Boobirt Stylish but barely mediocre overall

Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Lumsdal Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Neive Bellamy Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

writers_reign As a rule biopics of composers have a tough time pleasing everyone; purists kvetch about chronological lapses, music lovers feel short-changed and the neutrals feel that less music and more story - fabricated or not - would be better all round. Having said that Abel Gance has made a very decent fist of Beethoven's life and work, helped considerably by having one of the finest actors in the business - in France or elsewhere - Harry Baur in the lead role. For some bizarre reason Gance is thought of as a 'silent' director as if he'd his career had come to a halt with the advent of sound, a sort of directorial equivalent of John Gilbert, whereas he made several excellent sound films, not least this one. For 1936 he uses some adventurous techniques not least the 'Disney' birds, lined up on a branch singing their hearts out to a Beethoven unable to hear. Today we may feel that Gance overdid the transition from silence to sound as he switches back and forth between Beethoven's and a general viewpoint but in 1936 it was the perfect visual image to illustrate the profound loss suffered by a genius. This movie, in black and white though it is, towers above such jokes as Stewart Granger's Paganini (The Magic Bow) and Dirk Bogarde's Liszt (Song Without End) and as for the blood on the keys in Cornel Wilde's Chopin (A Song To Remember) do we really want to go there. This is one that will take some beating.

dbdumonteil It's considered polite to write that the silent era was Gance's time and that his talkies were mediocre stuff.Do you need FF Coppola to give them a chance?Do you? Gance was a pioneer even when he made talkies.Actually his post-silent career was a constant drift back and forth between adventure ("La Fin du Monde" "J'accuse" (2nd version),"La Venus Aveugle" "Le Capitaine Fracasse" "Cyrano et D'Artagnan" ) and retreat ("le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre" "Le Maitre de Forges" -actually mostly directed by Fernand Rivers- "Austerlitz" )."Un Grand Amour de Beethoven" is the follow-up to another historical biopic ("Lucrece Borgia" ) which exposed the worst of the man's weaknesses -or is it because of a bad editing where scenes were lost or deleted?-Gance did not repeat the same mistake:I'm not a specialist,so I will not argue over historical accuracy."Un Grand Amour de Beethoven" is not a biopic ,it's an experimental movie ,which predates another one,Forman's "Amadeus" .Gance's film is a musical poem ,where he tries to enhance the music with his pictures (and not the other way about).Most of the time,he brilliantly succeeds:he virtually invented the "subjective " soundtrack .These scenes when the musician feels the first effects of the illness are among the very best in the French cinema of the thirties,and as the thirties French cinema was the best French cinema ever,it speaks volumes about them.Gance simply cuts loose all the visual effects (mill,nature,thunder)at his command and lets the music surge and flow and ooze around his audience .This is shockingly transcendent stuff ,absolutely intoxicating in its use of dynamics -perhaps inspired by his previous experiments in "La Roue" -from silence to thunder .Gance also finds marvelous scenes to let us hear "moonlight sonata" .Harry Baur gives another sublime performance ;the very long scene depicting the death of the artist has the strength of a dirge : while a "Miserere " is heard ,the face very slowly turns into a death mask.

jimi99 From the opening heart-wrenching scene that establishes the marriage of Beethoven's compassion with his extraordinary genius, to the transcendent death scene, The Great Love of Beethoven shows how adept Abel Gance could still be after the grandiosity and gimmickry of Napoleon. This film seems to owe much to the Surrealists, to Renoir, and to the Rembrandt biopic starring Charles Laughton, which I believe was a year or 2 before. The romantic nature of the man and how it both conflicted with and intensified his creative genius is at the center of the film, exploring his relationships in the most effective way: through the use of his timeless music. Of course Ludwig's gradual and intermittent deafness is a critical element of any such biography, and is conveyed by Gance brilliantly. In few films has such familiar and beloved music been used to capture the emotional content of the various moods and episodes of the artist's life, from the deepest melancholy to the gaiety of birdsong that Beethoven channels spontaneously to the delight of the children gathered around and the artist himself. Beautiful, sad, honest & important film...

Kermie-3 Following the incredible silent masterpiece "Napoleon," Abel Gance created another magnificent work of art in 1936, this time focusing on the brilliant composer Ludwig van Beethoven.While the film is filled with the creative camera work that characterized the style of Abel Gance, it goes one step beyond that of any of his previous works. It combines beautiful musical interludes with imagery that not only describe specific historical and biographical events in Beethoven's life, but also evoke the opposing inner emotions of happiness and anguish that troubled the deaf Beethoven during the prime of his life.Abel Gance's "Beethoven" is a perfect example of how the marriage of picture and sound can be used perfectly to form a creative masterpiece.