Wonderfully offbeat film!

Excellent but underrated film

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

In this biopic of Robert Schumann, Paul Henreid plays the struggling pianist and Katharine Hepburn plays his wife, also a pianist. While Paul felt fine about using a hand double during the musical scenes, Kate trained so that she would be believable as a piano player. Not only do you see her playing during the scenes, but you actually hear her, too! Usually, music is dubbed over, but Kate was so flawless in her playing that director Clarence Brown opted to let audiences hear her music. So, if you want to see Katharine Hepburn showing an enormous amount of musical talent, this is the movie for you! Robert Walker costars as Johannes Brahms, as well as Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt. It's an interesting story to see the three famous musicians together, but the main focus of the plot is the Schumanns. Kate puts her career on hold to give her full support to Paul as he pursues his musical dreams, but will the pressure prove to be too much for him? You'll have to watch the film, or know your history, to find out.My favorite scene in the film is during one of Katharine Hepburn's concerts. There she is, in a beautiful ball gown, playing a slow concerto to hundreds of people in a theater, when a nurse shows herself in the wings and tries to get Kate's attention. She holds up Kate's newborn baby, indicating that the child is hungry and needs food from Mama. Kate immediately speeds up the piano concerto, to the audience's confusion and entertainment, so that she can finish the piece as quickly as possible and attend to her baby. It's hilarious and adorable. If you like musical movies, or if you found that scene too cute to resist, go ahead and rent Song of Love. It probably won't be your all-time favorite Katharine Hepburn movie, but it's pretty good.

SONG OF LOVE is a tastefully romanticized biography of the Schumanns (Clara and Robert), as portrayed by KATHARINE HEPBURN and PAUL HENRIED, in a glossy tribute to their classical music. Their life changes when they take in a boarder/student by the name of Brahms, ROBERT WALKER, who immediately falls in love with Clara.While she makes a successful career as a pianist, her husband is less successful in pursuing his serious work as a composer. The story chronicles the highs and lows of their marriage as they struggle to raise seven or eight children while juggling their professional lives. Whether the romantic angle with Brahms falling deeply in love with Clara is accurate or not, I don't know. I'll have to read more about them to get the full picture, but it makes for an interesting romantic drama with lots of classical music, courtesy of Rubenstein at the piano.An unusual film for Katharine Hepburn, who does beautifully at the keyboard looking as though she's really playing the instrument, as well as Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt who is quite adept at the fingering.Good performances throughout, but I suspect that it's a film for classical music lovers only.

First of all, Katherine Hepburn is badly miscast as Clara. She just can't be convincing as the devoted, selfless, rather smarmy wife that the writers have created.But the real weakness of the film is its shallowness in the face of a potentially great piece of drama. Schumann's bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder amounts to "Oh, oh, I have a headache" and the occasional angry word. Suicide? The word is used, but there's no sign of it in domestic scenes and when we see him in the mental hospital he's calm and subdued and smiling and optimistic. A superficial treatment. And Brahms is so upright and bourgeois - no sign of his gruff humour, his love of tweaking the noses of the establishment, no sign of his tortured attitude toward sex and women resulting from spending his youth playing piano in brothels. And was Clara's long concert career entirely about promoting Robert's music, or was she, in fact, a remarkable pianist who wanted a career for herself, a female pianist carving out a place for herself in a male world? Any sort of treatment of the lives of great artists is better than none, but this is a standard Hollywood, middle-of-the-road approach, particularly disappointing because the real story is so much more dramatic, so much more interesting, so much more human.

Yes,we can ignore the opinions of the pedantic musical historians who belittle this film, because this is one for anyone with a love of music ! In essence, historically accurate - Brahms was a friend of the Schumanns, Robert did suffer from a brain disorder which drove him to attempt suicide and caused his early death, Brahms undoubtedly loved Clara, but she remained faithful to Robert for the rest of her life, whilst she pursued the career of a piano virtuoso (which she was).All of this adds up to a romantic story with all the necessary ingredients plus the music of Schumann and Brahms,(played with customary brilliance by Artur Rubinstein) surely a guarantee of success. The three principal characters are played with a reasonable degree of authenticity, indeed, Robert Walker bears such an uncanny resemblance to Brahms as a young man that one suspects he may be a descendent ! And what a tour-de -force is Miss Hepburns characterisation of Clara Schumann, a woman, by all accounts, possessed of steely resolve and immense courage. The only relatively weak link is Paul Henried, who bears not the slightest resemblance to Schumann, and fails to convey Schumann's determination and musical genius - perhaps a little pedestrian and lacking conviction. The performance of Henry Daniell as Franz Liszt is superb, projecting the personality of 'the Master' to perfection, and particularly worthy of note is his 'performance' of Schumann's 'Widmung', where his simulated pianistic technique is incredibly accurate, indeed, one suspects that he may well be a competent pianist in his own right. The whole essence of this drama is conveyed with a flair and a grasp of the subtle nuances of the various relationships which generates an astonishing degree of authenticity, almost as if we are seeing the events as they actually happened. Add to this the music, the pianism of the incomparable Rubinstein, and a classic has been born to stand the test of time ! As a matter of interest, Schumann composed the song 'Widmung' (Devotion) at the time of his marriage to Clara - the music 'played' by Henry Daniell is,in fact, not the original song, but an arrangement by Franz Liszt.