jimmaclellan714 I have only seen a couple of brief excerpts. The performance of the first act from Puccini's Madame Butterfly' was so amazing that I have been searching for the movie ever since. I imagine it is impossible to find. Over the years I have seen and heard many performances of "Butterfly" but there was something magical about this performance despite the grainy quality of the film.

ksf-2 Fun cast of characters, even if the plot is a smidge thin. Margaret Hamilton, of course, is the straight talking' maid, who talks back to everyone. Matronly Helen Westley is the guardian and agent for singer Elsa Terry (opera singer Grace Moore). Melvyn Douglas and Stuart Erwin claim to have a contract requiring Elsa to perform in Buenos Aires, but she she wants to go sing in Paris. I personally could have done without all the opera numbers, but this was 1937, and they still thought each film needed singing entertainment. The awesome Franklin Pangborn is in here, even if only for a line or two. This one DOES work as a comedy... lots of fun lines, double entendres, and banter. The only way to approach this is to go get a sandwich every time they perform the opera numbers; those long, yawners really bring things to a halt. Fun to watch, in spite of that. Directed by Ed Griffith. Sadly, Grace Moore would only make one more film after this... she died in a terrible plane crash in 1944.

MartinHafer Back in the day, Grace Moore was a huge opera star. Somehow, the studios thought they could translate this into making her a movie star but after less than a dozen films, she just didn't make much traction in the film industry. Her acting wasn't bad but she didn't exactly have a movie star look and her singing style was something most viewers wouldn't have enjoyed...even more so today. Fortunately, Columbia paired Moore with Melvyn Douglas, an actor who had an easy-going acting style and brought out the most in this otherwise limp film.The film hampers itself by creating a pretty dreadful conflict...one that makes viewers immediately dislike Moore's character. Apparently, this singing diva has a contract to sing in South America but is planning on just ditching it in favor of singing in Paris. I don't know about you, but anyone totally ignoring a contract and the impact breaking it would have on others makes me pretty angry at her. Douglas plays a guy hired to try to get her to South America and eventually he tries to use romance to woo her that way. Unfortunately, every time this film starts to get interesting, Moore breaks into song....and most of the songs are operatic. I was watching the film at home and whenever she sang, I did chores! Too bad, as it's otherwise an agreeable little film.

richard-1787 If you only know Grace Moore from *One Night of Love*, you should definitely check out this movie. It's much better.First, Moore is much more at ease acting in front of the camera. In ONOL she often delivered her lines in a stilted way. Here, she is much more natural, and really seems to be having fun.Second, and even though they do repeat it rather often, this movie does have a dynamite title song, which bears repeated listening.Third, Moore is surrounded by a uniformly fine cast, starting with Melvyn Douglas and including Stu Erwin, Helen Westley, and Margaret Hamilton (yes, the Wicked Witch of the West, two years before TWOO), all in top form.The weak point, frankly, is the three fully-staged operatic scenes. The first and the third, from Traviata Act I and the Love Duet from the end of the first act of Madama Butterfly, are well-performed. (The middle one, the Act III finale from Martha, is not as well done.) The problem is that they just sit there, and are not in any way integrated into the plot. If you think of a movie like Moonstruck, which does such a magnificent job of incorporating various scenes from La Boheme into its plot, you have some idea of what could have been done. Instead, the action just stops, and the audience is asked to sit back, watch, and listen, not even as if they were at the opera, because we are given no idea whatsoever of what is going on in those three scenes. If scenes had been chosen with situations similar to what was going on in the movie, and if the parallels had been indicated, the operatic scenes wouldn't have acted as dead weights in what is otherwise a nicely paced romantic comedy. (There is some effort to incorporate the scene from Manon into the action, but not much.) Still, don't let those three scenes keep you away. Moore comes off as vivacious and fun-loving, Douglas is his usual easy-going and agreeable self. The result is an enjoyable 90 or so minutes.---------------------I watched this again on TCM. The cast is really very good, a group of first-rate comedians. It's a shame the material isn't up to the level of their talent. Every now and then it seems about to take off and become a good comedy, but then it falls flat again.I still feel that the operatic numbers slow things down. Only the Butterfly duet is really well done. On the other hand, Moore does a great job with the few pop numbers she is given. She should have sung more popular numbers and cut back on the opera.