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‘Hear My Song’
By Desson Howe
Washington Post Staff Writer
February 21, 1992
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If there's a song in your heart, does anything else matter? That's the message in "Hear My Song." It's a slim story, this Irish romantic fantasy about the search for a long-lost singer. But it's held together by an abundance of music and a centrifugal playfulness.Set in England during the late 1960s, it's about young music promoter Micky O'Neill (Adrian Dunbar), who's in search of the ultimate booking: legendary (and real-life) singer Josef Locke. A Locke appearance would be sensational, since the tubby Irish tenor escaped England in 1958 to avoid the tax man. Micky, stuck with signing carbon-copy bores (such as "Franc Cinatra") at his waning English club, needs this bad. When a singer the spitting image of Locke shows up, Dunbar thinks he has it made. Chief Constable Abbott (David McCallum) has a bone to pick with Locke -- to do with those back taxes. So does Cathleen Doyle (Shirley-Anne Field), who had an affair with the singer back in 1958, when he gave her first prize in the Miss Dairy Goodness beauty pageant. She helped him duck the authorities but hasn't heard from him since. It soon becomes apparent to everyone that this Locke, who bills himself as "Mr. X -- Is he or isn't he?," ain't the real McCoy. Micky loses his standing and his money, and he's already on the skids with the girl he loves (Tara Fitzgerald). But he remains obsessed. He embarks on a romantic mission to Ireland in search of the real Locke (Ned Beatty). Director and co-scriptwriter Peter Chelsom has a gift for atmospherics. "Song" is full of blue-lit scenes, fog-suffused landscapes, smoky backrooms and black-and-white flashbacks. Everything's touched with a magical, eccentric air, rather like the work of Scottish director Bill ("Local Hero") Forsyth. As for the music, it ought to get star billing. It kicks in whenever it chooses, not just enhancing a scene, but taking it over. When Micky's partners are putting up a poster advertising mystery man "Mr. X," for instance, a quirky theme comes over the soundtrack. As if they can hear it, the two men whistle to it and even do a little soft-shoe shuffle. Life, in this movie, is always ready for a musical interruption. That's just as well. In a movie such as this, whether or not Micky finds Locke and persuades him to return to his fans, the English stage and his erstwhile sweetheart is hardly nail-biting fare. What counts is the instrinsic goodwill and the wonderful sounds of the human voice, particularly that of Vernon Midgley. As the one who sings offscreen for Beatty's character, he fills the movie with a lilting resonance.
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