The Tales of Hoffman (1951)

A Powell/Pressburger film I hadn't seen. I've long thought it was interesting how P & P, a team perhaps best known for making films about World War II, would so often counterpoint their film making with movies about ballet, or nuns. The Tales of Hoffman is defiantly in the pairs latter tradition, an adaptation of Jacques Offenbach's 1879 Opera of the same name, which in turn was based on the writings of the German Romantic author E.T.A Hoffman (who is best known for being the author of the novelette from which came Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker).

From the opening of the film, with its surprisingly long 'program notes', to its expressionist sets that would be at home in an F. W. Murnau film, you know this movie is going to be something different. It's a stage production on an impossible set, the story of three doomed romances in the life of Hoffman the poet. The palate is that typical bright and vivid brand of technicolor so characteristic of The Archers films. The set and costume design by Hein Heckroth runs from the classical and childlike, to the Salvador Dali. The cinematography and the staging is superb. Visually its impressive, the dancing often compelling, and the music pretty good, but its also kind of boring.

It's kind of hard to rate this as a movie, it feels more like a stage play with camera angles. The operatic style of singing renders the English verse hard to understand, and the plot is abstract. I think I might have enjoyed any one of the films three acts more separately. I think this would be a wonderful film to have as background on a busy day doing things around the house, but to sit and watch it all, for me and I'm sure many others, simply requires a certain mood that I don't think I was fully in when I watched this. I can tell its a very good piece of work technically, as an adaptation of Offenbach I don't know enough to tell, as a film a piece of art, as a movie not so swell. Again its good, but I had periodic difficulty keeping it the center of my attention. As a balance of its artistic merit and its movie watchability I give it a C+