1998 · drama · music

The Legend of 1900

Directed by Giuseppe Tornatore · 2h 50m · 1998

Musician Max Tooney goes to sell his prized Conn trumpet to a music shop, where he plays the instrument one last time. The shopkeeper recognises the song as one on a record matrix he found and asks who the piece is by. Tooney tells the story of an infant found abandoned in the first class dining room of the four-stacker ocean-liner SS Virginian on 1 January 1900. Danny Boodman, a coal-man from the boiler room, names the boy Danny Boodman T. D. Lemon 1900, after himself, the fruit crate the boy was found in, and the year, and raises him as his own.

Our read: The Legend of 1900 (1998) reads as a neutral, steady, inventive drama · music entry — measured in intensity, mid-stakes in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook.