Spook the Piano Player

By * Jay Cocks

At first glance, and even at second, The Mephisto Waltz looks a lot like Rosemary's Granddaughter. There are the ambitious husband, beleaguered wife, treacherous new acquaintances, sympathetic old friends, intimations of perversion and, finally, the confirmation of diabolism. Yet for all the obvious echoes of its superior predecessor, Waltz stands on its own as a sleek and scary piece of movie necromancy.

Alan Alda appears as a failed concert pianist turned journalist. He is assigned to interview a master pianist (Curt Jurgens), who treats him with impenetrable superiority until he notices Alda's hands. "Hands like yours are one in a hundred thousand," the maestro exclaims, with blurred syntax, seizing Alda's forearms and showing them off to his daughter (Barbara Parkins), who responds with pronounced interest. Naturally, Alda's frau (Jacqueline Bisset) doesn't at all care for the lavish attentions of Jurgens and his kinky retinue of friends, but Alda is too flattered to listen. When Jurgens suddenly dies of leukemia, Alda, who has resumed his musical career, takes over the master's concert dates and an incestuous love affair with Parkins. His wife, in the meantime, has stumbled on some evidence (a book of incantations, a flask of mysterious blue oil, more or less the usual things) that strongly suggests that her husband's new-found musical talents are at least uncanny, and probably a good deal more. During the rest of the picture she pays, as they say, a dear price for such knowledge.

Director Paul Wendkos has perhaps taken the suggestion of his title a bit too literally. He seizes every available opportunity to dance his camera around, photographing from acrobatic angles and utilizing a full spectrum of weird color filters. If the technique is somewhat distracting, at least he succeeds in achieving a good sense of clammy terror. The Mephisto Waltz is not one of those really goose-fleshy horror pictures that make you edgy about opening the front door when you get home from the theater. But it is spooky enough to make you wonder just a little the next time you attend a piano recital.

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