I dunno if this has been mentioned before, and it’s impossible to search on the movie title for obvious reasons.
Last night I watched M, the remake from 1951. I thought I’d seen it before, but obviously not.
A whistle first appears about 40 minutes in. [I’d thought it was a Cooperman’s but it was an All-American, I think identical and made by the same company.] It’s in the movie off and on till the end and is central to the plot.
https://imdb.com/title/tt0043766/
In particular, the still at https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0043766/mediaviewer/rm3409402624.
I did a lot of whistle and pipes work for “Kill the Irishman”. It was on Netflix not long ago.
Is he playing “In the Hall of the Mountain King”? I had no idea there was a remake of M.
YouTube’s got a couple of full-length-ish vids of the remake of M. Here’s one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vsBJAk5kv1A
No, and no. At 44:30 in the link above, the tune is dubbed and the actor is basically just moving his fingers at seemingly tentative random, in no relation to the actual tune; as for the tune itself, it doesn’t resemble ItHotMK to me, apart from the creepy factor. You’d have to do a fair amount of half-holing to reproduce that tune on a standard whistle, and the actor’s definitely not going to those lengths.
Maybe there’s an actual tune under the dub, but it looks more like the actor is just winging it for the camera.
Me neither.
It looks short to me (at 32:12). If it’s an All American Fife (yeah, it’s not a fife!), there should be a set of three stripes down towards the foot as well as a set of stripes above the finger holes.
At 32:26 I can only see the upper set of stripes. Notice also when he starts to finger the instrument, his left hand is right up near the window. There are no finger holes up that high on a whistle.
I concur: he’s obviously “faking” the finger motions while someone in the orchestra is playing the music. But also, the instrument itself seems modified if it is in fact an All American.
I don’t think Cooperman made whistles of the All American / Schoha / etc. pattern. Many of those predate Cooperman’s late 1950s start.
I found it’s a 1931 German film. Sounds pretty creepy, both the film itself and the society it was made within and made to protest against.
Roger Ebert’s review of the 1931 film says it’s a tune from Peer Gynt.
Right. In the 1931 film, Peter Lorre is indeed whistling In the Hall of the Mountain King (by mouth, not instrument; and since Lorre couldn’t whistle well, the actual whistling was by Fritz Lang himself and dubbed). However, in the 1951 remake the actor David Wayne is instead portrayed playing a whistle, and the tune is not ItHotMK, although it draws from a roughly similar set of notes. Lorre’s tune is whistled in a fairly sprightly way, but the 1951 remake’s tune, “played” on a whistle, is quite different and slow. I’m not intimately familiar with Grieg’s body of work, so if the 1951 tune is by Grieg as well, I’ll have to leave that to those who know, but my guess is that it was instead by Michel Michelet, the remake’s composer.