Word: pinza
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Imperium (Ezio Pinza & Fran Warren; Victor, 2 sides LP). Miss Warren and songs (some of them pretty featherweight) are badly outclassed by Operatic Heavyweight Pinza...
Strictly Dishonorable (MGM) shows how persistent Hollywood can be. The picture is the second movie version of Preston Sturges' 1929 Broadway hit; it is also MGM's second attempt to capture Ezio (South Pacific) Pinza's middle-aged sex appeal on film...
This adaptation does tolerably well by Actor Pinza but it makes hash of Playwright Sturges' comedy. The original play told a simple, incongruously funny story about a young and fairly innocent Southern girl who tries to seduce a rakish Italian opera star; he turns out to be such a sentimentalist that he marries her. The film all but smothers the idea with plot complications, cooking up elaborate reasons for the marriage-in name only-to come first, so that the pair can pursue their dalliance and yet stay strictly honorable under the technical rules of the cinema code. Irrelevantly...
Janet Leigh is engaging as the Southern belle who takes up with a courtly rake in a Manhattan speakeasy. Actor Pinza, 59, whose close-up profile occasionally resembles Douglas Mac Arthur's, carries off his role with vigorous charm, and takes full advantage of his cues for a few operatic bits (the best: Song of the Golden Calf, from Faust), and two old popular tunes (I'll See You in My Dreams, Everything I Have Is Yours). If his style is a shade heavy for deft comedy, it is certainly no heavier than the script...
...first attempt: Mr. Imperium, which has been put into cold storage in the hope that the new film will get Pinza off to a better start...