Word: mgm
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Even the singing is occasionally marred by poor dubbing-a surprising lapse in MGM's usual technical proficiency-and by pointless attempts to make Tenor Lanza look effortless while performing arias that ordinarily require opera singers to flex every muscle. But Lanza is in fine voice, and with such artists as the Met's Soprano Dorothy Kirsten and Mezzo-Soprano Blanche Thebom, he sings varied favorites by 13 composers from Verdi to Victor Herbert. On the program: La Donna E Mobile and the Quartet from Rigoletto; Vesti la Giubba from I Pagliacci; the Sextette from Lucia De Lammermoor...
Father's Little Dividend (MGM) repeats the formula of last year's highly successful Father of the Bride, with the same principals, scripters and director. Unlike most sequels, it should also repeat the original's success...
...Teresa (MGM) is a strange picture, by the usual Hollywood standards. Its hero is an insecure weakling with whom no red-blooded American moviegoer will care to identify himself. Its heavy is that rarely assailed folk heroine, Mom. Its backgrounds (a bombed-out Italian village, a humid Manhattan slum) are as real and painful as a clout on the jaw. Least conventional of all, and the best thing about Teresa, is its heroine, who gives U.S. movies a new kind of personality and performance...
...future of Pier's talent depends on just how skillfully it is handled. MGM, now paying her $1,600 a month plus living expenses, well knows that her unspoiled naturalness is precisely what makes her Pier Angeli. Hence the studio's orders against gilding the lily: no eyebrow plucking, no greasepaint lathering for stills, no hair-dyeing or publicity whirls. Pier's next assignment: the part of a painter who regenerates a swindler (Stewart Granger) in The Light Touch, to be filmed in Tunis and Sicily...
...film lacks the pace and style of a good Broadway show (or of MGM's own On the Town). Its songs & dances serve merely as interludes in the kind of plot that cinemagoers know too well. But within these tired limits, the movie offers some amusing comedy, expert staging of individual numbers, bright lyrics by Alan Jay (Brigadoon) Lerner and, best of all, Fred Astaire who, at 51, has never danced with greater skill or ingenuity...