Word: aida
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...Manhattan last week, the movies were making opera seductively easy to take. In Sol Hurok's Aida (see CINEMA), the young, beautiful Ethiopian slave girl really was young and beautiful (played by Italy's Sophia Loren, with the singing voice dubbed in); and while the Nile flowed realistically, the extras were dazzlingly costumed and the plot was explained in plain English. Hollywood's Carmen Jones, for its part, transformed the Seville siren into a beautiful American Negro factory girl, took the toreador from the bull into the prize ring and turned the words from Spanish-flavored French...
...Aida (Sol Hurok; I.F.E.). Italian film makers have released eight filmed operas to U.S. art houses in the past seven years. Some of them translated into fairly acceptable films. Aida, with its vivid Ferraniacolor, its monumental settings of ancient Memphis, its popular and dramatic music, its handsome acting cast and its standout (mostly invisible) singing cast, aims at being the grandest assault yet on U.S. eyes and ears...
...Aida, the eyes have it. Lest any of the plot be lost between the music and the Italian language, a discreet narrator explains each scene before it starts. Aida (Sophia Loren) is a slant-eyed, dusky-skinned, full-lipped Ethiopian slave girl in the Egyptian court. She and the stone-faced princess (Lois Maxwell) are in love with a weak-mouthed warrior named Radames (Luciano della Marra). Radames is sent off to trounce the Ethiopians and is rewarded, all against his will, with the hand of the princess. Torn between love and guilt, he slips Aida a top-secret battle...
...Stignani and Giuseppe Campora (with supporting singers from La Scala and the Rome Opera). He has had his visible actors synchronize their lips and slow-motion movements with the music. Unfortunately, his $3,000,000 budget apparently made no allowances for up-to-date recording equipment. Too often Aida rasps and burbles as though it were being played on a windup phonograph with a rusty needle-and another low blow is dealt to grand opera...
...Eden, by Jan Meyerowitz (TIME, Jan. 30, 1950), based on the 1947 play by Dorothy Gardner. The German-born composer chose an American subject, the tragic, frustrated life of New England Poetess Emily Dickinson, but gave the frail story a pretentious treatment that would have been better suited to Aida or a Greek tragedy...