Moira Shearer gets her chance to show off her admittedly impressive stuff to James Mason and a background of 'Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini' by Rachmaninov.
Brattish youth in Rome magically becomes Farley Granger overnight and romances French governess Leslie Caron. There's a nice dog in this one. This is the Minnelli episode.
In the best and tensest sequence, acrobat Kirk Douglas rescues Pier Angeli and enjoins him to his terrifying act, which looks like is all shot for real with the highest of high cameramen (no back projection I'm sure), sound men and director (had they the nerve to join them that high up). (I misremembered that it was Burt Lancaster who was the real former acrobat.) Angeli - when not stunt doubled - looks as confident as Douglas. Surely this inspired Trapeze?
With Ethyl Barrymore, Agnes Moorehead.
Shot beautifully by the great early film camermen combo of Charles Rosher and Harold Rosson, though whether they shared or split.. The great website http://www.cinematographers.nl/GreatDoPh/rosson.htm suggests Rosson did the Rome story.
Miklos Rozsa scored, so overall largely watchable:
Miklós Rózsa devotes a relatively large amount of space in his memoir, Double Life, to The Story of Three Loves—which he described as “a delightful picture”—and in particular to “The Jealous Lover.” The filmmakers asked Rózsa to write a short ballet, which would be needed in a week. “I had to tell Franklin [one of the few producers the composer liked and admired] that although Rossini wrote an opera in ten days, I couldn’t do an original ballet in so short a time.” Initially, he proposed using the love music from César Franck’s tone poem Psyché (1888), but neither producer nor director cared for the piece. Then the composer recalled a recent Hollywood Bowl concert in which he had conducted Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943) with a young André Previn as piano soloist. He suggested it to the filmmakers and “this time they were delighted.”
Souce: http://www.filmscoremonthly.com/notes/story_of_three_loves.html
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