Bajazzo

I am a huge fan of the opera Pagliacci, it has a powerful story, great characters and above all amazing music. While I marginally prefer the 1968 and 1982 productions, this 1948 film is mighty fine as well. The costumes, sets and photography are excellent and as you would expect the music is phenomenal especially Vesti la guibba and Si Puo. When it comes to the acting and singing it is great, maybe the fact that the singing is separate to the acting takes some getting used to and the sound is not that great but mostly there are few or little problems. The singing for both Canio and Nedda is ideal and acting wise not only does Gina Lollobridgida look beautiful but shows a bitchy and vulnerable side to Nedda, and Afro Poli is a fine Canio. But Tito Gobbi as Tonio (and Silvio) is a revelation, while his voice isn't exactly the most powerful or most sensual, nor did it need to be, he had tremendous acting skills, strong musicianship and a sense of intelligence and intensity all of which are here. Here he is at his best in the prologue Si Puo which seamlessly sets the tone of the whole opera; while Leonard Warren, Robert Merrill and especially Sherrill Milnes(in the 1978 Met production) give very moving interpretations of this wonderful piece, Gobbi's(the middle of the aria has the most pathos sung by any baritone in my opinion) is in a different class. Overall, an absolute must for any fans of the opera and especially of Gobbi. 9/10 Bethany Cox

Mario Costa's PAGLIACCI (1948) is a very satisfying, inspired film adaptation of Ruggero Leoncavallo's popular opera (1892) of the same title. Taking the action outdoors in the beautiful Italian countryside, Costa adds lots of local color to an already exuberant setting by having the townspeople dress in typical Calabrian costumes, thus intensifying the authenticity of the opera's historical locale. To my mind, given the technical difficulties of filming in post-war Italy, this film is a miracle of perfection. Mario Bava's cinematography is breathtaking, making expert use of light and shadow with great sensibility. The sound in the DVD currently available is the best one can have, although I believe that, with adequate means, both image and sound could be rendered even more pristine. My greatest enjoyment, however, derives from the actors: Tito Gobbi (Tonio, Silvio), Afro Poli (Canio) and Gina Lollobrigida (Nedda). Gobbi is wonderful in his dual role. Both Poli and Lollobrigida fill the screen with just the right charge of magnetism. Lollobrigida's Nedda is indeed a grateful surprise, given the fact that the actress was totally inexperienced then. In her second speaking part, Lollobrigida already shows all the qualities that would make her a national and international star in just a few years.

As hard as it may be to believe, this film was shown, along with several other Italian opera films of the late 1940s and early 1950s, on WPIX television here in New York City in the early to mid-1950s. They were hodgepodge-like renditions for the most part (Italian producers of opera films had even less faith in the public's acceptance of opera than did their Hollywood counterparts), often with added prologues or epilogues concerning the opera itself, or with voice-over narrations. From the time I first saw this PAGLIACCI (I would say 1952), I've always thought it was the best of all of these films, because it did give the opera close to complete, and the added-on dramatic introduction of how Leoncavallo first came across the subject for his opera was short, if superfluous. (Those reviewers who complain about its absence from current prints don't know what they're missing, but should count their blessings.) Anyway, this is a pretty stark visual rendition of the opera, several times (most especially in its mesmerizing ending) approaching good American film noir in aspect, black and white shadowing, and general cinematography. The four singers heard in the five leading roles (Galliano Masini, Onelia Fineschi, Tito Gobbi and Gino Sinimberghi) were all leading opera stars in Italy at that time, Gobbi going on to become almost certainly the greatest Italian baritone of the second half of the last century. Gobbi is great in both his roles, as the hunchbacked and lecherous Tonio and as the handsome lover Silvio, and his Prologue is gloriously sung and filmed, but for me the star of the film is Afro Poli, a famous baritone himself, but here appearing as Canio and mouthing the ringing voice of Masini. Since he did similar service in other opera films - to the voices of baritone rivals like Gino Bechi and Gian-Giacomo Guelfi, we must assume he had no ego at all!. What he did have, though, was what I always term "an actor's face", granite-like in its aspect, and in this particular film, with his hair whitened to indicate Canio's age, he looks rather impressively like Boris Karloff in that same stage of his career when he was working for Val Lewton. Sinimberghi, a heavy-set but quite handsome tenor sings Beppe in this one but does not appear in it, while, like Poli, he did appear in others of these opera films mouthing some other ringing Italian tenor voices (most especially, Antonio Salvarezza's, although Salvarezza was actually from Argentina). Gina L. looks very beautiful, but despite some publicity given to the fact that she could sing soprano, she does not do so here, but mouths for the excellent Fineschi. And despite some really awful dubbing (you really had to go to M-G-M in the Grayson-Melchior-Lanza era to see singers who really looked like they were singing rather than just mouthing the notes; the Italians never seemed to care, even going all the way back to Gigli's earliest films), you get used to it pretty quickly and from there on it's all clear sailing. As opera films of this period go, this is a tremendously 'vital' one that might even appeal to non-lovers of Italian opera. (You might want to think of it as the Boris Karloff film you always wanted to see, but missed!)

From the simpler days when cinematography focused on story and acting rather than gadgets and special effects. I paid to see this movie over a dozen times, in the days when home movies were not even a dream, except for the very rich. And even then, cellulloid would deteriorate in time.

This was my first exposure to Gina Lollobrigida, in my teens. What a discovery! And since then, this has remained one of my favorite opera performances, bar none. Simple, to the heart, well sung. And black and white definitely projected the story focusing on emotion, rather than landscape. Too bad the VHS version is missing the revealing spoken introduction we saw in the movie house. If anyone knows if it is available, I'd like to know.

Lacking Carmine Gallone's "Faust", the finest noir opera currently available on DVD is undoubtedly Mario Costa's 1948 movie version of "Pagliacci" in which Tito Gobbi (in no less than three roles) just manages to steal the limelight from Gina Lollobrigida, ideally cast as the super-beautiful Nedda. The unfortunate Afro Poli played Cannio to perfection. A fine singer himself, Poli spent much of his film career acting on-screen for not so handsome dubbers like, in this case, Galliano Masini — whose only other cinema venture was as the singing star of the 1938 "Star of the Sea", written and directed by one of Italy's great masters of the cinema, Corrado D'Errico. (Although D'Errico wrote and directed no less than 15 super-popular, extremely large-budget movies between 1929 and his death at the age of 39 in 1941, he was so totally forgotten just 15 years later that he's not even included in Italy's massive, seven-volume "Filmlexicon degli Autori e delle Opere". Such is fame in the movie world!}. The current DVD of the Mario Costa "Pagliacci" starts somewhat abruptly as it is missing the original introduction in which we are told something of the history of the Leoncavallo opera. Fortunately, the opera itself is presented intact. The sound, alas, is far from perfect, but that's how it was back in 1948. Fortunately, the voices do not suffer so much as the orchestra, and as the voices are the main item, this "Pagliacci" rates 8/10.