by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The film was Interrupted Melody, a 1955 MGM biopic of opera star Marjorie Lawrence
starring Eleanor Parker as Lawrence with Glenn Ford as her husband, Dr. Thomas
King. Ford, one of the nastier egomaniacs in Hollywood history (read the
chapter on the making of the film A Pocketful of Miracles in Frank Capra’s autobiography The Name
Above the Title for a particularly nasty
and venomous portrait of him), not only insisted that he get top billing (for a
biopic about a woman!) but pulled all the typical upstaging tricks on Parker,
including walking away from her on screen so she had to turn her back to the
camera to keep up with him. He’s also simply not an appealing screen presence
and one can’t help but think this film would have been better with a more disciplined
and charismatic leading man. Marjorie Lawrence was never an operatic superstar
but the reason she wasn’t — at the height of her career she was stricken by
polio and ended up in a wheelchair — made her story irresistible for MGM
producer Jack Cummings, who assigned it to director Curtis Bernhardt (a German
expat who brought at least a bit of Continental sophistication to what
otherwise might have been a rather dreary tear-jerker) and writers William
Ludwig and Sonya Levien, based on Lawrence’s own memoir. When the film opens,
Marjorie Lawrence is a spirited tomboy growing up on a sheep farm in
Winchelsea, Australia (I’d forgotten Marjorie Lawrence was Australian, but that
adds her to the list of Nellie Melba, Florence Austral and Joan Sutherland as
major divas from Australia — plus
Kiri te Kanawa from New Zealand if you want to cover all of “Down Under”) who’s
secretly entered a singing contest whose first prize is a scholarship to study
voice in Paris. When she sneaks out of the family farmhouse to go to the
contest, she’s overcome with stage fright but she manages to sneak out there
(after first removing her corset) and wins the contest with her rendition of “O
don fatale” from Verdi’s Don Carlos.
(Some of the commentators on imdb.com have marveled at the sheer range of the
movie Lawrence’s repertoire, ranging from mezzo arias like “O don fatale” and
Musetta’s waltz to the hochdramatische Sopran repertoire of Wagner, the real Lawrence’s specialty
— she also recorded the final scene from Richard Strauss’s Salome, in French, but Salome was probably still Verboten to the Production Code people and also would have
likely entailed royalties to Strauss’s estate, since it was still under
copyright in 1955 — though MGM probably did have to pay royalties to Puccini’s publishers and
heirs for the bits of La Bohème.)
She ends up living a hand-to-mouth existence in Paris as she tries to get the
attention of voice teacher Mme. Gilly (Ann Codee), who finally takes her on as
a pupil after Lawrence hears one of her other students (played by Eleanor
Parker’s voice double, Eileen Farrell) miss the high note at the end of “Vissi
d’arte” from Tosca (the only
Puccini role in the real Lawrence’s repertoire, by the way) and she sings it
from outside, holding it way
longer than any singer in a complete production would dare. Mme. Gilly takes
Lawrence as a student and arranges for her to make her professional debut as
Musetta in Monte Carlo when another singer drops out of the production — “They
need a singer, and you need a job!” she says. Just after her sensationally successful
debut Lawrence meets and instantly falls in love with Thomas King (Glenn Ford),
a U.S. doctor who’s just on his way back home from a year of study at the
Sorbonne (so how did he end up in Monte Carlo?), though she doesn’t run into
him again until she’s already a major star and is about to make her debut at
the Met in Götterdämmerung.
There’s a nice scene showing her independence in which she insists on actually riding a horse into the flames during the Immolation Scene
instead of just walking it in as the production’s prissy director, Leopold
Sachse (listed as playing himself!), insists — “I’ve been riding horses since I
was five!” she declaims — and of course she’s a sensational success, only she
breaks the engagement with a European count (Steven Bekassy) her brother and
manager, Cyril Lawrence (Roger Moore — off the top of my head I can’t think of
another movie about opera featuring an actor who played James Bond!), arranged
for her and marries the doctor instead even though he won’t take money from her
(either directly or through the referrals her celebrity and contacts among the
1 percent could get him).
She’s offered the chance to open the Met season in Tristan
und Isolde but only if she takes the role
on tour in South America first — and at the first rehearsal she misses two high
notes in the “Liebestod” and collapses. She’s diagnosed with polio by the South
American doctors and her husband comes to get her, then moves her back to his
native Florida in hopes a program of warm beach-water baths, massages and
exercises will restore her ability to walk. He gets the upper part of her body
to work but she still can’t move her legs, and he puts her through a course of
tough love — including, in one gratuitously cruel scene, putting on one of her
records and daring her, if she doesn’t want to listen to it, to make her way to
the phonograph and turn it off herself. (I did note that Glenn Ford did the range-of-motion
exercise on Eleanor Parker correctly, placing his hand above her knee as he bent her leg with his other hand. I
was taught that the hand needs to be either just above or just below the knee,
never actually on it, as the
actor doing ROM’s in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her did it.) Eventually Lawrence regains her voice but
not her confidence — she is once again overcome by stage fright when she’s
booked to appear with the Florida Philharmonic — only she gets her mojo back
through a curious deus ex machina:
World War II. She’s persuaded by her husband’s colleague and friend, Dr. Ed
Ryson (Peter Leeds), to sing at army hospitals, and when she protests that
she’s in a wheelchair she’s told that most of her audience will be, too.
Accordingly she turns up in hospital wards, combat zones and on a ship, belting
out “Over the Rainbow” (Eileen Farrell’s rendition wasn’t going to keep Judy
Garland awake nights worrying about the competition, but it’s quite good —
among Farrell’s qualifications for the job of Lawrence’s voice double here was
her ability to sing pop songs idiomatically instead of sounding like an opera
singer “slumming”), “Anchors Aweigh,” the “Caisson Song,” a beautifully moving
rendition of “Annie Laurie” and — inevitably, since she’s playing an Australian
— “Waltzing Matilda.” After the war ends the Met books her to perform Isolde at
long last, announcing that they will alter the production to accommodate her
disability — and at the climax of the “Liebestod” she uses the braces she’s
been equipped with by then to stand up for the final bars. The End.
Interrupted
Melody is a quite good opera biopic for the
first half and a shameless tearjerker for the second half (and it wasn’t the only role Eleanor Parker played that year that required
her to use a wheelchair: she did it in The Man with the Golden Arm as well), but it’s a film I’ve always liked mainly
for the authority of the two people essentially sharing the female lead.
Eleanor Parker is excellent as the on-screen Lawrence and Eileen Farrell is
absolutely breathtaking as her voice double, easily encompassing a range of
material few real opera singers would attempt. It’s particularly interesting to
compare her version of “Un bel dì” from Madama Butterfly with the one Grace Moore filmed for her movie One
Night of Love in 1934; Moore sang the aria
gorgeously but didn’t bother to act it — she didn’t do a breathless effect on
the “Chi sarà? Chi sarà?” lines — while Eileen Farrell somewhat overdid the
anticipation at that point but still turned in a performance that was
dramatically effective as well as musically impeccable. Eileen Farrell didn’t
become an operatic superstar — though she had the vocal chops for it — mainly
because she concentrated her career on concerts, radio (back when U.S. radio
still broadcast a fair amount of classical music) and recordings and did few,
if any, staged performances of opera. (She sang in the U.S. premiere of
Cherubini’s Medea in an American
Opera Society concert performance in New York in 1955, but she was overshadowed
in the role by Maria Callas, who sang it in staged productions.) It would be
silly to expect factual accuracy from a Hollywood biopic, so it’s probably
beside the point to mention that while the real Marjorie Lawrence did make a triumphal postwar comeback in Tristan
und Isolde, it was in London (not New York)
and it was an unstaged concert performance (led by Sir Thomas Beecham), not an
actual production. Still, Interrupted Melody is an entertaining film, several cuts above the
usual monstrosities that resulted when classic Hollywood tried its hand at
depicting opera, and the vocal authority of Eileen Farrell on the soundtrack
really “makes” this movie.
