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The film takes up Liszt's life as the 26-year-old genius deserts his faithful mistress (Genevieve Page) and their two children and goes billy-goating off on a concert tour, followed by his new inamorata, Princess Carolyne of Russia (former Parisian Model Capucine). Repeatedly, in one lavish recital hall after another, Bogarde strides arrogantly to the piano, peels off his white gloves and flings them to the floor, rips through a couple of scherzos and then stares smolderingly at Carolyne. Carolyne unfailingly melts on the spot. Unfortunately, the plot demands that the lovers remain eight octaves apart; the princess is both married and religious, and the Vatican refuses to grant a divorce. Every now and then Old-Flame Page adds to the anguish of the situation by pleading tearfully that Bogarde take her back.
All this, naturally, is filmed in extreme legato, a mood in which Bogarde is seen at his most irritating. Dressed in the sort of shirt with droopy sleeves and deep décolletage that all 19th century musicians must wear in films about their lives, he does not really act; he poses. His reaction to every situation—although, to be fair, most of the film's situations are the same—is an ironic half-smile.
Portrait in Black (Ross Hunter; Universal-International) presents Lana Turner as the love-famished wife of a bedridden shipping magnate (Lloyd Nolan). Anthony Quinn is Nolan's physician, and he also ministers to what ails Lana. Actor Quinn is reliably reported to have said "You're kidding" when it was suggested that he take the role, his first as a drawing-room matron menace, but by the time the film was shot, his mood had changed from disbelief to a kind of numbness. His speech is oddly strangled, and his general acting style is that of a beaten prizefighter routinely protesting a decision he knows to have been fair.
If cornerstones are still being laid in Hollywood, this is the film that should be sealed inside to instruct future generations: it is a brilliantly photographed and very nearly complete record of cinematic clichés. Nothing that could stupify an audience has been neglected. The dialogue runs to such familiar lines as "Don't say anything for a moment; just hold me." The score is as sticky and obtrusive as any in memory; when onetime Silent Cinemactress Anna May Wong, who plays a Chinese housekeeper, appears on the screen, there is, sure enough, Chinatown music on the sound track to nudge any viewer whose eyes have glazed over.
When a funeral is staged (Quinn and Lana, the overwrought lovers, have done away with Nolan), Director Michael Gordon gives filmgoers the Graveside Scene they know so well: the guilty glances, the dark overcoats, the raised umbrellas, and the rain beating down on the scarred earth. The Cry of Conscience is represented by echoing, disembodied voices; Quinn is pursued by a djinni who repeats the Hippocratic oath, and Lana writhes daintily in her sleep as Nolan's ghost chides her for infidelity. An anonymous blackmailer sends accusing letters, and this leads smoothly to the Mirror Bit: at the peak of a wrangle with Lana, Quinn raises a heavy candlestick and smashes it into the reflection of her terrified face. But Director Gordon is not entirely tradition's slave; instead of requiring Dr. Quinn to snap the stem of a wineglass to indicate the power of his emotion, he has the fellow crush a syringe.