Interrupted Melody

This film was very touching and memorable. The acting was great. The music is beautiful. The real-life drama of overcoming catastrophic personal crisis with courage and determination was touching to watch. It was particularly significant to view with an individual who, while not famous, had to face the overwhelming uphill battle of dealing with the unfortunate personal tragedy of learning to live with the reality of infantile paralysis.

The beauty of this film and the feelings it evoked have stayed with me all these years and it remains one of my favorite movies of all time. Certainly they don't make films like this today because not many 12 year-old boys or girls would attend. Thank goodness it is available on video to those of us who still recognize good cinema.


INTERRUPTED QUALITY   December 22, 2001
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

This movie is the outstanding, true story of one of Opera's finest stars of the 20th Century, Australian Marjorie Lawrence, played by actress Eleanor Parker. Along with Glenn Ford and a very young Roger Moore, the acting is also superb.

However, MGM/Turner Home Video should be slapped on the hand for a very poor sound transfer. After all, the movie is full of Lawrence's music, both opera and popular songs of the era. Yes, the sound track is in stereo, but MGM/Turner didn't reproduce it with dolby digital, even though the picture was digitally transfered. Just about every time throughout the movie when she sings, especially when she hits those beautiful high notes, the sound crackles like an old, scratched 78RPM record. Come on, MGM/Turner! There's no excuse for this. If you're going to take the time to digitally transfer the picture, you've got to do the audio justice. This should have been a no brainer! Hopefully, this will be corrected on future video issues. Or, please give this movie what it really deserves--a full make over on to DVD.

However, the poor sound reproduction shouldn't keep one from purchasing the video. The story is so compelling and powerful, it makes a nice addition to any video library.

Five stars for the story and acting. But one star for the audio quality. Average it out.


Best opera movie   May 6, 2000
Thomas F. Dillingham (Columbia, Missouri USA)
13 out of 13 found this review helpful

I was 14 when this movie opened and I saw it at least five times (but I have never in my life worn a baseball cap backward, so I guess I have not really contradicted the previous reviewer). I repeated because the Liebestod (as sung by Eileen Farrell, though I did not know that until much later) was one of the greatest musical experiences of my life--then and since, though I had been a devout opera fan before that movie and have been a serious Wagnerian ever since. The movie somewhat romanticized Marjorie Lawrence's life, but Eleanor Parker and Glenn Ford, who played her husband, built a credible dramatic picture of the calamity of serious physical illness striking a great artist. Lawrence did sing Isolde at the Met as her last performance there--whether she rose to fall across Tristan's body must be for some other historian to tell--I certainly wasn't there. But the movie inspires both admiration and creative enthusiasm in anyone who can respond at all to great music and the great determination it requires to perform it well.