Based on Loius Verneuil's play Monsieur Lamberthier, which had been retitled Obsession for Broadway and Jealousy for a 1929 film rendering, Deception is the story of an unlikely love triangle between a cellist, a composer and a pianist. Claude Rains as the maniacal composer steals the entire movie, though Bette Davis as the pianist remembers the film—and Korngold—fondly in her memoirs. Korngold was heavily involved in the screen re-writes and the scripting and filming of the dialog for the musical scenes—unusually for the time. The result is that the film is unusually credible in its musical content—a situation to which Korngold's caching of Claude Rains in conducting and Bette Davis in piano playing adds considerably.

The music is somewhat sparser than usual for a Korngold movie, with the main theme providing most of the content, with the liberal addition of carefully chosen performances of classical works. Two works were written for specific concert scenes in the film; the Cello Concerto (later expanded and given the separate opus number 37) and the delightful Romance Impromptu for cello and orchestra, regrettably cut from the film in its entirety.

© Tim Mahon, Rovi