- #Movie biography of chopin starring cornel wilde movie#
- #Movie biography of chopin starring cornel wilde series#
#Movie biography of chopin starring cornel wilde movie#
Millionaire weirdo Howard Hughes bought the rights to the book, and he picked former Chicago newspaperman and veteran top-notch screenwriter Ben Hecht (including the best newspaper movie ever made, The Front Page, which was also produced by Hughes) to write the screenplay, and Howard Hawks, with 10 features already under his belt, including his wildly popular Dawn Patrol (1930), to direct. He titled his book after Capone’s supposed nickname, Scarface, due to a knife scar on his cheek. Coons – writing under the pen name Armitage Trail – wrote a novel in 1929 that was based on the life of Chicago gangster Al Capone.
Three years later he shot to superstardom in the movie that kicks off Criterion’s Muni collection, Scarface.ĭirected by Howard Hawks (who grew up in Neenah, Wis., where his grandfather owned the Howard Paper Mill), Scarface has a great pedigree.Ī guy by the name of Maurice R. His first starring role in The Valiant netted him his first Oscar nomination. Muni’s acting career began on stage, first with Yiddish theater, and then on Broadway before defecting to Hollywood.
#Movie biography of chopin starring cornel wilde series#
Nominated for five Best Actor Academy Awards in a 30-year film career that began with The Valiant (1929) and ended with The Last Angry Man (1957), Muni built a career on being able to play Everyman as well as very specific characters in a series of biopics that you could say began in 1932 with Scarface (Al Capone), and on to Louis Pasteur, Emile Zola and Professor Jozef Elsner, Chopin’s teacher. Muni is his mutton-chopped teacher, Professor Jozef Elsner. Owever, in this 1945 Technicolor musical extravaganza called A Song to Remember, even though Muni and Merle Oberon as George Sand get top billing, it is a young Cornel Wilde who plays Chopin. It’s a beautiful movie moment in a collection of films on the Criterion Channel featuring that great Everyman actor, Muni Weisenfreund – aka Paul Muni. The lights come up thanks to George Sand with a candelabra, only to reveal the upstart Frederic Chopin, who is introduced by Lizst as “one of the greatest artists of all time.” The camera pans through the room to different groups enraptured by the music the pianist is producing. The great Franz Lizst is about to play at a grand party. Al Capone was already in prison for tax evasion when this cautionary movie loosely based on his Chicago exploits was released. Paul Muni in Howard Hawks’ 1932 Scarface.
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