The Medium

This film certainly did not lack for admirers in its own day.It took the Cannes Award for best lyrical drama(lyrical is not exactly the best word to describe what is going on)and received BAFTA and Oscar nominations.It was a conversation piece for years after."Were you ever able to see it?" and later,"Whatever happened to Marie Powers?","Wasn't that Leo Coleman flitting through the Fellini movie?" And ,sorrowfully , it was. For this film brought together three dynamic performers, who had no where better to go cinematically. Marie Powers ,an expatriate American married to a respected but uninfluential Italian opera conductor,had a reputation as a Wagnerian interpreter among Italians who preferred Germanic opera. I have never been able to find a recording from her Italian heyday in the USA.Maybe this is not such a loss. Ms.Powers must be seen to be believed ,and this film offers the only opportunity that either the majority of her contemporaries or all of posterity has to do so.In the very late fifties or early sixties,this reviewer wandered into a lower New York Church and found he had accidentally caught the unviewable Powers live.She was playing Noah's Wife and doing it to the hilt.She could handle religious folk comedy as lightly as she had swept us along the road to damnation with Madame Flora and the hapless Romany boy,Toby.And there were perhaps two hundred locals in the audience, to whom she was giving all that the role could take.I have seen Maria Callas live and Licia Albanese.There is no question Powers stands in that world class of great singer actresses. How many such are there in any century? The two youthful co-stars give equally impressive and perfectly integrated performances.With Powers it is our loss that there simply never are enough good dramatic roles for powerhouse actresses who first come on at age fifty. The young people had different problems.Both reached the apogee of their unforgettable talents at ages fifteen and twenty-eight in their first major roles.Leo Coleman has to be seen to believed,particularly as he plays a mute to a pair of hyper-dramatic women leads.Their five minute ensemble,"Why weeps my child unborn?"must have had Val Lewton gnashing his teeth that he hadn't thought of it first.For this is great story telling as well as compelling music.In fact the script is so good I can hear some disgruntled Gothic fan complaining ,"Why did they want to slow it down with all the singing?" Composer-writer-director-photographer Menotti on this occasion assumed the Orson Welles persona very credibly.To my knowledge it would be nearly thirty years before he tried anything as ambitious a second time,a haunting televised version of his script "Vanessa " during the late seventies.But that's quite all right.It is what the last Romantics are about.

A lot has been written about the opera, but not enough in my opinion of the film itself and how much of a masterpiece it is. Even without the music it would have been good, and there are three idiosyncratic films made in the 1950's, and two of them were the only films that the director made. Charles Laughton's ' The Night of the Hunter ' and ' The Medium ' are the two. The third is ' Anatahan ' made by Josef von Sternberg and this, his last film is totally different from the Marlene Dietrich vehicles he is noted for. What makes these three so special ? The fact I think that total originality of the imagination comes to the fore and that imagination hits hard at the audience. Interesting to note that all three were given X certificates for adults only due to them being so powerful, and sometimes terrifying due to the extreme threat of the images. In the cinema before these three I can only think of Eisenstein's ' Battleship Potemkin ' reviled and banned until it was given a belated X certificate, and Bunuel's ' Los Olvidados ' again X certificated and given a ridiculous title in the UK that I cannot recall. Now for ' The Medium. ' Marie Powers is truly pathetic and horrifying in ' The Medium ' terrified of possible damnation because she has been ' touched ' by ' something ' at a Seance to bring back two dead children. She thinks she is a fake medium, but the possibility that she is actually in touch with the dead sends her into a frenzied panic. Anna Maria Alberghetti is superb as the young woman who assists her, and Leo Coleman is a fantastic presence on screen of the young man who is mute who also assists her. He is in love with the young woman, and she with him. No spoilers but the ending is horrific in the true sense of the word. Above all this is not just filmed opera but a film made out of fantastic images, and a grotesque Punch and Judy scene at a carnival is just one of the visual highlights. It is, as I said, a great film in itself and let me just say the music helps the film and not the other way around. Gian-Carlo Menotti the composer directed with visionary ability, and yet on the hard to find DVD he is given no credit as director whereas the conductor of the music is pushed forward. I am making a plea here for this film to be taken seriously, and perhaps returned to possible buyers as a film. I am possibly speaking into the void, but speak I must. Summing up; too much has been made of this as an opera and not as a masterpiece of world cinema.

I'd never heard of Marie Powers before watching this curious hybrid of a film, but she definitely earned her fee here as she offers a compelling operatic performance as the slightly crooked medium "Madame Flora" who has been fleecing the gullible quite successfully for quite a while before, well a bit like Noël Coward's "Madame Arcati", she happens on the real thing and it's a malevolent and mischievous entity determined to cause it's own brand of intense havoc and induce quite a degree of introspection and even guilt from our now slightly freaked out conduit to the spirit world. It's that intensity that Gian Carlo Menotti has managed to capture impressively here coupled with a little comedy and some powerful arias from an entertaining, if a little contrived, libretto that I think would present well on a grand theatrical stage. As to cinema? Well on that front this falls down a bit. The quality of the film-making is frankly rather poor and Menotti doesn't really seem to appreciate the opportunities and limitations of celluloid when it comes to telling his story. The dim and dingy lighting works well for a while but soon becomes a little too dreary - as if it were filmed in a cave, and the quality of the audio which is so crucial to the storytelling here renders it quite hard to follow at times, especially if you are not a native Italian speaker. That said, it is innovative and the score can hit the heights of the rousing and stimulating powerfully so it it's worth a watch, but you might have to be patient with it.

Amahl and the Night Visitors may be Menotti's most well-known and most performed opera, but the 1960 production of The Consul and this film version of The Medium are great examples of why those two operas deserve to be almost in the same class. It is true that this film is not The Medium that you would see staged at the opera house, that doesn't matter because it is truly outstanding in every department. And Gian-Carlo Menotti is a huge part of the film's success, being not just the composer but also the director and writer, while he is best known as a composer he shows great skill in the writing and directing departments. The film looks great with a film-noir look to it and some of it is bizarre but in a good and striking way, especially with Madame Flora's visions. The drama and staging is intelligent and grabs you right in, with a moving ending and a quite disturbing scene with Toby and Monica at the fair and with Toby being harassed. The music is just lovely and dramatic, the highlight for me has always been Monica's beautifully dark lullaby The Black Swan, rhythmically relatively simple and the hauntingly beautiful main theme will stay in your head long after but with some very awkward note intervals in the middle(even if you are a good sight reader or have absolute pitch you might still struggle). And what is so good about Menotti's writing is, as librettist, lyric-writer or script-writer, is how vivid and poetic his way of words are and the impact they have, particularly apparent in The Black Swan which with the right word painting creates some quite harrowing imagery. The story is easy to follow and has a lot of emotional power, also good in filling in the short running time with good development or not much filler, even giving more to subsidiary characters like Mrs Nolan. Menotti's directing is controlled, and the performances are really impressive apart from some too obvious lip synching(not an uncommon problem in filmed opera though actually). Like Patricia Neway in The Consul, Marie Powers is one performance you are unlikely to forget, her contralto voice is very powerfully projected and Madame Flora's tormented character is brought to life most vividly and movingly. Anna Maria Alberghetti is adorable and sings with a clear, pure tone to her soprano voice. Leo Coleman is both savage and affecting despite not saying a word. Overall, outstanding film, an example of filmed opera done really well. 10/10 Bethany Cox