Rediscovering old films

I was all ready for a Christmas weekend just watching films at home. I even had a list. Three films I had read about and caught glimpses of but would finally be able to watch in full all by myself. I said bless technology. It is because of massive advances that films like those are not just available in film festivals or special showings but are now available for everybody, everywhere on their own time.

Songwriter from Apple is an intimate look at the life of one of today’s biggest pop idols, Ed Sheeran. Directed by his cousin Murray, the film follows Sheeran on tour and while at work on his Divide album. That is the one that yielded hit songs like Shape Of You, Galway Girl and Perfect. Can you imagine finding out how he composed those songs?

The other one is the much-talked-about Whitney. Already a Grammy nominee for Best Music Film, this one goes through the life of the pop diva Whitney Houston, who broke more sales records during her career. That means all the scandals and struggles and the tragedy of her death ironically on the eve of the Grammy Awards.

And the third film I was looking forward to watching was Elvis The Searcher from HBO. Directed by Thom Zimmy and featuring interviews with Ann Margret, Steve Allen and others, it is about Presley’s evolution as a man and as a musician. Reviews are excellent and the movie is a nominee for Best Music Documentary at the Critics’ Choice Awards. Must be very good.

The only problem is I did not get to watch any of them. I got derailed. I thought I would channel surf for a while before watching and I came across this interesting film on Turner Classic Movies (TCM). You know TCM, they show really old movies sometimes back from the ’20s which can be really fun to watch.

The picture was Interrupted Melody, which I believe I had already seen in bits and pieces over the years, and it starred Eleanor Parker as the opera singer Marjorie Lawrence who was stricken with polio at the peak of her career and popular leading man Glen Ford as her doctor husband. It was a musical biopic done in the classic glossy MGM style. They also did this for composers like Jerome Kern and Cole Porter and many others.

I knew it was formulaic. Some personal drama, preferably white-washed and solved to happily ever after endings. But Interrupted Melody had more than the usual musical numbers. It had beautifully staged excerpts from famous operas. I remember Mario Lanza in The Great Caruso but female version. And the choices, which must have been the ones Lawrence was famous for, were very good.

Habanera and Seguidilla from Carmen; Un Bel Di from Madama Butterfly; My Heart At Thy Sweet Voice from Samson and Delilah; Il Trovatore, La Boheme, Don Giovanni and others including magnificent excerpts from Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, which in the finale had Lawrence taking a few steps on stage.

Particularly heartwarming, too, was the portion of Lawrence entertaining troops in battle fields during World War II. She had been unable to sing again after she got sick because she was confined to a wheelchair. But why not when most of the boys she was singing to were also on chairs or without arms or legs or blind. I tell you only the hardest of hearts will not be touched as Lawrence sang Over The Rainbow to them.

And Eleanor. She was so beautiful and because she was playing an opera diva, her wardrobe was fantastic. There were too many furs for my taste but the clothes were really impressive. I remember reading her obituary a few years ago which mentioned only her role as the Baroness in the musical The Sound of Music.

I know being in one of the greatest musicals or I should say films ever made, is quite an accomplishment, but after watching Interrupted Melody, I say she was more than that. She was a very good actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for her work in Interrupted Melody.

If you think I was able to get down to Sheeran, Whitney and Elvis after Interrupted Melody, I tell you it did not happen. TCM had Giant scheduled and you know how beautiful Elizabeth Taylor was and Rock Hudson and James Dean…