NR | 1h 46m | Drama, Biopic | 1955
Director Curtis Bernhardt’s film fictionalizes the real-life heroism of Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence, an intrepid interpreter of Richard Wagner’s operas.
Australian farmgirl Lawrence (Eleanor Parker) starts her career with a bang, winning operatic vocal competitions and a ticket to a musical scholarship in France. There, under the tutelage of legendary operatic singer-tutor Cécile Gilly, she masters the art of concert singing. Then, as she rises up the ladder of fame and fortune, including a starring role at the Metropolitan Opera, she falls for an American, Dr. Thomas King (Glenn Ford). She also gets her brother Cyril (Roger Moore) to be her tour manager.
Lawrence’s fairy-tale run may sound like an enchanted melody, but it’s about to be interrupted. Part of her longs to be not just King’s wife, but a devoted mother, too. As a physician, King likes “bringing new babies into the world.” Another part of her longs to be a star, rushing from back-to-back rehearsals to season-long, sell-out international tours. That puts her on a collision course with King, now her husband, who enjoys caring for his grateful patients, as much as she does singing for her adoring audiences.
Meanwhile, another warring self unravels. She loses the use of her legs to polio. Bound to a wheelchair and brimming with self-loathing, she turns in on herself in anguish; she also lashes out in anger, with King on the receiving end.
To King, she’s no trophy wife. He loves her deeply. He isn’t about to let polio cripple her career or maroon their marriage. When specialist doctors give up, he doubles down, cheering and cajoling her through traumatic therapy. She pictures polio as the final curtain on her dreams, but he’s convinced that she can pull off an encore.
Never mind Parker’s throaty American and Moore’s smooth aristocratic British accent, or that their classy elegance makes them unconvincing as siblings who grew up on a farm in Australia. There’s too little of Australia in the screenplay, anyway. Parker shines wherever she appears as Lawrence, in Europe or in America.
Parker as Prima Donna
When people praised Parker as a character actress in a movie star’s body, they implied that she was far more than an exquisitely beautiful redhead. Understandably, she considered this role, the last of her three Best Actress Oscar nominations, her favorite. She loved the opera, had a sweet soprano voice, and perfect pitch. She’d also trained for weeks to convincingly sing, not just mime, the nearly two dozen arias on the soundtrack.It may be American soprano Eileen Farrell’s studio-dubbed voice on every track, but it’s Parker, singing for real on the film set, that makes Lawrence’s onscreen breathing and phrasing so believable; it gave Bernhardt the gall to go in for repeated close-ups instead of the safer medium shots preferred for performers who aren’t singers. Sportingly, Farrell cameos as Gilly’s student, struggling to hit an awkwardly high note. Academy of Vienna alumnus, conductor, and 1940s’ music director for Voice of America, Walter Ducloux, conducted all the operatic recordings.
When polio strikes, it’s not uncommon for it to paralyze the legs. So, Bernhardt begins by showing a young Lawrence leap onto her horse to catch a train, as she rushes to an operatic competition. The camera shows her running, then the horse’s graceful legs double as her own. As she nears the railway platform she springs back down, on her legs again, as she boards the train.
That motif of a galloping horse returns more meaningfully, again, articulating Lawrence’s fiery spirit. Overruling the opera director’s reservations, she becomes the first soprano at the Metropolitan, to ride, rather than walk, her horse as Brünnhilde, into the immolation flames of “Twilight of the Gods” (“Götterdämmerung,”) the last of Wagner’s four epic operas, and part of the majestic “The Ring of the Nibelung” (“Der Ring des Nibelungen.”)
What appears to drive Lawrence’s zest? Her belief that love is more than mere marriage and life, and more than mere living. The beauty of music, too, demands melody, much more than holding the metaphorical note. After a breathtaking rendition of “Habanera” from Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” she gasps to Gilly about how wonderful it is to “sing a melody again, after a … year of … endless, interminable scales.”
