Interrupted Melody (1955)
Contemporary review by Bosley Crowther for New York TV Times

With the subject of poliomyelitis very much in the news these days and with the public thus extra-mindful of the prevalence and the terrors of the disease, the Music Hall has a timely picture, as well as a tender and moving one, in M-G-M's Interrupted Melody. It opened there yesterday.

For this beautifully made color picture, which is part opera-film, part romance and part inspirational drama, is based on the life of Marjorie Lawrence, the Australian-born opera singer who suffered and overcame polio. And in telling her extraordinary story with candor, simplicity and taste, the studio has got a stirring drama, plus a handsome and melodious one.

Ordinarily, the job of concocting an eventful "biography" for a musical personality that is to be enshrined in his own music on the screen is mainly one of inventing a convenient fictitious plot, into which the musical numbers may be planted like plums in a cake. But no such necessity confronted William Ludwig and Sonya Levien, who prepared the script for this surprisingly frank and faithful extension of the published biography of Miss Lawrence.

For the real story is much more dramatic than any fiction could be, and that is the story Mr. Ludwig and Miss Levien have skillfully revealed. They have followed Miss Lawrence from her singing-contest emergence off an Australian farm through her early operatic training in France and America. Then they have taken her to heights of triumph with the Metropolitan Opera Company and in the sweet toils of love, only to plunge her into the depths of polio suffering and a struggle to regain her will to live and her golden voice.

It is a tale of personal triumph and recovery that is rendered the more eloquent and taut by the ample production of gorgeous music of which the heroine is capable. And the liberal scattering of musical numbers and operatic scenes in the early part of the film makes more dramatic and poignant the stretches of silence that perforce come later on.

In the performance of the early part of the story, Eleanor Parker as Miss Lawrence is beholden to Eileen Farrell, dramatic soprano, who provides her operatic voice. For it is the actual singing of Miss Farrell against Miss Parker's pantomiming of gorgeous scenes from "La Boheme," "Il Trovatore," "Madama Butterfly" and several more that gives eloquence and credibility to the episodic rise of the opera star.

But no one can take from Miss Parker the full credit for the emotional power she brings to the scenes of agonizing self-torment that come later in the film-no one save possibly Glenn Ford, who plays her doctor-husband and is the catalytic force in these scenes. Miss Parker and Mr. Ford together create an electrifying sense of the thing that may happen when the devotion of a man for a woman gives her strength.

The key scene in this evolution, is indeed, a tremendous one, visually and aurally brilliant. In it the paralyzed singer, full of woe and despair provoked by memories, is compelled to drag herself across the floor to knock over a gramophone playing a record of her singing "My Heart at Thy Sweet Voice." The compulsion is one her husband has set up to try to force her to move.

Of course, the climax of the story comes when Miss Lawrence returns to the Metropolitan Opera to sing "Tristan und Isolde."

It is surprising to realize later that this picture is almost wholly performed by the lovely Miss Parker (cum Miss Farrell) and the modest Mr. Ford. Roger Moore as the heroine's brother and manager, Cecil Kellaway as her father and Evelyn Ellis as a maid are about the only other ones with something to do.

It is also surprising to realize later that this film is in CinemaScope. The excellent decor and the apt direction of Curtis Bernhardt detract attention from the odd screen shape and size.

© 6 May 1955, NY TV Times

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