Pagliacci (Audio-Cinema Inc. & Fortune Gallo). Unkind people have said that Fortune Gallo does not like music much. He is a lively and busy executive, a bank director, concert manager, and, primarily, president and treasurer of the San Carlo Opera Company. Once when he was running an opera company in California he suggested to Composer Ruggiero Leoncavallo, who was working for him as a conductor, that Pagliacci would make a good movie. Leoncavallo refused to allow his masterpiece to be photographed unless the music went with it, but Gallo did not drop the idea. Last week, with characteristic enterprise, he presented Pagliacci, in Italian, without color, made by his San Carlo singers and backed by his own funds: the cinema's first full-length grand opera.
Opera has often come to film-seers in little pieces. One of the first things Warner Bros, did with the sound device was to make a series of short features in which famous stars sang arias. The experiment was not continued. Had Gallo's Pagliacci been made with singers from the Metropolitan their names might have been enough to put it over in fair-sized cities, but the cast means little as a draw nor is it overskillful. The singers act only when they feel their voices going back on them. This deficiency is startlingly revealed by closeups; there are times when the singers have the air of comics burlesquing grand opera stars. Their voices are not bad but they sing as loud as they can all the time and the recording makes the results even worse. The orchestra utters metallic clickings, moans sepulchrally in the lower register, makes the upper notes shrill and hollow.
Making Pagliacci will not rank with the past feats of Maestro Gallo, who once said of Pavlova "I bought her outright," and who persuaded the deposed Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii to go to one of his shows though she had not been out of her palace for 22 years. However, it is a courageous piece of pioneering and reveals a fact many producers had guessed but none had proved: grand opera is never likely to be successful cinema.