This film is a wonderfully evocative anecdote about an elderly aristocrat, slowly dying amid the crumbling splendors of the past, who decides to defy the encroaching egalitarian age. For all the rough edges, the film exhibits the more polished elements of Welles’ Citizen Kane as the aging aristocrat sits alone in his Xanadu, dreaming amid the remnants of past magnificence while the bulldozers of modern civilization hum outside the walls. He rebels in a gesture of glorious folly, bankrupting himself to hire the best classical musicians around, dust off the vast chandelier, and bring his ancestral music room to glittering life.