The brief career of Mario Lanza hit its highest pitch with this lavish MGM production dealing with the life of the legendary Metropolitan Opera star, Enrico Caruso. Caruso's widow, Dorothy, wrote the biographical framework on which the screenplay is based, and perhaps this is why the story of the celebrated tenor--which takes Caruso from his humble Neopolitan beginnings to his idyllic marriage to his death at age 48--never mentions the fact of his former wife and family. But the film is overall a musical--“the singingest movie ever made, featuring no fewer than 27 vocal items, most of them sung by Lanza with a tremendous brio. In nine operatic scenes he was joined by Metropolitan stars (including songs and arias from ‘Rigoletto,' ‘Aida,' ‘La Boheme' and others) (and) the production even yielded a pop hit ‘The Loveliest Night of the Year,' sung by Ann Blyth as Caruso's wife” (“The MGM Story”). Richard Thorpe directed in showmanly style--and managed to attract as many middle-brow opera fans to this film as he was later to bring bobby-soxers to his Jailhouse Rock.