogether turning it into the earliest classical music video. In 2001 the fully restored 144 minute version was released by Kino International (now Kino Lorber) the way that Edgar G. Ulmer originally shot it. This version, and this version only, (also on You Tube) is the only one with a clear picture and enhanced sound.
The Capsule Critic 