The Moviegoer

Tradition has always pictured Verdi as a sunny oldster dandling children on his knee. In "The Life of Giuseppe Verdi", a script-writer's florid fancy and an actor's indecisive acting are diligently at work portraying bearish youth mellowing into crochety old age. Inconclusive in its characterization, the picture meanders shapelessly through the minor crises in the composer's life, in a disjointed course that lacks both interest and conviction. A weak-kneed attempt to build up Verdi as a nationalist idol bogs down in conventional heroics. In a last desperate effort at unity, the director drags in a love complication as profoundly touching as Hollywood's grade C productions. Never reaching beyond the suggestive, the picture loses itself in a maze of episodic trivia.

The blurbs promise a musical feast, but what is actually offered are the more hackneyed numbers from the Verdi repertoire, indifferently performed and badly integrated with such plot as there is. Gaby Morlay's sensitive acting provides the only stable note in this flabby drama, which amounts, at best, to a tolerably exact biography.