‘Time Out of Mind’ or — A Silk Purse and the Power of Multi-layered Music?
The story goes that when director Robert Siodmak was given the script to ‘Time out of Mind’ (1947) he told the studio the story wasn’t great but that he could make a decent picture out of it anyway. And you can see his point because the plot, based on Rachel Field’s novel, is a prime slice of hokey melodrama and one that frequently lapses into the laughable, the berserk and, ultimately, the truly unhinged… but isn’t all that what the delicious excess of melodrama is about? That and the blaring music?
Kate Fernald (Phyllis Calvert) is a serving girl for Capt. Fortune’s (Leo G. Carroll) household, a huge mansion perched on a cliff looming over the sea. Kate is in love with the Capt.’s son, Christopher (Robert Hutton), and will do anything for him. So will his overly attached sister, Rissa (Ella Raines). When Christopher informs his strict father that he doesn’t want to be a sailor but a concert pianist and great composer instead Kate and Rissa team-up to smuggle Christopher away to Paris where he can pursue his musical dreams.
Will they succeed? Will Christopher accept such charity? Will Capt. Fortune rumble their scheme and destroy everything? And do dreams come true or ultimately become nightmares?
To be honest, it doesn’t really matter because the above only outlines the movie’s first act with the drama really kicking off once, a few years later, Christopher returns. Meanwhile the film seems to have morphed from a Gothic old, dark house mood piece to a thriller to a noir to a costume drama then full-blown psychological (and musical!) warfare before, ultimately, ending up a ‘woman’s picture’.
And it’s not just Christopher’s return that kicks all this off but also the new girlfriend he’s brought back home, along with his new found fame as a concert pianist which she’s bankrolling. He’s also bought back from France a debilitating depression.
This further muddies the waters as Christopher is a decidedly unsympathetic character — weak, self-centred, self-loathing and who has three women running around after him, all of whom seemingly get nothing in return. So is Kate an idiot? Maybe she’s secretly a devious social climber or manipulative psycho? Or is she his saviour and muse?
Siodmak takes this daft material and directs the blazes out of it, something obvious from the opening panning shot that includes location footage, mattes, hidden transitions and miniatures. Any chance to visually explode the movie Siodmak seizes whether it’s one of the most beautiful camera moves through a flurry of snow you’ve seen or the push-in of Kate crying against a window that would be hailed as a stroke of genius if it was in a more famous movie. This is a really beautiful film with a ravishing mixture of space, design, lighting and movement that’s as stimulating as it is alluring.
Although the film’s greatest triumph is Miklós Rózsa and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s phenomenal score, a score that’s even more impressive as it functions not just as a typical soundtrack but also as the diegetic music Christopher composes and performs, music that at the concerto’s climax furiously switches between the diegetic (when we see Christopher on stage) and the non-diegetic (when we see Kate rushing about backstage in a state of panic).
It’s a knowingly funny score, too. Christopher, at one point, pathetically laments his work is only a cheap knock-off of Debussy and when he plays his composition Rózsa and Castelnuovo-Tedesco do a nice job of pastiching the style of the French composer, and by the time Christopher unveils his ‘New England Symphony’ he’s moved on to knocking-off Dvořák. It’s an exceptionally playful, complex and dynamic soundtrack that simultaneously works on various different levels, including that of musical sabotage (at one point we know a drunken Christopher is going to deliberately screw-up a performance out of spite and the way the music delivers all the information we need is as hilarious as it is clever).
‘Time Out of Mind’ might initially appear like an unremarkable Gothic melodrama but it’s really a film about art, love, sacrifice, music (and musical snobbery), depression and (slight spoiler) the astonishing might of triumph. Siodmak spectacularly illustrates this with his last shot of Kate, a woman who now glows with a blinding light of such unimaginable power it’s as though Tolkien’s Galadriel has claimed the one ring.
It’s also a film that demonstrates that when a group of people know they’re not making a masterpiece they sometimes inadvertently end up making something much better.
