Saturday Night at the Movies: When Low Culture was High Culture

Before They Started Treating the Masses Like Morons

Did you see Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto on primetime last night? What about last week, when Saturday Night Live had that prodigy on to play Mendelssohn’s violin concerto? Surely you caught Lucia’s mad scene on Colbert?

If it sounds absurd to imagine such a mainstream cultural embrace of classical music, you’re not imagining hard enough. My intro is not fanciful in the least; a few years ago, it was everyday reality.

Picture your typical teen movie, something from the 90s, starring Jennifer Love Hewitt or Melissa Joan Hart or someone like that. There’s a lighthearted effort at a plot, no serious themes or acting, and some harmless romance. Now picture that, amid all the usual teen bait, one of the stars keeps breaking into operatic arias. Hard to believe? Well, time to introduce you to the Hollywood B movies of the 40s and 50s.

Take, for instance, Luxury Liner. The young Jane Powell (you may remember her from Seven Brides for Seven Brothers) getting into hijinks on a cruise ship. A cruise ship filled with… opera singers. There goes Powell, singing some Massenet, after a little intro tune courtesy of Wagner. This kind of teen comedy, with hefty doses of opera thrown in, was Powell’s bread and butter for years. Here she is singing the signature aria from my favorite opera, La Boheme. Watch that video – this was in a popular teen movie! What happened to us?

Powell was far from the only star in this vein. Here’s the mega-star Deanna Durbin (once the highest paid actress in the world!) singing La Traviata. Here she is giving a summary and performance of the Barber of Seville. She made a lot of movies, I could go on.

Prefer a good tenor? Allow me to introduce Mario Lanza. He’s just a low-class Cajun fisherman, not a stuck-up opera singer… until he falls in love with Kathryn Grayson, and it’s time to put on a performance of Madame Butterfly. Or are you more in the mood for a biopic of Caruso, with another timeless scene from La Boheme? Again, watch that last video – these are the kind of movies that used to fill the seats. Per the authoritative Wikipedia, “The Great Caruso was a massive commercial success and the most profitable film for MGM in 1951. It set a record gross at Radio City Music Hall in New York City […] The movie was also the most popular at the British box office the same year.” Again, what happened?

Enough opera? Well, how about some great classical tunes? It wasn’t always Bugs Bunny conducting! The first time I ever heard Grieg’s transcendent piano concerto? Right here, in a silly Jimmy Durante/Margaret O’Brien/June Allyson vehicle, Music for Millions.

If you know, you know. If you don’t, trust me, I could go on for pages, this was run-of-the-mill movie making for the masses back in the day; whether it was Dvorak or Tchaikovsky or Mozart, it was on the silver screen, and it was watched by millions.

Imagine what that means to people. Imagine you’re a poor kid in Iowa, or Texas, with precisely zero chance of ever being able to afford a trip to New York City, let alone tickets to the Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall. Yet here, in your local cinema, for the price of a nickel, some of the greatest music the world has ever produced is yours, along with some Jimmy Durante one liners. Maybe it’s not high culture, but it sure beats whatever we have now.

 I was thinking of all this as my wife and I recently had the privilege to attend An Evening With Itzhak Perlman. If it comes to a theater near you, please go, it was lovely. Yet the experience also reminded us all of the days when one didn’t have to go to the theater for that kind of an evening. Do you know where the young Perlman got his start, his big break? In living rooms all across America, on Ed Sullivan! Speaking of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto…

So, you see, my introductory paragraph was not crazy sci-fi. It was once our reality. Perhaps one day we can get back there again. Until then, well, there’s always old movies…