The Saddest Music in the World (2003) on Netflix
In Depression-era Winnipeg, legless beer baroness Lady Helen Port-Huntley stages a contest to find the world's saddest music. Chester Kent enters for America, against his father and brother.
- Netflix3.0/5
- IMDb7.0/106,609 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes79%
Trailer
Plot summary
Winnipeg, winter 1933, and the city is the world's sorrow capital for a fourth year running. Lady Helen Port-Huntley, a legless beer baroness, marks the honor with a contest to decide which nation's music is the saddest, a $25,000 prize for the winner and publicity for her brewery as American Prohibition nears its end. Chester Kent, a Broadway producer who left Winnipeg, enters for the United States. His father Fyodor, a streetcar conductor and former doctor, competes for Canada; Fyodor, a veteran of the First World War, once built Lady Helen a pair of artificial legs. Roderick, Chester's brother, performs for Serbia, home of his missing wife. Chester brings along his girlfriend Narcissa, who has lost her memory.
Cast
- Ross McMillanas Roderick Kent / Gravillo the Great
- Claude Dorgeas Duncan Elksworth
- Jeff Suttonas Young Chester
- Graeme Valentinas Young Roderick
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Saddest Music in the World (2003)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Maddin and co-screenwriter George Toles based the film on an original screenplay written by British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro, from which they kept "the title, the premise and the contest" to determine which country's music was the saddest, but otherwise re-wrote.
- Like most of Guy Maddin's films, it is filmed in a style that imitates late 1920s and early 1930s cinema, with grainy black-and-white photography, slightly out-of-sync sound and expressionist art design; a few scenes are in color, imitating early two-strip Technicolor.
