Word: svengalied
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...Svengali (M-G-M). Faced with making a 1955 movie out of Trilby, George du Maurier's period novel of 1894, Director Noel Langley decided to play the story straight. As a result, moviegoers get a full treatment of the giant-sized nobilities and epic despairs that swirl up from Victorian drama, reflected in the iridescent mirror of fin de siecle Paris...
Essentially, the film chronicles the triumph of British pluck over Levantine cunning. On one side are ranked wholesome Terence Morgan and his fellow painters (Derek Bond and Paul Rogers); on the other looms the hypnotic Svengali (oldtime Shakespearean Actor Donald Wolfit). who drifts about the screen in tattered clothes, rather like a grounded crow. In between is Hildegarde Neff, who makes Trilby, the Irish artist's model, exactly the "great, beautiful, stupid cow" of a woman that Du Maurier intended...
...romance between Artist Morgan and Hildegarde strikes its first snag when he is horrified to discover her posing in the nude for an art class: its second, when Morgan's mother begs Hildegarde not to ruin her son by marrying him. Hildegarde, who has been using Svengali's hypnotism as a sort of aspirin treatment for her headaches, is so unnerved by this classic gambit that she falls completely under Svengali's power. His fell purpose: to make a world-famous diva of her. Morgan searches madly for his lost love until, kicked by a horse...
Spectacular (Sat. 9 p.m., NBC). Svengali and the Blonde, a 90-minute musical version of George du Maurier's Trilby, starring Carol Channing, Basil Rathbone. Narrator: Ethel Barrymore...
...offering four summer Spectaculars. One, a nostalgic reminiscence of a prewar year, Remember-1938, was shown last week with Groucho Marx as host. Two of the three others promise to be good summer fare: the Broadway musi-comedy One Touch of Venus, and Svengali and the Blonde, a musical version of Trilby, starring Carol Channing...