greendale66

"The film is only let down by Durban's (sic) terrible singing." . . . Now that's a good one! Deanna Durbin was catapulted to national prominence in her first appearance on the Eddie Cantor radio hour - at the age of 14 - as a singer. That program elicited 4,000 letters of praise, and off she took like a rocket. Her films were enormously popular, and she sang in every one. She changed the course of operatic singing and single-handedly inspired a whole new generation of opera singers. The list of her professional musical admirers is as long as your arm and includes Lily Pons, Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland, who said,"I wish I knew how she did it." Rostropovich, the great Russian cellist, said he was inspired to capture with his cello the same purity and clarity that he found in Durbin's singing. Mel Torme said Durbin was "phenomenal." He said she could sing anything you put in front of her and do it to perfection. I am rarely able to endure operatic singing, but Durbin is so good at everything, I'd rush to listen to her call hogs if given the chance.

I'm afraid this film lost me right from the start. I waited and hour and ten minutes for it to get going and it never did. Mind you, I selected this film because the topic does intrigue me, so it wasn't that I would have found it uninteresting. Unlike one of the main characters -- if there are any -- I even know what an Emir is and have a fine sense of the geography and history of the region. It's simply too disjointed a film to be anything but uninteresting, irritating and frustrating. I did watch the whole film through once, though. I didn't understand the film; I didn't even understand the scenes. I just kept asking myself, "Why did this happen? Why did that happen?" The next day, I tried it again. This time I gave up after the first five minutes, right after a car exploded without explanation. The camera work was likewise distracting. Too many long shots of people talking off in far corners of the screen while somebody's head or shoulder occluded another part. If the shots were actually composed, they were composed to look like they were not composed, which doesn't seem to do anything for them. I have heard this film euphemistically described as "non-linear." Yes, well that it is, but I wouldn't use it as a euphemism.