Interrupted Melody (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Curtis BernhardtRelease Date(s)
1955 (December 16, 2026)Studio(s)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Warner Archive Collection)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: C+
Review
The 1950s witnessed a number of movies about singers overcoming handicaps. Among them are I’ll Cry Tomorrow (Lillian Roth), The Helen Morgan Story, and With a Song in My Heart (Jane Froman). The 1955 biopic Interrupted Melody tells the story of Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence and how polio sidelined a flourishing operatic career.
Young Marjorie Lawrence (Eleanor Parker) lives and works on her father’s sheep farm in Australia. Secretly one morning, she dashes off on horseback to catch a train to the site of an opera competition. She wins and her father (Cecil Kellaway) gives her his blessing to pursue her dream of becoming a professional. She goes to Paris where she studies, determined to make her stage debut. She achieves success in Europe and becomes a leading dramatic soprano known for powerful roles at the Metropolitan Opera.
She meets and marries Dr. Thomas King (Glenn Ford), but her burgeoning popularity and extensive tours put a strain on the marriage. The couple manage to work things out until, while performing in Mexico, she contracts polio, leading to paralysis from the waist down. Unable to perform, she falls into deep depression though Tom constantly attempts to buoy her spirits. Despite being unable to walk or even stand, Lawrence has retained her voice and her husband encourages her to do what she loves most—sing again.
While the first half of the film is heavily weighted toward arias and excepts from various operas, the second half is primarily dramatic as it deals with Lawrence’s illness, rehabilitation, and efforts to reinvent herself by taking advantage of opportunities. While she struggles mentally and physically, husband Tom lovingly supports her efforts with patience and encouragement.
Parker gets a chance to show her dramatic skills mostly after Lawrence learns she’s contracted polio. The actress conveys despondency, self-pity, depression, and acceptance in a series of scenes that illustrate her range. Two stand out. In the first, Tom puts on a record of Lawrence singing an aria. Reminded of the career that she no longer has, she asks him repeatedly to turn it off. When he challenges her to do it herself and walks away, she crawls off a sofa and across the room to silence the record player. It’s a highly emotional first step toward helping herself. In a later scene set at an opera specially staged to accommodate her inability to walk, Lawrence delivers a dramatic aria bewailing the death of her character’s lover and then, with the help of a prop wall drags herself upright and staggers a few steps to throw herself over the body. In both scenes, you can feel Lawrence’s pain and determination.
Ford’s Dr. Tom King is a soft-spoken man who wants a typical homemaker wife but agrees to compromise to accommodate her flourishing career. As she recovers from polio, he sacrifices his medical practice in New York to resettle in Florida so that she can benefit from a warm climate. Ford is pleasant but never really gets a chance to portray Tom’s personal frustration. He and Parker make an attractive couple, but their screen chemistry is tepid at best. In their scenes together, the dialogue is all about their love for one another, but we never see this in their performances.
Roger Moore has a small role as Marjorie’s brother, Cyril, who becomes her manager. As siblings, Moore and Parker are believable and Moore delivers an energetic performance as a protective sibling who opposes his sister’s budding attachment to a young doctor. Unfortunately, he disappears for a long time, pops up again toward the end of the film with a silly mustache to establish a passage of time, and stiffly spouts the film’s dumbest dialogue in a scene between Cyril and Tom. Cyril says he was wrong about Tom, awkwardly claiming that Tom and Marjorie were meant for each other.
Interrupted Melody is a lushly produced biopic shot in CinemaScope and color. The widescreen is used intelligently to show the entire stage in long shots when Lawrence is performing. The camera is at a slightly low angle to give us the point of view of a spectator in the first row. The opera costumes are beautiful and Lawrence’s make-up is put on in broad strokes to simulate stage make-up. In addition to the unbalanced script, another big flaw of the film is that no one, especially Parker, speaks with an Australian accent.
The film is top-heavy with operatic music in its first hour, with only snippets of dialogue to bridge them. Arias from operas by Verdi, Puccini, Bizet and Saint-Saens are performed by Eileen Farrell (dubbing for Eleanor Parker) and include Habanera from Carmen, Madame Butterfly’s Un bel di, Mon coeur s’oeuvre a ta voix from Samson and Delilah, and the immolation scene from Wagner’s Gotterdammerung. In the latter, Parker rides a horse across the stage into a simulated fiery inferno. Lighter tunes, sung toward the end of the film, include Annie Laurie and Over the Rainbow. There’s also a medley of patriotic songs performed in a montage showing Lawrence entertaining troops during World War II.
The storyline is similar to With a Song in My Heart, made three years earlier. Marjorie Lawrence and Jane Froman were about the same age, became unable to walk at the peak of their careers, had a tough road back to recovery and performing, and entertained the troops during World War II. Interrupted Melody is surprisingly true to actual events in Lawrence’s life and isn’t marred by excessive fictionalizing. Some events have been truncated for purposes of narrative flow, but the picture is otherwise a fair representation of Lawrence’s career and struggles with a debilitating disease.
Interrupted Melody was shot by director of photography Joseph Ruttenberg on 35mm film and presented in the aspect ratio of 2.55:1. The Blu-ray presentation is a new 4K restoration from the original camera negative. The color palette is broad, with vibrant hues for the elaborate opera costumes, including character-appropriate garments and wigs for Carmen and Madame Butterfly. Details are well delineated in Lawrence’s stage costumes, huge floral arrangements, vintage automobiles, posters, and decor in Lawrence’s Manhattan apartment. Opening scenes set on the Lawrence farm in Australia are impressive in CinemaScope and show the expanse of the land and its relative isolation.
The soundtrack is English 2.0 Stereo DTS-HD Master Audio. English SDH subtitles are an available option. The 4-track stereo does wonders for the musical numbers, bringing them to vibrant life and augmenting their majesty. Dialogue is clear and precise, though the absence of Australian accents is a crucial oversight on the part of the director. Sound effects include a galloping horse, a train’s steam engine, car motors, pouring rain, and ambient background noise at a party.
Bonus materials on the Blu-ray release from Warner Archive include the following:
- Tom and Cherie (6:43)
- Trailer (3:42)
Tom and Cherie – In this 1955 Tom and Jerry cartoon directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, Jerry, dressed as a French musketeer, tries to deliver love letters to a lady mouse. His young, sword-wielding sidekick, Tuffy, constantly gets into duels with Tom, who guards the mouse hole. Chaotic and sometimes messy sword fights ensue, all in the name of love. Shot in CinemaScope, this was the 94th one-reel animated Tom and Jerry cartoon.
Interrupted Melody is a treat for opera lovers, featuring liberal examples of classic opera selections sung by the great Eileen Farrell. The film showcases someone who may not be that well known these days but whose story is definitely dramatic and worthy of a feature film. Eleanor Parker gives one of her best screen performances as the farm girl turned prima donna. Director Curtis Bernhardt stages the operatic numbers sumptuously. The screenplay by William Ludwig moves quickly as Lawrence rises in her profession but gets bogged down by so many arias before Lawrence contracts polio that Parker has little more to do than wear elaborate costumes and lip synch. She finally gets a chance to exercise her acting muscles about an hour in, when Lawrence is stricken with despair over her new condition.
- Dennis Seuling