Spitball Army

6.6
[DVD]

Harry Baur, as Beethoven, communicates emotional torment so well, whether it be the pain of his yearning, broken heart, or the disoriented confusion of a man losing the hearing that is required to pursue his livelihood. Abel Gance made this “talkie” a solid decade after his silent masterpiece NAPOLEON, and it relies heavily on the montage methods he had perfected by then. This Image Entertainment DVD has a running time of just under two hours, but the choppy storytelling in the film leads me to think that the original film may have had a longer running time (this is unknown to me*). The scene in which Beethoven discovers his deafness contains some wonderful sound editing: when he realizes his world has gone silent, his memory produces several familiar sounds – birdsong, thunder, a blacksmith’s hammer strike – that create a cacophony of comfort in his head.

*IMDb lists the film’s running time at 2’15, so approximately one-eighth of the film is missing from the print I viewed.

https://boxd.it/jLmTH