NR | 1h 49min | Drama | 1951
Director Richard Thorpe’s fictionalized story of Italian operatic tenor Enrico Caruso draws on a sympathetic biography by Caruso’s wife, Dorothy. Charismatic tenor-actor Mario Lanza brings the power, presence, and passion of Caruso’s legendary voice to life on screen.
Gifted but lowly singer Caruso (Lanza) falls for pretty Musetta Barretto (Yvette Duguay). But her father, Mr. Barretto (Nestor Paiva), who runs a flour mill, won’t bless their wedding unless Caruso abandons singing at diners and comes into the family business. Caruso agrees and begins life as a flour merchant, but his beloved singing catches up with him. Fed up, Mr. Barretto marries Musetta off to someone else.
With ex-tenor Alfredo Brazzi (Ludwig Donath) for manager, Caruso embraces the world of opera. He brings life to cafes and street corners with his music. As his fame and fortune spreads, he serenades audiences in opera halls worldwide. In America, he befriends soprano Louise Heggar (Dorothy Kirsten), and falls for Dorothy Benjamin (Ann Blyth), daughter of Park Benjamin (Carl Benton Reid), a patron of The Metropolitan Opera.
Mocked as an “Italian peasant” unfit for the privileged perch of the opera by opera aficionados, the temperamental Caruso dislikes America. Dorothy explains that America is a big country with a big heart. Challenges arise to being with the woman he wants to marry and the life they’ve planned together.
Lanza’s size strikes you first, even before his voice. No taller than 5 feet and 8 inches, his barrel-like chest makes one feel like there are two, maybe three, men singing on stage. At his peak, his vocal range crossed nearly two and a half octaves from low A to D, just above high C. That he was born in 1921, the very year that Caruso died, only added to the myth that he was the true heir to Caruso’s legacy.
Of, For, and By the People
Thorpe shows how Caruso wouldn’t have been half the celebrity he became if he hadn’t stayed in America. He may have started out on the big stage at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, London, but he truly made it when he arrived and stayed for nearly 20 years at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and married an American.
On-screen, it’s Dorothy who persuades Caruso to ignore the “Diamond Horseshoe” of critics with their sharp pencils and sharper tongues, and to sing instead for the American public, ordinary music lovers in the galleries. Slowly, America learns to love Caruso. And he loves America back, slipping in the word “America” while christening his and Dorothy’s baby daughter with his most beloved names.
Lanza, who’d made his name in film rather than in the opera, brings that awareness of the cinema to his role as Caruso, juggling his beloved singing with the less beloved “business of singing.”
Musical Magic
Thorpe and Lanza create several magical moments.When audience members are left standing outside an opera hall because they can’t get in, a departing Caruso stops, stands up in a horse carriage, and does an encore just for them. There are other moments: Watch Caruso’s first accidental meeting with Dorothy. Watch him enthrall with an impromptu aria at a diner, while still a flour merchant—his steady head, throwing note above note, a flour-splattered shirt on his heaving chest, an apron around his waist, and a bandana around his neck.
When Mr. Barretto denounces Caruso’s singing for pennies at diners, the tenor retorts that pennies may be insignificant in a rich man’s house, but singing “is important everywhere.” He continues: “It makes people feel good inside. It takes away the ugliness, the sadness and,” as he taps his chest, “it fills the empty place here. That too is something, ... isn’t it?”
Thorpe didn’t want his film to be factual. It isn’t. He wanted it to be entertaining. It is. But the film, and Lanza’s Caruso, proved to be a little more. It inspired a few boys growing up to be singers at the time: José Carreras, Plácido Domingo, and Luciano Pavarotti.
