Unabashedly sentimental and a little silly (and all the more winning for it), John Cromwell's Night Song is about love, music and blindness. After a night at the San Francisco Symphony, Merle Oberon goes slumming with her high-hat companions to a joint called Chez Mamie. Promptly she falls for the blind piano player, Dana Andrews, who hews to the unbreakable Hollywood code of the vital male with a disability: he takes it out on everybody around him, including her.
With the help of his band-mate and companion Hoagy Carmichael, she comes up with the sort of plan that would better be left to Lucy Ricardo - she pretends to be blind, too! And not only blind but living on slender means, so of course the proud Andrews comes to reciprocate her love. Meanwhile, she uses her secret wealth to fund a composition prize, which goes to Andrews for the piano concerto he's been bitterly working on. He wins, and with the money flies to New York not only to have his sight restored but to hear his work played by Artur Rubinstein under Eugene Ormandy's baton (both appear as themselves; the concerto, alas, by Leith Stevens, dispels no memories of Brahms' 2nd).
In New York, the newly sighted Andrews meets up with Oberon - not as the poor blind girl but as his society benefactress (he's never seen her, remember, but you'd think he'd remember her voice - he is, after all, a musician). He falls in love with her, too, or again, or something, but then starts to think that he's a heel for throwing over the woman he left in San Francisco....
Night Song is one of those late-40s/early-50s movies that takes classical music seriously, and hurray for that. It also features that wise old crone Ethel Barrymore as Oberon's aunt, all knowing smirks and wry aphorisms (it's exactly the performance she gave in A Portrait of Jennie that same year). Best of all is Lucien Ballard's inspired photography: in the digs that Andrews and Carmichael share, he overlays a shadowy scrim from the tracery in the lace curtains and the gingerbread that festoons the archways. All in all, Night Song is a bittersweet romance of that potent post-war vintage; it's intoxicating, and puts your good judgement quite to sleep.
With the help of his band-mate and companion Hoagy Carmichael, she comes up with the sort of plan that would better be left to Lucy Ricardo - she pretends to be blind, too! And not only blind but living on slender means, so of course the proud Andrews comes to reciprocate her love. Meanwhile, she uses her secret wealth to fund a composition prize, which goes to Andrews for the piano concerto he's been bitterly working on. He wins, and with the money flies to New York not only to have his sight restored but to hear his work played by Artur Rubinstein under Eugene Ormandy's baton (both appear as themselves; the concerto, alas, by Leith Stevens, dispels no memories of Brahms' 2nd).
In New York, the newly sighted Andrews meets up with Oberon - not as the poor blind girl but as his society benefactress (he's never seen her, remember, but you'd think he'd remember her voice - he is, after all, a musician). He falls in love with her, too, or again, or something, but then starts to think that he's a heel for throwing over the woman he left in San Francisco....
Night Song is one of those late-40s/early-50s movies that takes classical music seriously, and hurray for that. It also features that wise old crone Ethel Barrymore as Oberon's aunt, all knowing smirks and wry aphorisms (it's exactly the performance she gave in A Portrait of Jennie that same year). Best of all is Lucien Ballard's inspired photography: in the digs that Andrews and Carmichael share, he overlays a shadowy scrim from the tracery in the lace curtains and the gingerbread that festoons the archways. All in all, Night Song is a bittersweet romance of that potent post-war vintage; it's intoxicating, and puts your good judgement quite to sleep.