A long time ago, I made a difficult choice: collect CDs or collect LPs. But not both. Because unless I became wealthy enough to acquire several warehouses to store every recording in every format that crossed my path, my passionate collecting habit would eventually be conflictive with my limited space, to put it lightly. So tens of thousands of relatively small CDs are perfectly fine. Anything more, though, and I’d risk becoming an ex-colleague of mine who faced a dire choice between his record collection and trimming it for the sake of living with his significant other. (Guess what he chose?) For the same reasons, I also don’t collect films on Blu-rays and 4Ks. (My brother collects enough of those for us both.) So streaming films is perfectly fine with me.
The other day I came across a film noir from 1946 that was new to me: Black Angel, starring Dan Duryea, June Vincent, and Peter Lorre. Posterity tends to romanticize the past. Things were better, films included. Sometimes that’s true, but Black Angel proves that wasn’t always the case. Not that it’s bad. On the whole, it’s an entertaining enough potboiler and Lorre is never anything less than fascinating to watch. But an immortal masterpiece it is not.
About two-thirds in, though, something caught my attention. During a tense scene between Lorre and Vincent, another character appears and invites the former to a Hollywood Bowl concert. “Oh, Shostakovich?”, Lorre replied; the work being performed is the Seventh Symphony. “Perhaps an evening with Shostakovich will prove very enlightening.”
Debates about whether or not classical music is “dying” or at least in decline have been ongoing for decades. Whatever one’s feelings on the subject, it is telling that the film’s creators dropped this classical music reference — and of a living composer at that — with the reasonable expectation that their audience would understand it. Hard to picture something like that appearing in a mainstream Hollywood movie of today. (Imagine a reference to, say, Michael Torke or James MacMillan in a modern potboiler.)
The mention of Shostakovich is fascinating in itself. At the time of the release of Black Angel, the din of mass media attention on the “Leningrad” was still fresh in the popular memory. A few years later, John H. Mueller in The American Symphony Orchestra: A Social History of Musical Taste observed that Shostakovich’s fame had peaked. He added that he believed that the composer’s reputation was heading into a steep decline “from which there is obviously no immediate prospect of recovery”.
At least on that account, things turned out differently to say the least!