‘The Great Caruso’ or — War of the Warblers?

Enrico Caruso was born in Naples, an Italian city famously located in a Hollywood studio backlot. Ever since he was a bambino Caruso loved to warble: he warbled as his mama died; he warbled his way into women’s hearts and, eventually, he warbled his way out of poverty and to fame and success. “Who is that warbling so magnificently?” people would gasp.

Before too long he’s warbling in warbling houses around the world until he is the latest warbling sensation at The New York Met. Here he meets a young lady smitten by his warbling and soon they are married with a bambino of their own to whom Caruso loves nothing more than to warble at when it should be sleeping.

However, all this warbling (warbling tours, warbling records, etc) soon begins to take its toll on the increasingly wealthy, though increasingly unhealthy, Caruso. “Don’t warble so much!” his friends implore him, “Warbling’ll be the end of you!” Caruso, seeing warbling as the only reason to live, ignores their advice and warbles himself to death.

The end.

If you think the dramatic content of the above is slight to the point of being non-existent that’s because ‘The Great Caruso’ (1951) consists of precisely 97.3% warbling and 2.7% actual plot. So we discover nothing at all about the famous tenor other than he was an Italian who got rich and died from warbling… and that’s it. No depth, no character traits, no substance. Just warbling.

So it’s easy to understand why the film was temporarily withdrawn from release in Italy because it’s so clichéd and shallow it’s like watching a biography of Garibaldi that’s nothing more than 109 minutes of looking at a biscuit.

The only thematic substance appears to be the portrayal of an early pop sensation selling millions of records, but even here the film betrays its main subject as it explicitly functions less as a depiction of Caruso and more as an elaborate Technicolor advert for the career of Mario Lanza.

In that respect the film was a phenomenal triumph as it helped Lanza become even more renowned than his predecessor in terms of album sales, lifestyle and fame. However, it appears it worked a little too well with Lanza also outstripping Caruso in the mortality stakes by dying a full ten years younger than his hero at only 38. I’m sure there’s a lesson to be learned here but quite what that is, outside of the inherently lethal potency of warbling, I’m not quite sure.

Amazingly, the film isn’t a complete chore to endure. It’s colourful enough, and noisy enough, to keep you awake even if Richard Thorpe’s direction is so banal it frequently threatens to send you to sleep, and the costumes are pretty even if they exist in some sort of hazily fluid space/time dimension allowing them to float free of any precise form of temporal fixity.

Apart from that recommended to anyone who loves wall-to-wall warbling because with ‘The Great Caruso’ that’s all you’re gonna get.