Deceptions
Last night Movies!, channel 5–2 on ota’s in NYC, ran yet another film I’d never seen — Deception (1946), adapted from a play by Louis Verneuil. It’s the story of a pianist, Bette Davis, who is the mistress of a famous composer, played by Claude Rains. Her life is complicated by the unexpected return of the love of her life, a cellist presumed dead in WWII, played by Paul Henried. She immediately marries him, and the composer is embittered. Despite this, he hires the cellist to perform the crucial solo of his new composition. Will he take revenge by sabotaging his own work to humiliate his rival? The movie’s best scenes are the nasty exchanges between Davis and Rains. An interesting aspect is Henried’s musicianship. Did he actually play the instrument? Alas, he did not, although he did a great job of faking it in long shots. The effect was achieved in the same way John Garfield’s violin playing was in Humoresque (1946): a special jacket with no sleeves and holes for two real cellists to insert an arm — one to bow, and one to accurately finger the music — while seated behind him, out of shot. Ah, the magic of cinema — I love it! The title refers mainly to the woman keeping her husband in the dark about the nitty gritty of her relationship with the composer. The flick was directed by London-born Irving Rapper, who did several of Davis’s films, including Now, Voyager (1942). In all he was at the helm of 22, and served as dialogue director on 30, usually works of foreign emigres whose English was limited such as Germany’s William Dieterle, Hungary’s Michael Curtiz and France’s Anatole Litvak. Here are the Hollywood legends of Deception in character:
And here’s Rapper, who passed away at 101 in 1999:
How long will the Democrats stay with the clearly struggling Biden? Will anyone outside of extreme partisans, left or right, care if he is told to step down? The policies won’t change, so what will it matter? The strings are being pulled from behind the scenes, anyway. Perhaps the powers that be fear a huge backlash if VP Harris ascends. What a sad spectacle.
The stiff wind was too intense at my regular book nook, so I headed for my alternate spot and it worked out very well. Recently, Wil had bought Billionths of a Lifetime. Today he took home A Hitch in Twilight and my rock n roll epic, Rising Star. Thank you, young man, and also to the woman who purchased illustrated versions of Jane Eyre and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm designed for young adults; and to the woman who selected a Bible in Russian; and to the gentleman who chose The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson and Portraits by Cynthia Freeman; and to the woman who donated two books.
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