MGM scored a big and rather unexpected hit in 1951 with *The Great Caruso*, their very fictionalized bi op of the great Neapolitan tenor. The success was the result of several features, such as a good mix of recognizable operatic numbers and well-known Neapolitan songs. But the real winning card was Mario Lanza as Caruso. Himself the product of the poor Italian neighborhoods of South Philly, with a build like a stevedore that made him look like "a real guy" to Americans of all classes, Lanza was perfect for making a larger-than-life individual come across on screen bursting with life.
Warner Brothers could therefore be forgiven for trying to do the same thing with the American soprano Grace Moore. Moore had been a success on Broadway for a few years, then had a good if not stellar career at the Met. But it was with movies like *One Night of Love* (1934), *When You're in Love* (1937), and *I'll Take Romance* (1937), along with a lot of appearances on the radio, that Moore entered the general popular consciousness, in part because she was a good singer, in part because she was a fearless, vivacious lady in an era when most opera stars, and even many female movie stars, were still intent on being seen as "ladies." Just as Caruso was famous for (being accused of) pinching a lady in the monkey house at the zoo, Moore, to some of the same extent, crossed the line from the world of classical music to the world of Joe and Jane Smith.
It would therefore have made sense to focus on this aspect of Moore's life and career in a movie about her that was being marketed to a general audience.
For whatever reason, Warner Brothers did not do this.
Instead, this movie focuses on Moore's career up until her arrival at the Met, and does not make any effort to suggest that she was "a wild and crazy lady." (You wouldn't hire Kathryn Grayson for that, anyway.) We get a paint-by-the-numbers story of an almost uninterrupted rise to success, and it isn't interesting.
Nor, as others point out, do we get much of the popular music that was associated with Moore. Her one performance of Ciriciribin gets interrupted before the last high note, which is what Moore had been famous for. (It's even referenced in *Funny Woman*.)
There's also another problem with this movie: it is the story of a woman who put career before love and family, but then doesn't do much with that. For American audiences in 1953, that was still a fairly radical theme, and should have been developed a lot more carefully.
There are all sorts of other, lesser problems. It is very antiseptic. The movie starts off when Moore is a child in Tennessee, but NO ONE speaks with even a hint of a Southern accent. Later, Moore sings with the great Irish tenor John McCormack, but he neither speaks nor sings with an Irish accent.
In general, the film looks cheaply made, the way Warner Brothers' 1952 April in Paris looks cheap after MGM's lavish 1951 An American in Paris. (April in Paris is still a lot better movie than this, though, thanks in large part to better music and Doris Day.)
If you want to learn about Grace Moore, read her entertaining autobiography *You're Only Human Once*. (I think there's also a biography, but I can't remember the title and couldn't find it on amazon.com) This movie makes her seem boring, and that is one adjective that no one who remembered her from when she was popular would associate with her.
