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Before Him All Rome Trembled

(Minerva; Superfilm) is an Italian-made movie which juxtaposes the tyrannies and passions of Puccini's opera, La Tosca, and those of the Nazi domination of Rome. The story: a famous tenor hides a Polish Jew and a wounded British agent from the SS. His sweetheart [Anna Magnani], a famous soprano, misunderstanding his secretiveness, inadvertently betrays him through her jealousy. While the SS closes in, the Italian lovers sonorously sweat out La Tosca's similar story on the stage of Rome's Royal Opera House.

This is a florid--but attractive--idea.

The overblown eloquence of gesture and voice in tragic opera and the grim melo-naturalism of a modern police state are shrewdly used to enhance each other. The opera house serves, too, as a huge, machine-like symbol of a nation. Opera lovers will dote on the Puccini sound track, but moviegoers who have no special affection for opera are likely to find the protracted, underlighted operatic sequences dull. There is, however, some good fierce melodrama which almost anyone can enjoy.

There is also the magnificent Anna Magnani (pronounced mon-yon-ee), who is soon, for better or worse, to come to Hollywood. Signora Magnani's style of beauty is not quite standard Hollywood; when she appeared in Open City, the reviewer for Variety described her as plain. Her acting style, too, is Mediterranean in its richness. But in her own vivid way--and in her knowledge of how to project her personality on the screen (this is only her second movie)--she is one of the most impressive women since Garbo. Lacking Garbo's peculiar, dreamlike power to enchant, she has in great abundance an asset Garbo never had: earthy sexuality.

The Fabulous Dorseys (Charles R. Rogers; United Artists), a not so fabulously good movie, is another in the biographical series on U.S. musicmakers (Till the Clouds Roll By, Night & Day, The Jolson Story, etc.). As the Dorsey parents, Sara Allgood and Arthur Shields turn empty roles into sincere performances, and brothers Jimmy and Tommy manage to impersonate themselves without noticeable strain. But there is no mention of the expensive Frank Sinatra, who once sang for Tommy (1939-42). And the famed Dorsey feud, which absorbs a good deal of the story, finally becomes as tedious to sit in on as any other family quarrel. Moreover, the picture is not as distinguished musically as might be expected. One thing the show does have, which most such movies lack: a feeling for the raffish professionalism of commercial jazzmen. Sample: Helen O'Connell's acid, sardonic singing of Green Eyes.

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