Books, Arts & Manners: La Tradita

What utter nonsense opera on film is! Ingmar Bergman almost got away with it in his version of The Magic Flute, but even there I had to rely considerably on my love for Bergman and indifference to Mozart. And though La Traviata is, to me, rather an old chestnut, I wouldn’t have picked Franco Zeffirelli to retrieve it from the fire with a movie version that has been lingering on our screens rather longer than it deserves. Zeffirelli is a fellow of small but flashy talent and fairly execrable taste, who nevertheless managed to carve (if that isn’t too virile a word) a niche for himself in theater, film, and opera. Hopelessly sentimental and with a campy sensibility, he began his cinematic career as assistant to the late Luchino Visconti, another director of theater, film, and opera with similar predilections albeit slightly more talent. Zeffirelli has been responsible for any number of disagreeable films, of which the most successful was the 1968 Romeo and Juliet (“the with-it version for modern youngsters,” as Leslie Halliwell calls it), and the most obnoxious were The Taming of the Shrew with the Burtons, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about St. Francis of Assisi, Endless Love with Brooke Shields, and the TV film Jesus of Nazareth.

In connection with another wretched movie of our eclectic’s, The Champ (the 1979 remake of a 1931 boxing tear-jerker), I quoted here a line from an early Lina Wertmüller movie, where a rich husband tells his wife, “Your idea of poverty is a garret in La Bohème designed by Franco Zeffirelli.” Since then, audiences at the Metropolitan Opera have been able to verify the appositeness of that remark. In the movie of La Traviata, the director has Violetta living in a town house that would put the Louvre to shame; as for her country place, it could compete, if not with Versailles, surely with Fontainebleau. The film begins with shots of Paris as the orchestra, under James Levine, plays the overture; as my companion commented when the clip-clop of nooves was superimposed on Verdi’s music (a carriage is driving up to Violetta’s house), any director capable of that should have desisted altogether from making the film.

JS

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John Simon

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What utter nonsense opera on film is! Ingmar Bergman almost got away with it in his version of The Magic Flute, but even there I had to rely considerably on my love for Bergman and indifference to Mozart. And though La Traviata is, to me, rather an old chestnut, I wouldn’t have picked Franco Zeffirelli to retrieve it from the fire with a movie version that has been lingering on our screens rather longer than it deserves. Zeffirelli is a fellow of small but flashy talent and fairly execrable taste, who nevertheless managed to carve (if that isn’t too virile a word) a niche for himself in theater, film, and opera. Hopelessly sentimental and with a campy sensibility, he began his cinematic career as assistant to the late Luchino Visconti, another director of theater, film, and opera with similar predilections albeit slightly more talent. Zeffirelli has been responsible for any number of disagreeable films, of which the most successful was the 1968 Romeo and Juliet (“the with-it version for modern youngsters,” as Leslie Halliwell calls it), and the most obnoxious were The Taming of the Shrew with the Burtons, Brother Sun, Sister Moon, about St. Francis of Assisi, Endless Love with Brooke Shields, and the TV film Jesus of Nazareth.

In connection with another wretched movie of our eclectic’s, The Champ (the 1979 remake of a 1931 boxing tear-jerker), I quoted here a line from an early Lina Wertmüller movie, where a rich husband tells his wife, “Your idea of poverty is a garret in La Bohème designed by Franco Zeffirelli.” Since then, audiences at the Metropolitan Opera have been able to verify the appositeness of that remark. In the movie of La Traviata, the director has Violetta living in a town house that would put the Louvre to shame; as for her country place, it could compete, if not with Versailles, surely with Fontainebleau. The film begins with shots of Paris as the orchestra, under James Levine, plays the overture; as my companion commented when the clip-clop of nooves was superimposed on Verdi’s music (a carriage is driving up to Violetta’s house), any director capable of that should have desisted altogether from making the film.