clanciai This was one of the most unforgettable films I saw as a child, I never had the opportunity to see it again until 50 years later, and it remains a lasting impact. Its weaknesses are admitted, it's more like a play than a film, (although some cinematic tricks occur as positive surprises,) the acting is not very brilliant but rather stiff, the camera moves as little as possible; but against all these foibles you have the overwhelmingly beautiful and brilliant story and play, the virtuoso dialogue all the way, and above all, the music, the dances and the poetry. Ben Hecht clearly conceived the idea inspired by the fate of Nijinsky, who was disabled as a schizophrenic from the first world war till after the second, and the real theme of the film is the freedom of artistic madness at its most exuberant and creative. Michael Chekhov sometimes tediously dominates long scenes of the film as the sore tried impresario of infinite tribulations who nevertheless is wholeheartedly sympathetic but outflanked by the indomitable realist of long and hard experience, Judith Anderson, who is magnificent in every scene; while the focus of the drama is the dancer's genius and the difficulty of handling it, or rather, subjecting it to discipline, because it's so totally beyond control that it really can't be disciplined, only at best directed in a creative vein. Powell-Pressburger's classic "The Red Shoes" a few years later would have been unthinkable without this for a road mark, and it must remain for always one of the most important and innovative ballet films ever made, especially for its delicate treatment of the difficult subject of genius. The film gains by seeing it a number of times, at first sight its depth and ingenuity is not obvious, but as you sink into it you never reach the bottom. This is an ingenious film about the trickiness of genius.

dbborroughs Ben Hecht's major off the rails story about the possible murder of a ballet's star's first wife.It's a very deliberate film full of beyond purple prose and performances that are way to over the top to be anything but deadly serious. Laughably bad, I sat staring at the screen for fifteen minutes wondering what the heck I was watching, unsure if I should be laughing or not- finally I just started to laugh and went with it...I had no clue why anyone would chose to do this deliberately- especially when its some one who should know better. It was painfully awful in a way that only films that are supposed to be works of art can be. It's a film to make you go- you have got to be f-ing kidding me over and over again

BILLYBOY-10 Judith Anderson who was the nasty, evil Danvers in Rebecca and the miscast "big mama" with a British-Louisiana accent in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof plays a former ballerina who runs a ballet school (don't they all?). Lionel Sandler who became the gruff major domo in the TV series Hart to Hart, plays a gruff non-rhyming poet. Some other guy, plays an over the top effectual show biz promoter. This other guy decides to resurrect the career of a the brilliant ballet dancer Ivor Somebody,who may or may not have killed his wife a few months early and since then he has become a looney toon recluse;he hears music in his head and sees ghost dancers with his face. Anywho, he says he is OK now and begins a series of road shows and has a hot love and marriage to another dancer, I forget her name..she made two movies in her entire career...twice as many as Ivor. Well, as luck would have it, sometime after Kansas City, Ivor sort of starts going cuckoo again. Lots of drama and jumping and twirling which is suppose to resemble ballet ensues and instead of slitting his wife's throat he takes a flying leap out the plate glass window. Kerplunk. Some silly dialog for a couple of minutes. And then the movie ends. I streamed this on Netflix but the won't give me a pro-rated credit. The acting is dreadful. The dancing by Ivor is gymnastics, not ballet. The whole thing is awful.

bmacv Whatever unfulfilled ambitions drove Ben Hecht to write, produce and direct Spectre of the Rose, it's charitable to pretend they bore scant relation to the gruesome folly that eventuated. Did Hollywood's most prolific uncredited contributor to great screenplays crave the glory that would come with his very own Citizen Kane? If so, he made choices that can only be accounted as bizarre.First, he set his story in the world of `the dance.' Since of all the arts, ballet, for Americans at any rate, reeks of the rarefied – the elite, movies about it invariably lapse into gaseous talk about `aaht.' Spectre of the Rose dives right into this pitfall. The high-flown, portentous dialogue must have entranced Hecht but it plainly baffles his cast. They variously give it stilted readings, flat it out, and drop quotation marks around it, but except for Judith Anderson – as an old assoluta now training novices in a `dingy' studio – nobody can make it work. (But then, she made Lady Scarface work.)The plot concerns a deranged male superstar called Sanine (Ivan Kirov), who may have murdered his first wife and partner and now seems to be rehearsing to kill his second (Viola Essen). It's safe to presume Kirov was engaged only to fling his polished torso around because he can't even act embarrassed; it's no surprise that this is his solitary screen credit. But his murderous madness just sits there, with a take-it-or-leave-it shrug, while the movie pirouettes off on other tangents. There's a larcenous impresario (Michael Chekhov) who outdoes even Clifton Webb in trying to break down the celluloid closet's door. Most puzzlingly, there's Lionel Stander as a Runyonesque poet who seems intended as some sort of Greek chorus to the goings-on but serves instead as a major irritant, uninvited and out of place.Without knowing what compromises Hecht made and obstacles he faced in bringing his work to the screen, it's easy to be glib. But there's such a discordance of tones and jostling of moods that the movie elicits diverse responses; thus some viewers have found in Spectre of the Rose something special and unique. Movies, maybe more than any other art form, touch our idiosyncracies. But when we're left unsure whether The Spectre of the Rose is dead-earnest or a grandiose spoof – an election-bet of a movie -- something has gone radically awry.