Warner Archive has released a stunning Blu-ray upgrade of MGM’s The Great Caruso, the second highest grossing film of 1951. Beaten only by MGM’s biblical epic Quo Vadis, it outpaced two other MGM musicals, Show Boat and An American in Paris, which were the third and fourth highest-grossing films of the year. The highest-grossing non-MGM release of 1951 was Paramount’s A Place in the Sun, which came in at number 5.

While I don’t usually mention box office, I thought this was an interesting fact given that unlike the other four films in the top five for 1951, The Great Caruso does not have the same vaulted reputation that they do. It was entirely a product of its time.

Mario Lanza, who played Enrico Caruso, his idol, was an aspiring opera singer who appeared on stage in an opera only once in his life. He was singing at the Hollywood Bowl when he was discovered by Louis B. Mayer in 1947. Mayer immediately hired him and had him groomed for stardom. Two years later he made his film debut playing an aspiring opera star in That Midnight Kiss opposite Kathryn Grayson. It was a huge box office success as was their second film together, 1950’s The Toast of New Orleans, in which he again played an opera star.

Sparing no expense, The Great Caruso was a lavish production co-starring Ann Blyth (Thunder on the Hill) as Caruso’s wife. Although it followed the famed tenor’s life from his birth in 1873 to his death in 1921, it was primarily a work of fiction as were most musical biographies at the time.

The film not only gets Caruso’s personal life wrong, it gets his professional appearances wrong as well, claiming that he started out in the chorus when his first appearance in 1900 was actually in a starring role. It claimed his Metropolitan Opera debut was a disappointment when it was, in fact, a huge success. It has him going on a world tour for years when he never did any such thing. Once he got the Metropolitan Opera, he stayed, touring in Europe once a year as well as playing other New York venues. His recording career, which was legendary, began in 1902, not toward the end of his life. He was the first recording artist to sell a million records.

As for his personal life, it omits his ten-year relationship from 1898-1908 with a married Italian opera star that produced two children. It has him meeting his wife in 1903 when she would have been ten years old, instead of in 1917, the year before they were married. It even has him collapsing and dying in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Despite all this, it’s enjoyable whenever Lanza sings, which he does 27 times. Blyth gets to sing “The Loveliest Night of the Year,” composed for the film, which became a huge hit. Featuring Angela Clarke (The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima) as Caruso’s mother, The Great Caruso was directed by Richard Thorpe (Ivanhoe).

It received Oscar nominations for Best Costume Design, Scoring, and Sound, winning for the latter.

Included as an extra is an hour-long documentary on Lanza, produced by the BBC on 2005 and broadcast on TCM in 2006.

Lanza made four more films in which he played opera singers, something he never really was. He was an actor playing an opera singer. The one film in which he would have played something different was 1954’s The Student Prince, but he got into a fight with the film’s director, Curtis Bernhardt, refusing to re-record a song Bernhardt felt was too emotional, and demanding that Bernhardt be fired. When Dore Schary, Mayer’s successor, refused, he walked off the set, causing a two-year delay in the film’s production which reached a settlement in which Lanza’s vocals would be lip-synched by actor Edmund Purdom (The Egyptian).

Lanza had a drug and alcohol problem as well as an enormous appetite, his weight constantly fluctuating because he sang better when he was fat but filmed better when he was skinny which is why his vocals were always pre-recorded. He died from a blood clot that traveled from his leg to his heart while on one of his crash-diet retreats in 1959 at the age of 31. His wife died of a drug overdose five months later leaving behind four young children, only one of whom survives today.

Film Movement has released a beautifully restored four-film Blu-ray set of Ealing Studio comedies starring Alastair Sim called Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter. If you only know Sim from his more serious films such as A Christmas Carol and An Inspector Calls, these films will be quite an eye-opener.

1947’s Hue and Cry (1951 in the U.S.), directed by Charles Crichton (The Lavender Hill Mob), was considered the first Ealing comedy, but its comedy is merely incidental to this postwar adventure about a group of teenagers from the London slums who outsmart a master criminal who publishes altered weekly versions of stories from a book written for kids with changes in the text giving instructions to a network of thieves. Top-billed Sim is quite wonderful in his brief appearances as the nervous author whose work is being purloined.

1951’s Laughter in Paradise is a twist on the perennial comedy classic, Brewster’s Millions, in which four, rather than one, potential heirs must carry out bizarre instructions before they can inherit. Sim is in his comic element as one of the inheritors, an author of seedy mystery novels. Fay Compton (The Haunting), Guy Middleton (Oh! What a Lovely War), and George Cole (Cleopatra) are the others. This is the one in which Audrey Hepburn made her film debut as a cigarette girl.

The most successful of the lot was 1954’s The Belles of St. Trinian’s in which Sim plays both the headmistress of a school for girls and her twin brother. Originally cast as just the brother, he stepped in to play the sister when Margaret Rutherford (Murder at the Gallop) proved unavailable. It was a huge box office hit in the U.K. and at U.S. art houses.

The best reviewed of the films was probably 1960’s School for Scoundrels, the last film directed by Robert Hamer (Kind Hearts and Coronets), who died of pneumonia induced by chronic alcoholism three years later at 52. Co-starring Ian Carmichael (I’m All Right Jack and Terry-Thomas (It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Sim co-stars as a man who runs a school for people who want to know how to take advantage of others.

This week’s U.S. Blu-ray releases include Promising Young Woman and Damn Yankees.