Cinema: The New Pictures, Aug. 31, 1959

For the First Time (Corona; MGM) presents outsize Tenor Mario ("My voice is the greatest in the world") Lanza as an "unpredictable, erratic, self-centered" American singer who is chased by an overdressed, "publicity-loving" international party girl (Zsa Zsa Gabor). The casting is pluperfect, but most of the picture is a pretentious bore. The pre recorded songs seem unable to locate Lanza's lips, and some of the arias might even have been scraped off old Lanza sound tracks. The only new number, a "Jamaican rock 'n' roll" item called Pineapple Pickers, summons little of...

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