The Great Caruso

I rented two movies the other day: “Butterfield Eight”, with Liz Taylor and “The Great Caruso” with Mario Lanza. (Wow! Do I ever watch a lot of movies! Yes, I do, but I think it’s one of the payoffs of being a senior citizen.) I played the Liz Taylor movie first. It dragged and seem to go nowhere. It was quickly ejected and put back in its box. It seemed to be a bad 1950’s script. Maybe I jumped to conclusions. I don’t know, but I tend to judge a movie as a “Let’s watch it all” or a “Let’s eject and return it.” within the first ten minutes of playing it. It doesn’t take longer than this to identify serious defects such as trite script  or poor editing.This knowledge comes only with age and experience, I think. I would never have been able to make these decisions when I was twelve.

Anyway, then I played “The Great Caruso”. I wondered how I would react to it. It had excited and moved me profoundly when I first saw it  in 1952  at the tender age of twelve. Then I saw it a few times over the years. How would I find it at age 70,  I wondered.  Would it now seem to me corny,  too sentimental, historically inaccurate?  (To some extent it is tainted with all of these defects.) Would Lanza’s Italian now seem a bit substandard?  Would I be a bit shocked at how naive I might have been to have once thought that this movie was an emotional blockbuster, a movie which brought opera into my life as  a major source of joy?  Vain intellectual imaginings! I found myself tearing up at a few points, then finally breaking down into major-league sobbing.  No doubt about it, I thought, this is one powerful movie! There might be some trite bits, but there are also scenes of amazing power.

Three scenes   will illustrate what I mean:  (1) there is whirlwind sequence of scenes showing Caruso on a world wide tour. You hear the voice but the camera pans on the faces of the audience as you go from city to city. These are the faces of older people– sophisticated, worldly faces, faces which have experienced joys and sorrows in full measure,  yet they are all riveted and clearly  moved by the music and the drama. of the opera.   (2) a scene in which Lanza, about to go on stage to sing Rodolfo in “La Boheme”, is urged by the prompter to act sedately, keep his hands out of his pockets, etc. Lanza  ignores this advice  and follows his  strong intuition that Rodolfo is not a super-refined kind of person and should not be portrayed in such a way if he is to move the people who are listening in the ‘standing only’ area of “The Gods.”  I am not going to clarify this but I am only going to suggest that you rent the movie and watch for this scene. (3) the scene where Lanza  sings “Ave Maria” with  the boys choir in  St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

Seeing this movie again  got me thinking. How interesting,  I thought, that I am reacting to this movie as emotionally,(maybe even more emotionally) as I did when I first saw it as a boy of twelve. No wonder that this movie had the power to lure me through the portals to the world of opera.  This it did. It occurred to me how little I have changed in my emotional core, in that precious core which is only reached and affected by things of great beauty, things  which you have to open yourself out to. What a movie! What a thrilling voice!  Aging is not the greatest bellyful of laughs that I know of, but there are some satisfying compensations. I could see from my reaction to this movie how much insight, understanding and empathy  I had gained with the passing of the years. The movie had not changed; I had. Ring any bells with anyone? Ah, how much I owe to opera!

My website: www.godwinbooks.com     rthomson@islandnet.com