Una donna in gabbia

Hitting A New High was the last of 3 films that Lily Pons did under her contract with RKO. As that brief vogue for opera sopranos ended as it began in mid 30s Hollywood, RKO and Pons parted company. She would make guest appearances however in other films in the future, most notably Carnegie Hall.

In this one the score is a mixture of operatic material with some original score music written by Jimmy McHugh and Harold Adamson. One of the songs I Hit A New High had some success on the pop charts.

I'm not sure what Lily Pons must have thought of this film. In it she's required to go to Africa as part of an elaborate con game to fool millionaire Edward Everett Horton into thinking he's captured a bird girl who has something like a five octave range. Then it becomes a struggle between Horton and opera impresario Eduardo Ciannelli for her musical services. Jack Oakie is press agent con man who fools Horton who really is quite a dunce in this film.

It all gets more silly than funny. Hitting A New High did get an Oscar nomination for music scoring.

I'm sure that Pons though she does display a bit of a flair for comedy here was grateful her Hollywood contract was at an end.

HITTING A NEW HIGH puts the spotlight on LILY PONS and her coloratura soprano vocal range, but unfortunately has a plot that is beyond silly. For publicity purposes, JACK OAKIE and EDWARD EVERETT HORTON decide to perpetuate the idea that she was discovered in the African jungle, a bird girl who happens to have a gorgeous singing voice. Horton puts her under the tutelage of a voice teacher so that he can put her on display as his own singing discovery. From that point on, the plot is saddled with even more improbabilities until finally everyone is happy that Miss Pons has been anyone's discovery, so impressive is her singing voice.

Indeed, RKO made sure that she gets to sing several arias (superbly), trilling her way through difficult arias with great ease and charm. But she was never the most photogenic of singers and no amount of close-ups are able to disguise the fact that she is not your typical Hollywood glamor girl. However, despite the banality of the plot, she seems a good sport to play the "bird girl" with such gusto.

For plot purposes, most of the spotlight is on JACK OAKIE, EDWARD EVERETT HORTON and ERIC BLORE--which turns out to be a good thing when it comes to comic relief. Horton and Blore are particularly effective in their zany roles, both capable of injecting some good laughs into the script.

Summing up: Pleasant trifle does indicate that Miss Pons had one of the best soprano voices at the Met (for some thirty years), even if she was not quite star quality on the screen.

This is an often very funny movie, with something of a hole in the middle of it.

Lily Pons, though a fine singer and an attractive woman - who didn't photograph well, at least in this picture - did not have the charisma to carry off a movie. If you compare her to Jeannette MacDonald or Grace Moore, her equivalents at MGM and Columbia, you will see what I mean. She isn't helped by the fact that she is given an unsympathetic role. Rather than another replay of the singer who dreams of singing opera and disdains popular music, this movie would have been much better if she had been presented as a singer who wanted to do both, and fight against the prejudice that held that opera singers shouldn't do popular music. The best numbers in this movie are when she does pop music - especially "Hitting a new high" - so her disdain for them doesn't make her attractive to the audience. The staging of the Mad Scene from Lucia di Lammermoor is downright bad, and would have confirmed opera-haters' views of why opera wasn't interesting. She just walks around with her arms extended gazing up at the sky. You would have NO idea what the number, a very dramatic one, is actually about from watching her performance of it in this movie.

What makes this a fun movie is the character parts - Jack Oakie, Edward Everett Horton, and Eric Blore - who are given really first-class material and a LOT of screen time, with which they do a really first-class job. Oakie and Horton come off as a quirky couple, with Horton as the straight man and Oakie as the guy with all the jokes. With many 1930s musicals you want to delete the dialogue scenes and just focus on the musical numbers. Here, frankly, it would be tempting to eliminate most of the musical numbers and the romantic scenes (which are few) and focus on the scenes with Oakie, Horton, and Blore.

Though I would save the scene in "Africa" where Pons appears in a lagoon singing to exotic birds. It's the most charming number in the movie, and nicely done.

What can one say about a picture where Lily Pons sits up a tree making bird noises while Edward Everett Horton tries to get her down by saying "Pretty Polly"? Well, it certainly didn't appeal to audiences back in 1937, because sources indicate that this picture proved a financial bust and put an end to RKO's attempts to turn Miss Pons into a movie star. I enjoyed it though, and maybe some of the bizarre humour in "Hitting a New High" might go down better today. Of course the plot machinations are contrived and weak, but is there anyone who really watches this kind of movie for the plot? Raoul Walsh keeps things moving along at a brisk clip, and Lily Pons, while not the most charismatic of film personalities, is reasonably appealing as Ooga Hunga the "bird girl". She also gives a pretty unforgettable rendition of Saint-Saens La Rossignol during the proceedings as well, but purists may not approve. However, the film is really stolen by Edward Everett Horton and Eric Blore, a not uncommon occurrence at RKO around this time, and for me they give this film most of the entertainment value it has today.

If we substituted similar-looking Eleanor Powell for Lily Pons, this could be an Astaire movie, the look and cast are so familiar. I would say, though, you really have to like opera to sit through so much of it in quite static staging in this movie. The way she used her voice in Africa to sound like a bird was for me the best part and quite remarkable as was the bird on her finger to whom she sang. (The animal wranglers had some real challenges in this production and did an excellent job.)

I was glad to hear the famous opera star but her speaking voice was unpleasant and her persona uninteresting. And it had one of those endings that was so boring I felt they needed a certain number of minutes and then concluded the movie. So on the whole I'd say it's one to watch if you have time to kill and aren't too choosy. I'm giving this an extra star for the music and animals--the parrot in the final scene was far more interesting than what happened to the characters. It isn't particularly witty or engaging or entertaining or...anything. Whatever originality it had vanished after the African adventure. It's just kind of there and most if it might be best enjoyed by using it as background music while you did something else.