Not even Martin Scorsese loves “Oh… Rosalinda!!” That’s the territory we’re treading with this month’s Unloved. I’ve heard arguments that all of Michael Powell & Emeric Pressburger’s ’50s work lacks the charm that made them beloved figures of then-contemporary cinema and cult figures in the decades that followed, but I’ve never believed it.
Like George A. Romero before me, I see the later works of The Archers, for that was how they were known collectively, as being dabbed with a cologne of their distilled essence. So light, so sweet, so breathtakingly singular in its loveliness. Say what thou wilt about Rosalinda, but no one else on earth could have made it, and though there’s nothing critics love more than putting a new comedy right back in the box for store credit, I find all of the late Powell movies terrific (well… maybe not his Australian movies).
The peculiarity begins with its title, though it was also known by the name of the comic opera on which it’s based, Die Fledermaus, no help from obscurity. Two different sets of punctuation is a great way to make sure no one bothers learning the proper order of them, or indeed how best to pronounce the title.
David Cairns, friend and hero: “A ballet/operetta movie based on “Die Fledermaus” but updated to four powers Vienna, with the Bat, played by Anton Walbrook, functioning as a black marketeer and general fixer — a singing Harry Lime, if you will — this movie could actually qualify as the weirdest thing the Archers ever attempted. And it’s generally regarded as a complete failure…. “
Here he describes seeing the film in the company of editor Thelma Schoonmaker, the late Powell’s husband, and cinematographer Christopher Challis:
“Thelma took the stage and told us that when Scorsese and Powell first started spending time together, Scorsese would look through Powell’s collection of memorabilia, and every now and then would find a lobby card or image from “Oh… Rosalinda!!” Anton Walbrook dressed as a bat… “‘What’s this?’ he’d ask, and Michael would look abashed and hide the image and say, ‘Oh, nothing, nothing…’”
Not even the Archers themselves seemed to have been proud of it, but as David points out the film is part of a trilogy of whizzbang theatrical pictures, in which opera and reality fuse like watercolors on canvas. “Rosalinda” may be the featherweight, “Hoffmann” the heavy, and both sit on the fulcrum that is “The Red Shoes,” about which it could be said is the greatest movie of all time without ruffling too many feathers, but to be in that company is no joke. Every time I watch “Rosalinda,” I expect to see it fizzle the way so many before me have, but I’m riveted each time. Do with that what thou wilt.
