The Toast of New Orleans

1950 "M-G-M's Technicolor fiesta!"
6| 1h37m| NR| en
Details

Snooty opera singer meets a rough-and-tumble fisherman in the Louisiana bayous, but this fisherman can sing! Her agent lures him away to New Orleans to teach him to sing opera but comes to regret this rash decision when the singers fall in love.

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Reviews

Hellen I like the storyline of this show,it attract me so much
Jeanskynebu the audience applauded
Freaktana A Major Disappointment
Aiden Melton The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.
fedor8 More wide-eyed, hysterical 50s hyper-cheerfulness that gives new meaning to anti-social, pathological behaviour. Danza and Grayson will leave you begging for mercy.It's a shame that all the people involved in the making of this movie are now dead (or in nursing homes). I kinda thought about suing them for torture. As this movie started unleashing its shamelessly aggressive operatic assault onto my poor, defenseless ear-drums, I felt instant, strong pain envelop my entire being. That damn muscular vibrato can shatter Soviet tanks into tiny bits, nevermind glass."Why didn't you switch the channel if you didn't like it?", you might ask angrily. Fair point, fair point... The answer is that I wanted to, but the pain was so sudden and excruciating that I fell to the floor, writhing in agony. With my last ounces of energy, I tried to reach the remote but couldn't.A silly little fisherman with the questionable talent of singing with an annoying opera voice is discovered by Niven, who then proceeds to "pigmalionize" him. Lanza is in love with asymmetrical Grayson, but she predictably treats him with contempt until they finally hook up. This may seem like a rather thin plot, but this noisy movie is so chock-full of singing and music that there is barely any dialogue at all. This movie is RELENTLESS. Forget about torturing hippies and war prisoners with Slayer's "Reign In Blood" (as in a South Park episode). Whatever little conversation there is amongst the silly adults that infest this strange 50s musical world, it's all infantile - as if they were all 6 year-olds impersonating grown-ups. I can only envy people who find movies like this funny. It must be great being easy-to-please: what a world of wonder would open up to me if only I could enjoy any silly old gag as hilarious, gut-busting comedy. But let's examine this phenomenon, the 50s musical. My best guess is that 50s musicals offered the more day-dreaming idealists among us a glimpse into Utopia or Heaven (depending on whether you're church-going or Lenin's-tomb-going), or at least very cheesy version of these fantasy-inspired places. TTONO is more akin to a representation of Hell, but that's just me. I don't seem to "get" musicals. People talk, there is a story - but then all-of-a-sudden everyone starts singing for about 4 minutes after which they abruptly calm down and then pretend as if nothing unusual happened! When you think about it, musicals are stranger than any science-fiction film.Worse yet, TTONO (my favourite type of pizza, btw) is not just a 50s musical, but one with opera squealing. Opera is proof that there is such a thing as over-training a voice - to the point where it becomes an ear-piercing weapon rather than a means of bringing the listener pleasure. The clearest example of this travesty is when Lanza and Grayson unite their Dark Side vocal powers for a truly unbearable duet. I tried lowering the volume. I lowered it from 18 to 14. Then from 14 to 10. Then 8. I ended up lowering it to a 1, which is usually so low that it's only heard by specially-trained dogs and certain types of marsupials, and yet I STILL could hear those two braying like donkeys!Take the scene in the small boat in the river. Danza starts off with one of his deafening, brain-killing tunes, and then... nothing. No animals anywhere to be seen. Even the crocodiles, who are mostly deaf, have all but left. If you look carefully, you might even see the trees change colour, from green to yellow, in a matter of minutes. No, this was not a continuity error, it was plain old torture of the flora. And those trees were just matte paintings! Imagine how real trees would have reacted.The reason glass breaks when a high C is belched out of the overweight belly of an operatic screamer is not due to any laws of physics relating to waves and frequency, but because glass is only human - hence can take only so much pain before committing suicide through spontaneous self-explosion. I can listen to the loudest, least friendly death metal band for hours, but give me just a minute of a soprano and I get a splitting headache.
bkoganbing With the success that Mario Lanza and Kathryn Grayson had in That Midnight Kiss, MGM knew it had a box office team of appeal. The following year the two of them moved from contemporary Philadelphia to pre-World War I, New Orleans.People paid their money to hear Mario sing and really didn't care about the plots of his films. Lanza was cast as an opera singing truck driver in That Midnight Kiss, as an opera singer drafted into the army in Because You're Mine, and the greatest opera singer of all in The Great Caruso. I think we can see a pattern forming here.In The Toast of New Orleans Lanza plays a shrimp fisherman who works on the boat with his uncle J. Carrol Naish. When opera singer Kathryn Grayson comes to town, Lanza boisterously and impulsively joins her in a duet of Be My Love. Her manager and New Orleans opera kingpin, David Niven is as impressed as everyone else was in 1950 with Mario's voice. He's even willing to overlook to some extent the fact he's moving in on Grayson.Acting wise The Toast of New Orleans is no strain on anybody. Mario and Kathryn play a pair of singers and Mario as in all of his films, just played himself. It's interesting that the only times he attempted to play a role from classic operetta, The Student Prince and The Vagabond King it didn't work out for him. As for David Niven, he's as debonair and charming as he always was. Niven carried more films on the strength of his charm than any other star in the sound era.But no one worried about acting and a plot in this film. Like That Midnight Kiss, The Toast of New Orleans has a nice mixture of classical opera and some good songs by Nicholas Brodzsky and Sammy Cahn to round out a very full score. One of the songs, Be My Love, became Mario Lanza's signature song, his biggest selling record on RCA Victor Red Seal label. You could not go ANYWHERE in 1950 without hearing Be My Love coming out of some radio. Be My Love was nominated for Best Song in 1950, but lost to Mona Lisa.Norman Taurog directed Mario in this film, he had previously won an Oscar for Skippy and had directed Spencer Tracy to his second Academy Award in Boy's Town. Taurog was an interesting choice for a director to pilot a picture with a personality like Lanza. Later on Taurog would end his career directing nine of Elvis Presley's feature films, another instance of him directing a mega-pop personality successfully.The Toast of New Orleans is for Mario Lanza fans everywhere and this review is dedicated to my father who was a big fan.
maritere1939 I've watched this film more than 50 times, and as much as I watch as much as I like best. Mario Lanza was just unique, I agree that he did not educated his voice enough, but his natural voice was so wonderful, none of the best tenors hadn't his magnificent voice, is enough to know that Mo. Toscanini said that was "The Voice of the Century". This film is fresh and light and romantic, Mario's performance of "Be my love" as a duet is nice too, and "Madame Butterfly duet" is the greatest I've ever heard. David Niven, J. Carroll Naish and Rita Moreno, each one in the role they played are just wonderful too. Mario Lanza should be in the opera stage but if so, common people didn't had the opportunity to be delight with opera.
FelixtheCat Turn-of-the-century New Orleans is the setting of this operatic, musical romance starring Mario Lanza and his powerful voice and the porcelain Kathryn Grayson. Lanza plays a bayou, shrimp fisherman who lives with his nagging uncle, J. Carrol Naish. He is a brash and verile lout until an opera director, David Niven, sees him singing and believes he is the tenor that his opera has been needing. Lanza's voice is ironed out through the company's training as are his brutish manners, with the help of opera star Grayson, whom Lanza has fallen for. The humor is typical, but opera lovers may enjoy the inclusion of arias from "Mignon," "Carmen," and "La Traviata," along with duets from "Madam Butterfly." A young Rita Moreno appears as a waterfront girl.