I’ve Always Loved You is almost an “alien” in Republic Film’s productions, which were usually dedicated to low-budget serials such as Dick Tracy, Zorro, Fu Manchu, Captain America and Gene Autry’s and Roy Rogers’ “B” Westerns – products of assembly-line editing completed in a week for 30,000 dollars. Filmed in Technicolor over three months, with a dumbfounding budget of $2 million, this film is so out of their realm that R.M. Hurst did not even mention it in his otherwise well-detailed book dedicated to the history of Republic Studios! (Republic Studios: Between Poverty Row and the Majors, Scarecrow Press, 1979). Driven by ambition, Republic’s owner Herbert J. Yates hired some big names like John Ford, and later Orson Welles (Macbeth) and Fritz Lang (Secret Beyond the Door). When he began negotiation with Frank Borzage in June 1944, Borzage demanded a contract for three films and a salary of $100,000 per film, plus 30% share of the profits – the highest director’s salary ever seen in the United States at the time (…).
Borzage made his brother, Lew Borzage, co-producer, and chose the set designer, technicians and actors himself. He had almost complete freedom in the production of I’ve Always Loved You. During the war years musicals had become fashionable again, and the immense success of Charles Vidor’s A Song to Remember, in which José Iturbi “dubbed” Cornel Wilde (alias Chopin) on the piano pushed Borzage to buy the rights to Borden Chase’s screenplay, Concerto (1937). Chase, whose name is generally linked with Westerns (Hawks, Mann, Aldrich), drew his inspiration from his wife, the pianist Lee Keith’s prodigal career, she gave her first recital at Carnegie Hall at the age of eight. Borzage managed to obtain the prestigious collaboration of Arthur Rubinstein, who accepted to work in cinema for the first time. The cineaste asked him to choose the classical pieces to insert in the film, to decide their lengths, and to double the lead actors on the piano. Among the leads were 22-year old newcomer Catherine McLeod and the Dutch actor Frits van Dongen (the maharajah in Richard Eichberg’s Der Tiger von Eschnapur), who was renamed Philip Dorn in the United States. Tony Gaudio, the cinematographer, uses Technicolor dominated at the beginning by blue, emerald green, mauve, and grey, and by purple and black at Carnegie Hall- Borzage’s attempt to create a visual effect corresponding to an increasingly feverish emotional state. The plot reveals familiar themes from the cineaste’s career (unconditional love between exceptional individuai, supernatural communication across space, music as a medium of the soul, the quest for harmony) in an orgy of sentimental, chromatic and musical effects that fearlessly mix the improbable and the sublime, the ridiculous and the ingenious – all of this lightened by a touch of irony. An unclassifiable film that was rejected by “serious” critics when it first came out, but that now has a following of unconditional admirers.

Hervé Dumont