Sixty-five years ago this month, Carnegie Hall was
transformed into a Hollywood movie set when production began on the United
Artists film Carnegie Hall. The first
feature film to be made entirely in New York City in nearly 10 years, Carnegie Hall was also the first movie
ever recorded with 12-track stereophonic sound.
Although saddled with a fairly creaky plot, Carnegie
Hall featured an impressive array of classical music talent, and captured
magnificent and historic performances by Leopold Stokowski and the New York
Philharmonic, Arthur Rubinstein, Jascha Heifetz, Gregor Piatigorsky, Lily Pons,
and Risë Stevens, among others.
Mayor William O’Dwyer kicked things off on August 5, 1946, and director Edgar
G. Ulmer concluded filming on October 17. Shot at Carnegie Hall and Fox
Movietone News studios at 54th Street and 10th Avenue, the picture cost $1.7
million to produce—nearly $200,000 over budget, including $25,000 spent
striking and replacing sets and production equipment to accommodate previously
scheduled performances in the Hall, which began September 20.
The dramatic part of the film focuses on Nora Ryan (played by Marsha Hunt), an
Irish cleaning woman at Carnegie Hall. As a little girl, Nora arrived in
America from Ireland in May 1891—during Carnegie Hall’s Opening Week Music
Festival—to join her mother, who is also a cleaning woman at the newly built
hall. The film follows Nora throughout the next half century, as her life
becomes intertwined with the events and personalities at Carnegie Hall.
Except for its musical performances, Carnegie
Hall is usually dismissed as a trite flop. But once you dig a bit deeper
into its background, for all its flaws you find not only a remarkable
time-capsule—at the time, few people thought to put classical music performances
on film—but also a trove of fascinating connections and backstories. These
start at the very top of the credits with producers William LeBaron and Boris
Morros. LeBaron’s show-business career stretched back to 1911, when he was the
writer-lyricist of A La Broadway, a
burlesque musical revue that featured an 18-year-old Mae West as an Irish maid
in her first legitimate Broadway role. Carnegie
Hall, with an Irish cleaning woman as its central character, made for a
fitting bookend as his final producer’s credit.
Yet things get truly interesting with Boris Morros. Born in St. Petersburg in
1891, Morros came to America in 1922 and soon became music director at
Paramount Pictures. Using his family in Russia as bait, the KGB recruited him
as a spy in the mid-1930s. When he was confronted by the FBI in 1947—shortly
after the release of Carnegie Hall—Morros
admitted his involvement with the KGB and agreed to act as a double agent. He
wrote of his exploits in a 1959 book, My
Ten Years as a Counterspy, which became the basis for the 1960 spy thriller
Man on a String, starring Ernest
Borgnine.
At least Morros’s espionage tale had a happy ending—and a basis in fact. Carnegie Hall star Marsha Hunt’s
championship of liberal causes—and refusal to apologize for it—resulted in her
being blacklisted by Hollywood in the early 1950s, effectively ending her film
career (even though she was never called before the infamous House Un-American
Activities Committee, where a refusal to “name names” became the usual path to Hollywood
exile).
Another oddity of the film is the “dramatic” performances by Jascha Heifetz, Fritz
Reiner, and Walter Damrosch, who were asked to deliver several lines in an
attempt to connect the fictional and musical sides of the story. But the scene between
the 84-year-old Damrosch and an aging Nora—where they both talk about how they
were there at Carnegie Hall’s beginning in 1891—is deeply touching, in a way,
considering Damrosch really was
there!
Ulmer’s stylishly dark touches are all over the film, such
as in the sequence that features cellist Gregor Piatigorsky performing
Saint-Saëns’s The Swan with six
harpists. Although Piatigorsky claimed to have hated that scene, it is a striking setting, very atmospheric with its
sharp shadows. Other moments like this include the dramatic staging of Arthur Rubinstein’s
solo sequence—complete with overhead shots—and Leopold Stokowski’s wild crown
of hair angelically framed in the Hall’s ring of ceiling lights—like a halo,
strikingly shot at a sharp angle from below.
Click on the image below to open a slideshow of images related to the film.
