User Reviews

This is not a great film but it is an interesting one for what it attempts to show. Movies that really dig deeply into the creative processes that lead to great music are rare, because the time and innovative ideas that are needed don't transfer well into 90 to 120 minutes of film. We are shown people rattling off rhyming words and lines as though that is the process for song - it isn't. Yet Sammy Cahn, one of the best of song writers, for years would demonstrate how he composed, and even with the best of his intentions it looked like a set-up job for his audience.

The story here is about one of the giants of music, George Frederick Handel (Wilfred Lawton). Handel was a contemporary of Johann Sebastian Bach, but while Bach flourished in Dresden, Saxony, Handel was in the backwaters of the petty German states. He headed for Great Britain, and settled in London. Soon his series of operas, like Judah Maccabeus, were hits with the public. But he was a thorough artist and not a sycophant. He wanted quiet from his audience to listen to his music, and to the singers in his pieces sing. So when he found that the then Prince of Wales (Frederick, son of George II and father of George III)(Max Kirby) only went to see his singer, Elizabeth Cibber (Elizabeth Allen), at Covent Gardens theater, he showed his anger at Prince Fred's talking out loud and annoying Ms Cibber. Handel would finally (in the middle of a performance) bang the pianoforte or harpsichord he played to stop the music until His Royal Highness shut up. Prince Fred disliked this kind of lack or due regard to him (due to his position as heir to the throne).

The film follows the ploys used by Fred, due to his social position, in trying to ruin Handel and force him back to Germany. Fred threatens to boycott Vauxhall Gardens (the elite met there in the evenings for fun) unless music by others were played (he recommends Gay's THE BEGGAR'S OPERA). He and his friends have gangs of noisy troublemakers bang objects and play instruments badly outside the theater to prevent the customers from hearing the music of Mr. Handel. They certainly succeed in preventing him and his theater friends from prospering at all. Then, just as Handel finds a goal for him to strive to recover his prosperity (he wants to build a foundling home) he suffers a serious illness.

At this bleak time he gets a commission for a new piece, called THE MESSIAH. An oratorio on the life of Christ and it's meaning to the world, Handel realizes this is the type of music that will finally establish his talent with a worthy subject. Deeply religious, we watch Handel drive himself without food to write and compose the piece that we know gave him immortality. And at the end we see it's successful premiere in Dublin in December 1742 and in London in March 1743. King George II of Britain established the custom (still observed today) of rising at the repeat of the Hallelujah Chorus. Even a stymied Prince Frederick had to rise if his father did.

How true is it? I don't really know the full story, although I am certain the movie does well in showing the difficulties in putting on 18th Century opera in several scenes. It also shows the precarious position of artists (even great ones like Handel) in keeping fiscally sound due to the problems of patronage or the problem of official dislike. As such the film serves a good purpose. These topics are rarely touched on in movies.

But how serious a threat was Prince Fred to Handel? I read a biography of Prince Fred twenty years ago. His parents hated him (the Hanovarian monarchs had problems between fathers and sons from George I in 1714 to George III and George IV in 1795). Fred was the son in the chain who never got the throne (his son is George III, raised by his mother and her friend/lover Lord Bute). Fred may have used his influence against Handel (for whom...Dr. Thomas Arne with his best known piece "God Save the King/Queen" or the symphonic composer William Boyce?), but his father was there as a corrective - and George II liked Handel's music. Also, given the dates of this film, within three years of the London performance of THE MESSIAH, Fred and his father were both worried about the possibly imminent arrival from Scotland of their Stuart cousin and enemy Bonnie Prince Charlie. That was a really major issue of the day to face up to. Fred died in 1752 - he was fatally injured in a tennis game. If this story was really true, Handel probably heard the news with a quiet smile, thinking "the Lord works in mysterious ways."

Lawton is best recalled as "Alfred Doolittle" in the 1938 PYGMALIION, or as the decrepit old servant "Peacock" in THE WRONG BOX. He is pretty good actually in showing an artist striving to perfect his work in a far from perfect social world. He also is good showing his religious intensity while composing his masterpiece. Kirby does well with Fred, but the character's flaws are not pushed beyond typical snobbery and self-absorption. Allen does well showing how an opera aria was performed in 1742. It was mores static than today. Her voice was quite charming too.

This film was in 1942 a timely piece of what we might call 'propaganda for the Good' and in the face of the well-produced but disturbing Nazi film propaganda emanating from Germany was deemed worthy of being filmed in the then expensive and rare Technicolor system. Just in 1940 alone Goebbel's Reichsfilmkammer influenced and supported the release of many films of loathsome import but of consummate technical virtuosity, notably 'Der Ewige Jude' and 'Jud Süß', interspersed with brutally gung-ho military documentaries, escapist pap and the sort of stridently hero-worshipping biopic of genuine German cultural icons intended to be taken as vindications of the romanticised Hitler of 'Triumph of the Will'.

The lavish period drama produced in 1942 at the Denham Studios by Lord Rank's G.H.W. Productions Ltd., to demonstrate that British culture was in no way inferior to Nazi perversions of Germanic 'kultur', was 'The Great Mr Handel'. The film is essentially a bildungsroman of Handel's struggles in later life to rise above adversity through his Lutheran faith, and by means of the religious genre of the oratorio. We see him leave behind what is portrayed as the vanity of his secular operas and the petty politics of aristocratic society and dedicate himself to this more democratic and thoroughly Christian mode of artistic expression.

Essentially a moral drama of redemption through good works, as in his crucial support for Thomas Coram's Foundling Hospital, and religious devotion, as triumphantly shown in his movingly portrayed creation of 'Messiah' while in extremely poor health, the film presents Christian values and glorifies an Oratorio which had become in Britain an institution, being continuously performed since that time by professional and amateur resources alike. 'Messiah' was loved and cherished throughout Britain and was regarded as one of our most valued and established traditions.

The British film industry could hardly have spent it's money more wisely in the interest of representing to British people and to the world certain moral and humane values that were sustaining the country in it's time of trial. Though the Blitz was smashing up London, Coventry and other great cities in terror raids, this fine film, superbly produced in all departments, rose above the hellish wreckage, like the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, with a sense of imperishable hope.

Among the many felicities of this film are the conceit of the window facing Handel's writing desk becoming filled by the intensity of his vision, as in a theatre of the ideal. The authentic trader's cries of Old London which intersperse the street scenes outside the door of 25 Brook Street, where Handel lived, and which were still recalled by Londoners of the 1940s, would have served to remind wartime audiences of a depth of shared popular history, thus acknowledging and accepting that high art and folk art are spiritual neighbours; there is nothing pompous about this film other than the contemptible nature of the aristocratic society portrayed in all it's arrogance and shallowness.

But perhaps the bravest and the subtlest example of a 'Propaganda for the Good' in this film is the frank and open treatment of an obvious German as a fine and decent human being. The point is made in an opening scene, when Handel has to defend himself from a xenophobic English boor who resents his foreignness, 'You are only English by an accident of birth; while I am English by an Act of Parliament', he ripostes. This film, made at the height of Nazi ferrocity against civilisation, insists upon remembering a better German.

By remembering the civilised past, hope for the future is kept alive in time of war. It was fitting that this humane view was held up in opposition to the miasma of Evil that reeked from the Nazi super-productions, in which apalling murder and mayhem were extolled as civic virtues. However, Nazi propaganda films are now, thankfully, only of interest to historical specialists, whereas 'Messiah' is still today a moving and uplifting experience, which continues to be appreciated by anyone who enjoys the music of Handel, and admires the composer's struggles in adversity to complete what is regarded by many as his finest work.

I hope this review can at least somewhat redress the too often condescending views of this fine film.

Handel's Messiah has been a favorite of millions of people for centuries. It has been sung and performed all over the globe, especially during the Christmas and Easter seasons.

This movie tells the story behind the writing of that masterpiece. The first two thirds sets the context of the man and his struggles. Then most of last third is spent showing what it may have been like to compose that immortal work of art.

At the end there was a short segment of the grand performance of the Hallelujah Chorus.

Out of personal hardships and illness came this amazing work that has endured. A few other people played a huge role in bringing this to past.

There is an indication of how his personal fellowship with God influenced him during this creative process.

Plus the period costumes and antique like sets give a beautiful visual history lesson.