The Fjords Aren't Alive . . .

By Mark Goodman

Remember The Great Victor Herbert? Or Hi Diddle Diddle! Or how about Never Put It in Writing? Well, Andrew Stone has done it again with Song of Norway. Adapted by Stone from the highly successful 1944 Broadway operetta and filmed in Scandinavia and England at a cost of about $4,000,000, Song is a wildly romanticized biography of Edvard Grieg, once hailed as the "Chopin of the North." By comparison, The Sound of Music is not only trenchant social documentary but a symphonic tour de force.

As portrayed by Norwegian Actor Toralv Maurstad, Grieg comes across as a cross between Horatio Alger and Jackie Coogan. He confides to his close friend, Rikard Nordraak (Frank Poretta), "I was beginning to lose any hope, Nordraak, of ever being important." The plot follows Grieg's agonized crawl to fame, illustrated principally by a lot of fancy name-dropping. "I've written 15 songs for the poems of Hans Christian Andersen," he shyly admits. Cries Nordraak, eagerly: "Has Hans heard these?" Later, Grieg's wife Nina (Florence Henderson) sighs: "How do you suppose the others managed?" Replies a piano salesman played by Edward G. Robinson: "You mean Schubert and Liszt, for example?" When Grieg enters the Scandinavian Club in Rome, the clerk informs him, "A countryman of yours was asking for you." Grieg asks, "Who's that?" Replies the clerk: "Mr. Ibsen."

At least the fjords should have come alive with the sound of Grieg's music, but its richness is lost in endless romps over Julie Andrews' old daffodilled hillsides. It may be argued that Song is aimed at the kids. If so, they will quail pitifully when Grieg the reluctant piano teacher whacks a slow pupil across the, knuckles `a la Seventh Veil. Anyway, today's Sesame Street-schooled youngsters are much too sophisticated to be beguiled by so banal and outmoded a story line. qedMark Goodman

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