Cast:
Grace Moore (Mary Barrett), Tullio Carminati (Giulio Monteverdi), Lyle Talbot (Bill Houston), Mona Barrie (Lally), Jessie Ralph (Angelina), Luis Alberni (Giovanni), Andrés de Segurola (Galuppi), and Nydia Westman (Muriel) Directed by Victor Schertzinger.
Review:
Admittedly, you sometimes have to pull a name out of a hat when it comes to looking for directors to spotlight for the first time. Sometimes you have to take stock and realize that some folks can fall by the wayside in the annals of time. Did you know that Victor Schertzinger was an Academy Award nominee? In the first ten years of the ceremony, roughly over two dozen people were considered for the award for Best Director combined, and Schertzinger was one of them, nominated in an brief time with just two other nominees for 1934. So yes, I would say losing to Frank Capra while W. S. Van Dyke is your other competition is possible grounds for a spotlight for a director dead for eight decades. But a man from Mahanoy City, Pennsylvania surely has more to note than something as weird as awards. For one thing, he was a violinist in his childhood, performing with orchestras and bands while attending Brown University and the University of Brussels before moving onto songwriting by the 1910s. His first venture into film came at the request of Thomas Ince. He, along with Reginald Barker and Raymond B. West, were directing the film Civilization, and Ince commissioned him to compose the orchestra accompaniment for the film. He was then recruited to become a director, starting with The Pinch Hitter (1917), the first of a handful of films with Charles Ray (popular for at time in the silent era as a "young wholesome hick") as star. Schertzinger has been called the first artist to write a musical score for a film. In all, Schertzinger directed films in both the silent and sound eras before his sudden death in 1941 from a heart attack at the age of 53. He had directed over eighty films and composed fifty scores, which included: Something to Sing About (1937), which featured a singing and dancing James Cagney, The Mikado (1939), an adaptation of the Gilbert and Sullivan opera with participation from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Road to Singapore (1940), the first of a string of road films with Bing Crosby, Dorothy Lamour, and Bob Hope (there were seven in the next two decades, with Schertzinger directing the first two).
The film was based on an unproduced play developed by Charles Beaahan and Dorothy Speare, while James Gow, S.K. Lauren, and Edmund H. North helped write the screenplay. At the helm as star for this film was certainly a distinctly interesting choice: an operatic soprano nicknamed the "Tennessee Nightingale". She had a couple of film credits to her name at the turn of the 1930s, which included a debut with Irving Thalberg as producer in A Lady's Morals (1930). Moore went to Broadway first in 1920 before making her debut in opera in 1928, where she spent many seasons at the Metropolitan Opera singing countless operas (most notably Louise). She dabbled in film, appearing in eight of them from 1930 to 1939, but opera is generally her most known forte, aside from performances in support of the Allied Forces during World War II. Moore died in 1947 at the age of 48 in a plane crash. Her performance is manageable, one that seems best when performing opera or with songs (such as the title song, as written by the director), while the attempts at romance teeter a bit in credibility. You can see how this ended up being her most noted film as an actress: it hones appeal in her singing with a bit of naturalistic acting that lives and dies on the material. Carminati (an Italian film actor busy since the silent era) fares better, because his wry steely sensibility seems far more interesting as a contrast that doesn't seem implausible. Of course, since it is a film that has to eventually chug its way through misunderstandings, it can only maneuver itself so far with familiar beats. It may interest you to know that Talbot was a member of the first board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild in 1933, with his involvement in the labor union apparently affecting his career when it came to getting leading roles by the mid 1930s. He makes a decent straight man in support, never without edge but not looking to roll their eyes at such oddness. The movie is more of a curiosity with its opera and singing elements than any real romantic push, and it should be mentioned that the film was more of a hit with getting bookings in bigger theaters than with the rural circuit (a positive for Columbia, which saw two of its films vie for awards in the year that was the one for It Happened One Night). It proves involving with the singing done by Moore, which doesn't seem stilted to my ears. The film received six nominations for the Academy Awards, which ranged from its director to its star to its technical production, which resulted in wins for its music scoring and its sound recording alongside a technical award for Columbia Pictures due to its "Vertical Cut Disc Method". As a whole, the movie is a somewhat serviceable romance movie, achieving more interest with its dabbling in opera and singing more than the slowly developing game of insult-and-romance. Average, but a general winner for the folks that needed it most with Moore and Schertzinger to make it a useful curiosity for those interested.
Overall, I give it 7 out of 10 stars.
