Don't listen to the Hype. It's awful

A story that's too fascinating to pass by...

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

To call this thing ''bad'', is really doing it a disservice. It's actually beyond unbearable-a clear and relentlessly clumsy attempt to cash in on the tremendous success of ''The Sound Of Music''. If that wasn't enough, it features Edward G. Robinson and Florence Henderson in the SAME movie. Kind of like Pat Boone and Ann-Margret in the 1962 remake of ''State Fair''. No, Robinson and Henderson are not paired romantically. But they might as well have been-everything else in this so-called''Biography'' of Edvard Grieg is hilariously over the top, with everyone trying in vain to compete with the gorgeous location photography and substituting acting with simpers and bright, glassy smiles. Lucky for Florence, ''The Brady Bunch'' was just around the corner-because this ridiculous ''epic''pretty much killed her film career.Though the singing is fine, the music is not Grieg's best, and it's simply used as background for the scenery-which, by the second hour of this fiasco, begins to resemble one of those nature films which occasionally show up in small towns, accompanied by the Producer/Director who narrates it in person. One reviewer at the time this was first released stated: ''It seems to have been made by Trolls''. And not very talented ones, at that. Gives poor Norway a bad name.Not to mention Trolls....

When I saw this turkey in 1970, there were no rewind buttons for it was in a theater. So I could not go back and check this. . . But I am sure that in the final seconds, as Grieg is running up the street to his home and Nina, his arms swinging as one's arms do when running, he passes a young girl traveling in the opposite direction - and his hand smacks her rump sending her sprawling off camera . . . I have often wanted to see the end of this film again to see if my memory is correct. Or was it finally edited out? Did anyone else catch this best moment of the film? It rather ruined the 'return to his true love, to make up for all the wrong he'd done her' ending for me.

SONG OF NORWAY is an unbearably dull musical pastiche of clichés heard in every musical ever made that purported to be the saga of a composer's struggles to find recognition for his music. Edvard Grieg's struggles are so dull as to be non-stop in this awful compilation of Norwegian scenery by the truckload with no story to carry it.It is notable that the man who plays Grieg, TORALV MAURSTAD, never did make another American film, so disastrous were the reviews and box-office for this dull saga. Note also that FLORENCE HENDERSON was not able to make another film in Hollywood but went directly to television and stayed there for a very successful run on "The Brady Bunch". See the film and you will judge yourself why it was an abject failure. And don't be fooled by the presence of OSKAR HOMOLKA, EDWARD G. ROBINSON and ROBERT MORLEY in the cast. They have little or nothing to do.Music lovers may be enchanted by Grieg's works, but not the way they are presented here. Nor is there any resemblance between the zestful SOUND OF MUSIC and its picturesque way of dealing with the Von Trapp Singers and this dull as dishwater musical that would work better as a travelogue of Norway with the plot excised.See it at your own risk.

Adjectives fail this film. "Dreadful" isn't enough. "Awful" seems mild. "Stupifyingly bad" can't convey the experience of it, either. If you are familiar with the poet Helen Steiner Rice, imagine one of her poems set to film and you will begin to dimly grasp how bad, how truly bad, how amazingly bad this motion picture is. Imagine a trailer park filled with lobotomized people sitting in lawn chairs watching a version of "The Sound of Music" made on the cheap especially for them. Imagine the film being projected on a bedsheet attached with clothes pins to a wash line. Imagine the wind blowing. Imagine no one paying attention. Then imagine you are there and you are shackled to a stake in the ground so that you cannot escape the evening's entertainment unless you chew off your own foot. If you can imagine all this, you can imagine the witch's brew of butchered classical music, litter-free travelogue sterility, and lifeless robotic acting that was captured for eternity on one unlucky batch of film stock from the Kodak factory and slapped with the label, "Song of Norway." It is truly the worst film ever made. The only advantage of viewing it is that from that day forth, ANYTHING you see at the movies will look passable by comparison. And I do mean ANYTHING.