Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tales of Hoffmann is the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film of Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which was based on three of the wonderful short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But this statement needs to be qualified and amplified a great deal. Powell and Pressburger did not simply film the opera. They adapted and altered it significantly. Opera is the most deliberately and consciously artificial of all art forms and the most uncompromisingly theatrical. Making a movie that is artificial and aggressively non-realist is no problem but opera is artificial and theatrical in a very non-cinematic way. And if you remove the artifice and the theatricality then you have removed the very heart and soul of opera. So how do you make an opera into a feature film?

Powell and Pressburger adopted a bold radical approach. Their first crucial insight is that yes this is opera but it’s a movie. There’s no need to cast actual opera singers. Why not cast actors and dancers, and have their singing voices dubbed by real opera singers? In fact the entire movie was shot as a silent film with every element of the soundtrack post-dubbed. This allowed Powell and Pressburger to use a lot of silent film techniques. They were much influenced by German Expressionism.

This also allowed Powell and Pressburger to pull off three casting strokes of genius. Moira Shearer had been a sensation in their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. She couldn’t sing. But she was a magnificent dancer, so her singing voice was dubbed. And they were able to cast the great Australian ballet dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. He couldn’t sing either but again no problem. Not only could Helpmann dance, he was a very competent actor and he had extraordinary screen presence. And he had that amazing face. Once the makeup people were let loose on him he could become sinister, monstrous, comical, grotesque - whatever Powell and Pressburger wanted him to be. And Ludmilla Tchérina has breathtaking screen charisma.

Being able to cast dancers rather than singers allowed Powell and Pressburger to carry out their master plan - to create an extravaganza of music, images, dance and movement. A total artistic experience that was more than opera and more than straightforward cinema. Powell called it a “composed” film.

Casting dancers rather than singers gives the film a sense of dynamic movement and energy which would have been impossible otherwise. And choosing dancers such as Shearer, Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina who could act as well was another excellent idea.

Powell and Pressburger were totally and deliberately out of step with the mainstream of British cinema. With movies like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) they had already been pushing the boundaries. They were in fact operating more in the realm of European art cinema. They were making films with more in common with stuff like Jean Cocteau’s surrealist masterpiece Beauty and the Beast (1946) and were already venturing into territory that Max Ophüls would explore in his 1950s masterworks like La Ronde, Le Plaisir and especially Lola Montès. Martin Scorsese (a huge fan of this movie) has also correctly pointed out the influence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There are three separate stories. Hoffmann is the only character appearing in all three. In the first story he falls in love with a beautiful girl but she is in fact a mechanical doll. In the second tale Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta but she helps an evil magician (played with gusto by Robert Helpmann) to steal his reflection (and presumably his soul). In the third story Hoffmann is in love with the lovely soprano Antonia who is suffering from consumption. She must give up singing to save her life.

There’s also a framing story and Powell and Pressburger added a whole new sequence that was not in the opera - the Dragonfly ballet (scored by Sir Thomas Beecham who also conducts the orchestra throughout).

So what went wrong? The episodic nature of the film is a problem - with the framing story and the added Dragonfly ballet there are in effect five disconnected stories which dissipates any real emotional resonance. The film collapses under its own weight and at 136 minutes it is a bit of an ordeal. Apparently when it was shown at Cannes Alexander Korda told Powell and Pressburger that if they dropped the third segment, the Antonia story, it was a certainty that they would win the Golden Palm. They were unwilling to do this, and the movie missed out on that coveted prize. But Korda was right. It’s the weakest of the stories and it makes the movie way too long. On the other hand the Antonia sequence has a technical tour-de-force ending.

The Dragonfly ballet has no connection to the rest of the film but it’s a crucial part of the Powell-Pressburger plan to integrate image, music and dance. And it’s a fine showcase for Moira Shearer who was after all the movie’s biggest box-office drawcard.

The first sequence with Shearer as the mechanical doll Olympia has so much charm and wit and then we get that very unexpected ending.

It’s the second sequence, set in Venice concerning the courtesan Giulietta, that is the highlight. Here we have a sexy bad girl and Ludmilla Tchérina brings an unbelievably degree of sensuality, eroticism and decadence to her role. This sequence is wildly flamboyant and surreal and dream-like. It’s magnificent cinema.

This is a movie for hardcore cinephiles, filmmakers and devotees of cinematic experimentalism. The Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Martin Scorsese. He talks (delightfully) about his obsession with this film but it was clearly an obsession with its awe-inspiring technical virtuosity. For a young would-be filmmaker it provided boundless inspiration. I’m not sure a general audience was ever going to be able to embrace this movie to quite the same degree. It really is an exercise in technique. It doesn’t really have any emotional centre or anything likely to engage the interest of an ordinary movie-goer. It’s a movie to admire and to be dazzled by might be be heavy going if you’re not a devotee of opera and ballet.

Highly recommended for its originality and strangeness and for the glorious use of Technicolor. It’s insanely ambitious and despite its flaws it is in so many ways a triumph of cinematic art.