Serenata

What a marvelous musical drama this is, and grateful to TCM for putting it on their schedules. This is a story of how a vineyard worker rises to be an opera star, but falls victim to the emotional torture of a femme fatale which sends him into apparent oblivion. Then he meets a Mexican beauty and so can she raise him from the ashes?

What drama and what performances!

The voice of Mario Lanza is the greatest in history, and his rendition of "Nessum Dorma" and "Ave Marie" are show stoppers. Full of heart, passion and soul. There is just enough Opera in this film to keep everyone happy, like or loathe it.

The smoldering and intense beauty and performance of Sara Montrel, begs the question, who can surpass her as the most charismatic female on screen in the last 50 years?

Joan Fontaine is a suitably wicked witch and Vincent Price's mere raising of an eyebrow tell's a tale all by itself.

This is a classic movie beautifully filmed and totally underrated by the IMDb voters. Soap from beginning to end, and all the major performers vie to out drama queen each other, even to the final climactic scene.

Bravo!

8/10.

This was the fourth of just 7 starring vehicles for turbulent Italian tenor Mario Lanza; although not his best or most popular (that remains 1951's THE GREAT CARUSO), Anthony Mann was easily the best director he ever had. It was actually Lanza's first film in 4 years, a period marked by the debacle of THE STUDENT PRINCE (1954) where director Curtis Bernhardt decided he had had enough of the star's tantrums, had him summarily fired and replaced by Edmund Purdom (who mimed to Lanza's own singing)!

Anyway, the screenplay here is so predictable that it seems written on autopilot and one is hard-pressed to believe that it was based on a novel penned by hard-boiled noir writer James M. Cain; it comes as no surprise, then, to learn that the film version was heavily bowdlerized! Incidentally, Cain was also behind similar musical soap opera stuff like WHEN TOMORROW COMES (1939) and its remake INTERLUDE (1957) that had equally boasted the services of notable directors (John M. Stahl and Douglas Sirk, respectively) for their transition to the screen! On a personal note, it is unfortunate that, while respected Maltese character actor Joseph Calleia got to work with two of Hollywood's most talented film-makers of that time within the same year, it was only on their least interesting movies: this and Nicholas Ray's HOT BLOOD!; what is even worse is that another Maltese who goes by the name of Joseph Calleia is currently enjoying worldwide fame as a tenor himself - thus endangering his earlier namesake (who died back in 1975)'s own fledgling reputation on his home ground!

The supporting cast of SERENADE is quite good actually: Joan Fontaine (she has the right looks for the role of the bitchy society dame who entraps Lanza in her tangled web but there is next to no chemistry between them!), Sarita Montiel (Mann's wife at the time, she has the role of Lanza's beautiful Mexican redeemer), Vincent Price (a breath of fresh air as the witty, artless impresario), Silvio Minciotti (as Lanza's first restaurateur employer), Vince Edwards (as Fontaine's temperamental prize-fighting pet) and Edward Platt (as the director of Lanza's ill-fated stage debut performance of "Othello" – which he hysterically abandons in mid-aria simply because Fontaine has not turned up to see him!). Similarly histrionic moments occur during a thunderstorm in the Mexican plains (almost evoking John Ford's THE QUIET MAN {1952}!) and when a jealous Montiel (incidentally, she has her own jilted lover to contend with!) loses it by bullfighting a mocking Fontaine at a society party that precipitates an unbelievably contrived climactic traffic accident (with an inevitable happy outcome just as Lanza is about to go live on the airwaves)! To counter such melodramatic (if appropriately operatic) outbursts, perhaps the film's best sequence is the simple and moving one in which Lanza and Montiel enter a Mexican church to pray, and it is here that he regains his self-confidence (having spent some time on the skids and then returned to his roots as a field-worker!) by singing Schubert's "Ave Maria".

Apart from the afore-mentioned "Othello", the film also shows Lanza performing a famous aria from Giuseppe Verdi's "Il Trovatore" (incidentally, I have just acquired Renato Castellani's 10½-hour biopic of the famed Italian composer shot in 1982 for Italian TV with Ronald Pickup in the lead!), as well as 2 new songs in English (one of them 'composed' and played on the piano by Vincent Price and the title tune, which is reprised for the finale). Having mentioned the English numbers just now, it is odd given his proud heritage that, when Lanza is about to leave home early on in search of success (managed by his cousin Harry Bellaver), he treats his paisani to a pop tune – and in a foreign tongue, to boot! By the way, this viewing came via a TCM U.K. broadcast of the Warner Bros. production (albeit screened full-frame).

I cannot condone the fact that Mario was substandard in this film. He had been under the restrictions of an MGM ban, before Warners offered him a chance to return to the filmworld. He was naturally nervous (it shows in some of the scenes) as he had not worked for about three years and his voice was taking on a darker hue. Yes, he was a little overweight, but his singing was superb. He could sing anything and did, with complete conviction. His operatic arias in this film are superb and those of us who are lucky enough to have heard the outtakes from the soundtrack will agree that he was coming to terms with the fact that he had to adjust to his voice getting bigger. It was a really awesome instrument. The power was immense, but he could also sing falsetto when required. His "Ave Maria" in this film is one of the most moving I have ever heard. A good effort by him to re-establish himself and his fans will bear me out. To hell with the plot - listen to the voice of the century.

When this one was released I was still dazzled by the sleek beauty of the line of 1956 Lincoln automobiles. So, in the opening sequence, when Joan Fontaine, with her protege, Vince Edwards (playing a hot-headed boxer), in a "long, low, luxurious Lincoln" convertible (top down, of course), stop by the side of a vineyard where Mario Lanza is laboring (quite without any sign of perspiration, by the way...must have been an unseasonably cool day, despite the blazing sunshine!), to ask directions, I was hooked. The fire-engine red Premiere convertible is as lovingly photographed as the stars and it wasn't until Sarita Montiel, playing Mario's true love, Juana, makes her entrance, that I ceased wishing that resplendent automobile would again appear to do justice to the use of Technicolor (oops!), I mean, Warnercolor, in this soap-with-music.

Sarita, though her list of Spanish language films is quite awesome, never enjoyed much of a career in Hollywood films. (We weren't nearly as accepting of non-Anglo leading ladies back then.) She is just gorgeous in this one and her playing as the fiery and passionate (what else?!?) Juana helped Mario convince us that he was a man who could be snatched from the diabolical and devastating ensnarements of Joan Fontaine's spoiled heiress, Kendall Hale. The introduction of her character, when Mario flees in disgrace to Mexico, permits a scenic and worth-the-price-of-admission tour of Mexican locales.

The music is fairly well presented in this one. Not being an opera connoisseur, I am not qualified to comment knowledgeably on Mr. Lanza's renditions of operatic excerpts, but I have always found his tenor voice to be among the most listenable (So many of them just bleat!), and his constant reprising of the title song throughout this movie did not grow tiresome, at least to these ears.

A side note: Mario's father, quite a dear old gentleman, who had remarried, lived down the street in the Huntington Palisades section of Pacific Palisades, in southern California, where my family owned a home. I frequently saw Mario's Cadillac parked in his father's driveway, but, alas!, never caught a glimpse of the golden-voiced Mario himself, who was, you may be sure, his father's pride and joy.

I just discovered Mario Lanza and I loved this first film of his that I saw...can't wait to see more. Joan Fontaine and Vincent Price provide excellent supporting roles too! A total class act through and through.