A SONG TO REMEMBER joined a long list of synthetic screen concoctions about famous composers, in this florid 1945 entry the artiste du jour being Frederic Chopin. Directed by Charles Vidor, it made a star of likable 31-year-old Cornel Wilde, even nabbing him an Oscar nomination as Best Actor. Playing fast and loose with facts, Sidney Buchman’s screenplay uses Chopin’s Polish heritage as a bridge to inject WW2-related rally-for-democracy material viz a viz the war’s evisceration of Poland by Hitler and Stalin, and makes a good deal of blame gaming around the composer’s affair with controversial writer George Sand, played with imperious iciness by Merle Oberon. Even more than extolling Chopin, enabling Poland and slamming Sand, the movie serves a vehicle for Paul Muni to shamelessly ham like it was the last chance at scene-hogging he’d ever get.  As composer Józef Elsner, Chopin’s music teacher, battling for Frederic’s wavering soul over the selfish desires of Ms. Sand, Muni does everything to remind you HE is in a scene but yank his teeth out and hurl them at the screen.

Muni is too much by two thirds, Oberon effective, the music an obvious selling point, with José Iturbi covering the actual piano virtuosity for Wilde. The actor does a decent job mimicking on the keys, and delivers a warm performance otherwise. It’s to his credit because the script is so slanted to Elsner and Sand that ‘hero’ Chopin remains a cipher. Wilde had been in films for eight years, handling small roles well in pictures like High Sierra and Manila Calling. But 1945 lofted him to a higher level, with this, the stunner noir Leave Her To Heaven and the escapist fun of A Thousand And One Nights. *

A gross of $6,500,000 put it #44 in’45, and besides the nod to Wilde, Academy Award  nominations were given to Story, Cinematography, Film Editing, Music Scoring and Sound.

In the mix: Nina Foch, George Coulouris, Stephen Bekassy (as Franz Liszt), Howard Freeman, Ivan Triesault, George Macready, Sig Arno, Frank Puglia, Ian Wolfe, Darren McGavin (debut, 23).

* Wilde not wild about Muni: “He was very difficult to work with. He said he didn’t want to hear how I did it, he had no interest in how I portrayed it, he had his own conception of Frédéric Chopin and he told me he’d worked on his role in relation to that conception, and he didn’t care how I played it. And that was the approach to teamwork on that film.”