THE defense, in the latest form of “The Constant Nymph,” of composers and nymphs against philistines (or, Margaret Kennedy’s idea of the opposite of the English gentry against her idea of the English gentry) has been very nearly slugged to death by delirious earnestness. Once more we are at that romantic Alpine chalet where the great composer Sanger is going to seed and his blonde, horsey daughters are carrying on the Sanger tradition of spirit that cannot be quenched. The Warner Brothers have attacked the idea literally, in flying-wedge formation. To express the wild freedom of the Sanger personality, the daughters scurry around, ever constant, in a heavy lope (for instance, Tessa wakes her sister by grabbing her by the ankle and flinging her halfway across the room). To express Sanger’s musical turn the fruity music is approached with a fearsome solemnity that comes from knowing music is dissonance when it doesn’t have melody and full of genius when it does. Miss Joan Fontaine has missed being the nymph by littering her portrait with all the standard nymphisms—the spread-legged squats and stances, the fiddling with the skirt, the walking on tiptoe, arms outstretched, the constant look in the eyes as of hearing far-off birdsong—all that goes with an unrestrained love of acting. Director Goulding has not cautioned her at all, and has weighted the role even more by advertising every flurry with special gauzed lighting to imply purity.
“The Constant Nymph” has, in all of its four previous versions as movie or play, been a plot which after much detailed maneuvering accomplished the fact that a young girl who had loved a composer since childhood died of a valvular lesion just as he was coming around. Warner Brothers have added several more overloud conclusions to it, thereby stepping it up to an event-a-minute clip, meanwhile deleting much good criticism of English manners and musicians’ personalities.
In Hollywood this kind of movie is called an “art picture.” The term, like some other words Hollywood uses, for instance, montage, is closer to meaning fancy than to what it usually means. Art pictures are usually taken from a novel or play which has been stamped heavily on the public’s mind as an impressive creation, and in them the current queen or near-queen of the films is given every right of way to prove her claim to the movie-acting championship. The main characteristic, though, is that the production is given an expensive and flamboyantly artistic setting. In “The Constant Nymph” this takes the form of fancy lighting effects, a wallowing in the scenic splendors of the Tyrol, a whipping-up of wind when terror strikes, and a lot of gaudy touches like turning the highlight on an andiron into a small fire and thence into a sunset when Tessa dies. But the more exotic innovations are to weave the hero-composer’s work in with his love life. When he is with his cold English wife his music lacks heart and melody; when he returns to Tessa his music becomes good and melodic. And Tessa’s death, to make a supreme heart tug rather than just any old heart tug, has been speeded up to happen when she is listening to her lover’s début over the radio.
The movie is best when it forgoes its lush lyrical curvings and gets down to something more substantial. The character of the composer’s English wife—Alexis Smith—is undecorated in its selfishness and fears; the hate which exists between her and her husband is hard and rough, and as a result gets across as clear and vital. The satire on English manners is entertaining but standard. Miss Fontaine occasionally breaks through her mechanics, the dialogue turns up its good lines, and Charles Boyer is excellent as the composer and never looks silly while pretending to be a musician. On one occasion, with Miss Fontaine mauling the scene in the background, he does a masterful job of leading the Sanger girls’ orchestra. As a whole, however, “The Constant Nymph” is rather like that chromo you’ve seen every time you pay your yearly visit to your elderly aunt; only on this visit you find she’s taken out her water-colors and added a few strokes herself.
August 23, 1943