Rent Deception (1946)

A Suite for Cello, Piano - and a Triangle - Deception review by CH

What is it about classical music that brings out the enjoyably preposterous in Hollywood? One might think of John Garfield's beachside violin playing in Humoresque, but even that is restraint beside Deception (1946). Directed by Irving Rapper who, dying in 1999 at almost 102, lived long enough to find – one likes to think - his name the butt of many a musical joke far from the concert halls of this movie. It opens with Paul Henreid playing Haydn's cello concerto to acclaim in post-war America. Among the smartly-dressed audience is pianist Bette Davis, who thought that he, her lover, had died in the war. They are re-united with such passion that they decide to marry the next day. This brings a new turn to the notion that the cello is the musical equivalent of the human heartbeat.

All of which would be wonderful but for the fact that her lavish apartment, view and all, has been funded by the conductor and genius composer Hollenious (Claude Rains). Cat-stroking Rains, his hair distinctly bouffant, is outraged by this turn to events, his performance – jealousy incarnate – so much the higher camp that it is well nigh the last staging-post before the summit of Everest.

Especially when he finds that Henreid is the necessary cellist for his latest masterpiece (a work created by Korngold, who himself had fled Germany). Rapper, who had worked with all three of them on Now, Voyager, plays the situation – from a play by Louis Verneuil – for all it's (its?) worth, never shying from dramatic montage which plys close to noir inside and out as the torrid comes to the fore.

Hokum, of course, but brilliantly done, so much so that one might call it the thinking man's Amadeus.

Deception, a lesser known Bette Davis fillm - Deception review by BM

This film has wonderful performances by the main characters and worth seeing if only to see Claude Rains fussing over ordering an elaborate meal to the exasperation of Davis and Paul Henreid. One of my top ten film scenes.

Romantic Melodrama. - Deception review by Steve

This reunites the director (Irving Rapper) and stars (Bette Davis and Paul Henreid) of Now, Voyager, which was a box office hit in 1942. It's another romantic melodrama, only with a twist of film noir; this is much darker, and even features a murder. But still what they used to call a 'woman's picture' back in the studio era.

Davis is a minor neophyte on the piano wedged in a love triangle between two musical genius': she marries a brittle, penniless cellist (Henreid) just out of a Nazi concentration camp; and throws over a wealthy and narcissistic composer (Claude Rains) whose orchestra may be able to give her new husband the big break.

So, it's an intriguing dilemma for postwar audiences. Rains' jealous mind games are cruel. But he pays the bills. There's the usual motifs of the genre, with Bette's fabulous gowns and furs and the des-res of her modernist, Manhattan loft apartment in stark contrast with her egomaniacal former lover's baroque townhouse.

So much luxury in a time of austerity. There's an abundance of orchestral music on the soundtrack, composed by Erich Wolfgang Korngold. It's a lesser Davis vehicle, but enjoyable for its excesses; mainly her and Rains' expressionist performances. Plus it's one of the Hollywood films post-WWII which refer, however obliquely, to the trauma of the survivors.