We witness scenes from its most memorable productions including excerpts from a 1940's "Norma," rehearsals and opening night, and rare footage of the theatre after the World War II bombing- and its rebuilding. V.I.E.W. VIDEO is proud to present LA SCALA, a must for every collector and opera lover.

EXCERPTS INCLUDE:
1)Verdi: Otello, Tempesta- La Scala Chorus
2)Bizet: Carmen, Toreador Song- Gino Bechi
3)Salieri: Europa Riconosciuta, La Scala's Inauguration- Margherita Carosio
4)Rossini: Barbiere De Siviglia, Lindoro's Serenade- Tito Schipa
5)Bellini: Norma, Casta Diva- Maria Caniglia
6)Donizetti: S.

Otherwise, this seems to be a cheap dubbed version of a reasonably tolerable Italian documentary. The foreign language origin is rather obvious because the somewhat misleading credits have been written by someone who obviously has an appalling command of the English language [example: "Musics (sic!)by Giuseppe Verdi"]. The print is of medium to poor quality,although the sound is rather good. Perhaps there were no better prints of this film available,and it is possible that the performance clips are sadly no longer available in first-class prints.(The excellent Teldec video, "The Art of Singing",would seem to disprove this to a certain point,however; the clips on that video,even those from 1929, are all of pristine quality.)

This La Scala documentary is intended as a pseudo-history of the opera house,and to give it a more "realistic" flavor,scenes from EXTREMELY rare and obscure Italian films on the life of such luminaries as Verdi have been included. These would have been facinating if they had been presented intelligently,but they are not. The picture quality is bad,and the Italian dialogue isn't subtitled. Instead, we hear an overdramatic narrator full of phony enthusiasm informing us of what is going on,in a condescending tone that makes us feel we are back in an early 1960's grade school classroom.

The narration in this film is awful. It is featured throughout the film,except during the singing,and it sounds exactly like that hopelessly corny narration that I,and probably millions of others, used to hear on all those anonymous educational films of the late '50's and early '60's that were a regular part of grade school once (I'm not talking about good documentaries like "Hemo the Magnificent" or "Our Mr. Sun",which I saw in second grade.).It ruins the film,and it speaks volumes for the American distributors that they chose to release it in English-speaking countries with commentary like this added to it.