I Dream Too Much (1935)
I Dream Too Much (1935)
DVDRip | MKV | 700 x 540 | x264 @ 1800 Kbps | 92 min | 1,34 Gb
Audio: English AAC 2.0 @ 160 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Comedy, Romance, Musical
DVDRip | MKV | 700 x 540 | x264 @ 1800 Kbps | 92 min | 1,34 Gb
Audio: English AAC 2.0 @ 160 Kbps | Subtitles: None
Genre: Comedy, Romance, Musical
Jonathan Street is a struggling composer when he meets and marries Annette. The problem is that Jonathan was drunk and does not want to be married. Annette does go with him to Paris and does the cooking and cleaning. To get his music published, Annette takes it to Paul and he is won over - by her voice and not the music. So he manages her career and she becomes a star as an opera singer everywhere she goes. Since Jonathan cannot sell anything he writes, he leaves Annette and that makes Annette sad as she wants only to be his wife.
"I Dream Too Much," nicknamed "I Scream Too Much," is a 1935 film starring opera singer Lily Pons and Henry Fonda, who at this point in his life resembled Jane Fonda in a man's haircut. He was really at the height of his most adorable-ness. Fonda plays a composer named Johnny Street who marries a young woman, Annette, only to discover that she has an operatic voice. In attempting to push his opera, she sings some of it for the head of the opera company in Paris. He makes her a huge star and Johnny is stuck on the sidelines. When he finds out that she is paying for a production of his opera, he leaves her.
This is a slight story no doubt prompted by the success of Jeanette MacDonald and Grace Moore that relies on the voice and personality of Lily Pons and the cuteness of Fonda. Eric Blore plays a neighbor who has a trained seal; he's there for comic relief, and he was always funny.
Pons was a huge opera star who actually sang for the last time in 1972, when she was 74 years of age! She was tiny at a time when opera stars ran very big, she was very glamorous, and her timing was impeccable - she arrived in America during the Depression and saved the Metropolitan Opera from bankruptcy. Her signature aria was the Bell Song from Lakme, an opera done infrequently today if at all. In it, she wore a bare midriff costume and showed off her F above high C and her coloratura technique. She was an ideal Rosina, Gilda, Lucia, Linda di Chamonix, etc. Women singers in those days were trained a little differently than they are today, with back placement of the high notes. Pons' middle voice and extension above high C were lovely, but the notes from F to high C had a shrillness to them, at least in recording. Her speaking voice records shrilly as well.
This is actually a sweet film that the actors make enjoyable. I could have done without the long, dragging number at the end, but it's a chance to see one of opera's legends and a very young Fonda.IMDB Reviewer
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I Dream Too Much (1935)
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