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Reviews
Holiday for Sinners (1952)
B picture with an astoundingly adult screenplay
From a naturalistic Hamilton Basso novel, Days Before Lent, this is an adult melodrama about three childhood friends, a doctor, a priest, and a boxer,who develop in very different directions, but all leading to a dead end. The priest (Richard Anderson) wants to create a clinic for the poor but is frustrated by the church hierarchy, the doctor (Gig Young) wants to leave his hardscrabble practice and join a research team in India but discovers that he would have to leave his aristocratic fiancée (Janice Rule) back in New Orleans, and the battered boxer, a has-been who is going blind (Keenan Wynn), is merely trying to survive from drink to drink. The performances are more than merely competent, Keenan Wynn's in particular, but the delight is in the urbane and intelligent dialogue by Albert Bezzerides. The melodrama unfolds against Mardi Gras in New Orleans, but very little of what happens is peculiar to that unique city (even the breakfast pastries are called doughnuts rather than beignets).
Great Performances: Die Entführung aus dem Serail (1988)
Terrific opera recording
The best opera video I have seen of Mozart's "Abduction from the Seraglio," with a fine young cast, with good voices but without big reputations, Sir Georg Solti ably conducting the Covent Garden orchestra, and with Elijah Moshinsky's subtle and moving production, which brings out the strain within the Enlightenment values of the text.
Abduction, for those who don't know it, is a youthful work, like The Magic Flute a comic Singspiel with spoken dialog, and indeed the characters and themes are similar to those of The Magic Flute.
Like Sarastro, the oriental pasha is an Enlightenment prince; he loves Kostanze but surrenders her to her European lover Belmonte because he knows that love cannot be constrained. And as in The Magic Flute, the principal soprano has marvelous melodies to sing and needs great flexibility of voice.