"I've Always Loved You" is a 1946 production from Republic Pictures directed by Frank Borzage from a script by Borden Chase based on a magazine short story he'd published called "Concerto." In the mid-1940's, as World War II was winding down, Republic Pictures founder Herbert Yates, like other Hollywood studio owners, saw that the "B" picture was doomed and decided to push his company towards major-studio status by hiring important talents behind the camera: Ben Hecht for "Voice in the Wind," Orson Welles for "Macbeth" and Borzage under a long-term contract under which Yates would bankroll him in the sorts of big, romantic tear-jerkers that had been Borzage's specialty since his star-making film, "Seventh Heaven," in 1927. Oddly, the first film Borzage wanted to make at Republic was a John Wayne Western called Dakota, but Yates took that film away from both Borzage and Wayne and sent the script down his "B" Western assembly line instead. Borzage ended up hooking up with writer Chase, who came up with a tale that served as an excuse for Borzage to put a lot of great classical music on the screen, most of it played by pianist Artur Rubinstein (there are a few bits by a Republic studio orchestra as well), as well as staging the familiar romantic situations for which Borzage was famous.
The film opens in Philadelphia, where the world-renowned pianist and conductor Leopold Goronoff (Philip Dorn, an actor Warner Bros. had signed and tried to build into a sort of bionic combination of Paul Lukas and Claude Rains) is holding open auditions for a one-year scholarship for piano students. Goronoff's old friend Frederick Hassman (Felix Bressart), himself a formerly great concert pianist until he married an American woman and settled down in the farm town from which she had come, retiring from music and ultimately ruining his hands with farm work, shows up at the audition with his daughter Myra (Catherine McLeod). For all the money Herbert Yates threw at this movie, including paying for three-strip Technicolor and getting "name" talents behind the camera, he didn't go for star actors in the cast, and I got the impression Borzage had cast McLeod less for any acting ability than that she was a good enough pianist herself she could synchronize on screen with Rubinstein's playing and we could actually see her fingers striking piano keys instead of those awful shots with the body of the piano interposed between the camera and her hands. Goronoff thinks Myra is so good a pianist he offers to take her under his wing and let her move in with him - though since this is a 1946 movie, he does not insist that she become his mistress as part of the deal the way Lowell Sherman did with Madge Evans in a similar situation in the 1932 film "The Greeks Had a Word for Them," a.k.a. "Three Broadway Girls." Indeed, Myra's virtue is in no danger because she's protected not only by the Production Code but the formidable chaperoning of Goronoff's mother, played by Maria Ouspenskaya, billed with the honorific "Madame" in front of her name and easily taking the acting honors in this film. She makes a concert debut but the experience is so traumatic that she goes back to daddy's farm and accepts the marriage proposal of George Sampter (William Carter, a rather gangly but still nice-looking man whom we first get to see wearing jeans below the waist and nothing above it), and a couple of jump-cuts later Myra and George have a 17-year-old daughter who has dreams of piano stardom herself.
"I've Always Loved You" is a beautiful film when the characters are shown actually making music, but it's annoyingly sexist when they aren't; not only does Goronoff make a couple of blatantly anti-woman speeches to the effect that music is a man's world and women don't belong in it (ironic since at the time the film was made one of the world's top classical pianists was not only a woman but had the same first name as this film's heroine and a similar last name, too: Dame Myra Hess), but the whole story is framed as a contrast between Myra's pursuit of a musical career and her desire for a "normal" life as a wife and mother. Quite a few 1930's and 1940's movies set up that dichotomy for women seeking careers in singing, playing or dancing, and one of the few that didn't resolve its plot in that sexist fashion was a quite remarkable film from Republic's first decade as a studio, "Follow Your Heart," in which former Metropolitan Opera soprano Marion Talley played a woman who's encouraged at the end to "follow your heart" and go for the big operatic career rather than marry the small-town boyfriend and give up her dreams of stardom. Mostly, though, we got endings like the sexist cop-out of the otherwise magnificent film "Maytime" (1937), the best of the eight Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy movies, in which the aging diva Marcia Mornay (MacDonald) tells the young aspiring opera singer that the career isn't worth the heartbreak it entails and she should stay home and marry her boring boyfriend instead. In "The Red Shoes" (1948) the dilemma literally tears the central character, aspiring ballerina Moira Shearer, apart: torn between the choreographer who says she has to renounce love for her career and the composer who wants to write for her and also to marry her, she runs away after her performance and gets killed when she falls off a trestle into the path of an oncoming train: another annoying sexist cop-out ending to what's otherwise a great film. "I've Always Loved You" is hardly in the league of "Maytime" or "The Red Shoes" as a movie, but it shares with them this annoying streak of sexism that makes it a trial to sit through.
