The New Pictures

The Great Caruso (M-G-M), a quasi-biography of the late great tenor, is weak on facts and weaker as fiction, but as a well-recorded pops concert featuring the impressive voice of Mario Lanza (TIME, March 19), it is a tidy package of entertainment that music lovers can enjoy with their eyes shut.

The plot, which barely holds its franchise in the time left by 27 songs and operatic excerpts, draws on Caruso's life for whatever can feed the Hollywood formula, ignores or twists whatever does not. Thus it skips a longtime love affair that gave the real Caruso two illegitimate children, skimps on colorful details of his florid personality, compresses his tragic physical decline and death (of peritonitis, in Naples) into a sudden collapse on the stage of Manhattan's Met.

What remains is the Technicolored rags-to-riches story of a great opera star who, after his triumphs all over Europe, supposedly had to put up with a cool reception at the Met and the social snobbishness of the man (Carl Benton Reid) who was both its chief patron and the father of the girl (Ann Blyth) he loved. It is a story full of the kind of quaint dialect which, designed to sound like a literal English translation of Italian, sounds only like pure Ruritanian.

Even the singing is occasionally marred by poor dubbing--a surprising lapse in MGM's usual technical proficiency--and by pointless attempts to make Tenor Lanza look effortless while performing arias that ordinarily require opera singers to flex every muscle. But Lanza is in fine voice, and with such artists as the Met's Soprano Dorothy Kirsten and Mezzo-Soprano Blanche Thebom, he sings varied favorites by 13 composers from Verdi to Victor Herbert. On the program: La Donna E Mobile and the Quartet from Rigoletto; Vesti la Giubba from I Pagliacci; the Sextette from Lucia De Lammermoor.

Five (Arch Oboler; Columbia) tries to imagine what life would be like for the last five survivors of a worldwide atomic catastrophe.* Life, it seems, would be pretty dull. A couple of survivors die off, the third proves a villain who gets his just deserts, the fourth is a girl (Susan Douglas) who cannot afford the gesture of telling the fifth (William Phipps) that she wouldn't marry him if he were the last man on earth.

The picture supposes that the world has been hit by vast clouds of atomic dust that reduce the population to skeletons while leaving almost everything else strangely untouched. Late in the movie, this makes for some well-shot, eerie scenes as the heroine revisits the ghost city askew in the grotesque attitudes of suddenly interrupted life.

But most of Five, filmed on a shoestring by Producer-Scripter-Director Arch Oboler, takes place in Oboler's own modernistic eyrie in California's Santa Monica mountains, where the survivors happen to gather from as far away as Mt. Everest and the Empire State Building. Five's intriguing premise, which sorely lacks either dialogue by George Bernard Shaw or the imagination of H. G. Wells, leaves Radio-writer Arch Oboler with his limitations showing.

*A combination of types which set Manhattan's Daily Worker to sputtering: "Among the five survivors, not one is an industrial worker, serving not only to gloss over the workers' fight against the atomic bomb, but denying the very existence of the working class."

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