Magic Fire (1955 Wagner Biopic)

[Conchis]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFCfRJ9_xL8

A high kitsch rendering of the Wagner story, with Alan Badel as the main man.

Badel played Wagner again about fifteen years later in a television drama called (and about) The Siegfried Idyll: Barbara Leigh Hunt played Cosima. Sadly, it's probably been wiped - it almost certainly had a better script than the above.

[slarty]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dre3Ue7ro4E

In 1954, after eight years, composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold returned to the movies for the last time. It was not because he wanted to, but because his fear was that if he did not write the arrangements for the new Richard Wagner movie, somebody else could do it in a "modernistic disrespectful" way, as he said in a radio interview, aired at the first of October, 1954.
In the last 20 minutes of the movie a montage of scenes exists, which presents Wagner's "Der Ring des Nibelungen"-cycle, reduced from its full running time of about 16 HOURS to just 5 minutes.
As the actor, who should have played the role of the conductor Hans Richter, did not show up on the set, the director, Wilhelm (William) Dieterle asked Korngold, who was on the set to show the actors like Alan Badel, who played Wagner, how to conduct, if he would take over the role as Richter. Korngold accepted and here we have him, added with wig and beard, conducting. It is by far the ONLY footage that shows Korngold conducting, although it is to playback music of course.
This and many more wonderful adaptations by Korngold from Wagner compositions are heard through the entire movie, which is one good reason to watch this movie.

The above description is taken from the YT listing.

[Richard Tarleton]

Tony Palmer's 1983 film with Richard Burton has been recently remastered - absorbing at the time, I found it desperately slow and self-indulgent this time round (and repetitive - you lose count of the times they pass the same border post, in the snow, with the piano on a cart).

[Conchis]

I couldn't get on with the Palmer film at all: shapeless and lacking in a through line.

Too obviously, it was filmed in bits and pieces, with the actors clearly not being filmed in the same place in several sequences.

It does, however, come into its own in the final sections in Bayreuth and Richard Burton is brilliant throughout.