Rish Outfield's reviews
Cool title. Alan Alda looked really young as the journalist who befriends an aging concert pianist and becomes more than his friend, finally becoming inhabited by him when the old man dies, inheriting his money and his piano-playing abilities. Bisset played his hot, suspicious wife who tries to get to the bottom of things in a roundabout way and who (of course) no one believes when she voices her suspicions.
This was very slow-moving, which seemed pretty typical with 70's horror films. Today's audiences are unforgiving of any pace or delayed gratification, so movies are edited with strobelight tempos. But this one strays all the way to the other side. There were long dream sequences, long dialogue sequences, long piano playing sequences, long everything. I could see pretty much everything coming far before it happened, although there was an interesting turn toward the end, when Bisset takes matters into her own hands. Still, I was often tempted to turn off the movie and go get a donut, or at least test out my Fast-Forward button. The ending should have been a big deal, but it was just confusing. I wasn't paying attention, I guess. But it was hard to. It had nice Jerry Goldsmith music, but was never really scary. I have a family of cousins who are curiously like the occultists in this film. They all are enormously musical, all unusually brilliant, all disturbingly well-behaved, and all decidedly strange in a difficult-to-put-your-finger-on way. Like Bisset's character, when I have brought up my feelings of unease about this family, everyone says, "Oh, you're just jealous," or "You have to find fault even with the greatest of people," or "How DARE you speak ill of any one of them?!" Wow, that was quite a tangent, but it just exemplifies how my mind tended to wander while watching The Mephisto Waltz. I'll try to end the review on a more related note.
My dad used to talk about how beautiful Jacqueline Bisset was, and now I know what he was talking about. An annoying gaffe in the transfer showed the microphone in one shot and that Bisset was not really naked in another. But that's neither here nor there, is it? That's a weird saying, that something is ‘neither here nor there.' I'm not sure of its origin, but it has to be British. No American says ‘nor' anymore.