The Constant Nymph

WARNER'S ARCHIVE RELEASE EXCELLENT HIDDEN GEM!
For those wondering the quality of the print of this Warner Archive release, please be aware that it is NOT clean and flaw-free. In fact, I would compare it to earlier releases from the Turner-era, before digital cleaning and repair became the norm. This print indeed has its minor short-comings.

But to finally be able to see this beautiful classic makes up for the lack of polish and digital magic. There are no serious breaks in the film stock, and the sound is quite clean overall, so the fact that it is not perfect matters little to me. No doubt I will be viewing this film again and again for some time.

Enjoy!

She was robbed!
It took us several days to get through the moving and glittery CONSTANT NYMPH, but others may just want to dive in and drown in its luxurious Warner Brothers gloss and the fabulous Korngold music. As Glenn Erickson says on the DVD Savant blog, THE CONSTANT NYMPH dramatizes the making of a musical composition, the "symphonic poem" TO-MORROW which gradually grows and changes and attains its final expression during the course of the film, and this part of the film is a triumphant success. It is a glorious piece of music and the oddest thing is that when the singer, the glorious Clemence Groves, begins her solo, the chord changes are dramatically similar to those of a much later piece of musical theater, Stephen Sondheim's "Losing My Mind" from FOLLIES--and I'm like, hey, that's weird, didn't FOLLIES also have Alexis Smith in it? I wondered if Sondheim had played around with "To-Morrow" when he was composing "Losing My Mind" as a tribute to his great star.

Well, maybe it's...

How should I review this movie?
I not only remembered the name but the stars of this movie I saw only one time over 60 years ago. It was a movie I saw as a teenager and could not forget with the passage of time. How many movies can you say that about.

I gave this short and simple movie five stars because it far superior to many movies given an academy award today. Frankly it is what I would call a condensed soap opera or a "B Grade" which were so popular in the past - in other words a movie worth about 4 stars; but a movie you have a hard time forgetting. To sum it up, the movie makes you feel human emotions which most movies do not do anymore.

Most movies are not only unrealistic but the charactors are dehuminized to objects that will do anything to get what they want. That is why the underlying fabric of our society is crumbling. The old movie producers might not have lived perfect lives; but they did try to give society a model to follow to help the public to surive this imperfect society -...

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