Schmaltz Waltz

By F. R.

A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC Directed by Harold Prince Screenplay by Hugh Wheeler

With the possible exception of Choreographer Jerome Robbins, no one has done more to reinvent the modern Broadway musical than the team of Director Harold Prince and Composer Stephen Sondheim. In four successive collaborations--Company, Follies, A Little Night Music and Pacific Overtures--they have proved that America's foremost indigenous theatrical form can accommodate adult themes, unconventional music and innovative flights of staging and dance. Now Prince and Sondheim have adapted one of their shows to the screen, and the results are perversely stupefying. The film version of A Little Night Music looks less like a daring Prince-Sondheim creation than an anachronistic retread of Naughty Marietta.

Night Music is an adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's classic comedy about mismatched lovers, Smiles of a Summer Night. Perhaps to avoid potentially odious comparisons, Prince has switched the setting from Sweden to turn-of-the-century Vienna, but he might as well have shot the film in a Burbank TV studio. A wizard of stagecraft, he seems to freeze behind the camera. Since the photography is usually static and the editing monotonous, the lyrical flow of the original production evaporates completely. The movie's arty opening and closing scenes, which suggest that we are watching a play within a film, only underscore Prince's failure to rethink his material in cinematic terms.

The cast does little to help matters.

Though the increasingly Rubensian Elizabeth Taylor is a good choice to play the aging actress heroine, Prince has photographed his star so uncharitably that she looks like a raunchy barmaid. Most of the supporting players, including the talented Len Cariou, are stage actors with no screen presence. At least Diana Rigg and Hermione Gingold, playing the cattiest of the women in Hugh Wheeler's overly bitchy script, provide Night Music with a glimmer of razzle-dazzle.

Sondheim's gorgeous all-waltz score is his most openly emotional, but it is not heard here to maximum effect. Some of the best numbers (e.g., The Miller's Son) have been dropped, others have been reworked, and most of the rest (notably Taylor's Send in the Clowns) are ineptly performed. The only song that retains its full stage power is A Weekend in the Country, in which music and lyrics merge ingeniously to sum up at least five of the story's subplots and seven of its characters at once. Even in the context of this moribund film, the number is so magically conceived that it could pass as a smash musical all by itself.

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