The main reason to buy this film is because Nino Martini, an Italian operatic tenor who made only a handful of movies along his life, stars in it.
This is the story of the Gerards (Genievève Tobin and Reginald Denny), a rich couple who have fallen apart because of the husband's continuous "patronage" of young and beautiful girl artists. His wife decides to counter-attack patronizing some young and attractive singer herself. So she calls Mme. Ernestine Schumann-Heink, who suggests Nino as the protegée. After listening to him sing Mrs. Gerard quickly accepts, and he is sent to Paris to study. There he meets a ballerina (Anita Louise) and they fall in love. Then the Gerards come in, and Kathleen Gerard also falls in love with him, bringing troubles in.
It is a nice musical comedy but has some abrupt cuttings that make the story a bit awkwark sometimes. Anita Louise seems miscast as a poorly acting classical ballerina, opposite a sparkling Geneviève Tobin who makes one think the roles should have been reversed. Nino Martini was never the best of actors, yet his charm lays in his unpretentious personality as much as in his singing. Reginald Denny has a limited and not precisely nice role, given the chance he who was a skilled and elegant comedian could have done much more. Geneviève Tobin is by far the most engaging of them all. There's also the added interest of seeing and even listening to Mme. Schumann-Heink, a famous Bohemian mezzo-soprano in her only credited film (she appeared in a silent too) singing one of her best loved tunes, Silent Night, at the piano. She died shortly after that same year the film was released (1936), before a young girl named Deanna Durbin had her first big chance to impersonate her in the biography that was to be started but would never be made in the end. There are plenty of songs, both operatic and romantic, for Martini to show his artistry. If you want more of him, don't miss The Gay Desperado which is better, fresh and funny and Leo Carrillo and Ida Lupino make it very much so. It's such a luck this previously hard to find film has been recovered for rerelease.
