Terra di fuoco (1939) User Reviews

L'herbier's not really on fire.

[ulicknormanowen · 6/10 · 4 October 2023]

Filmed in both French and Italian versions; the French director Marcel L'Herbier was specialized in melodramas and "terre de feu" is no exception .The Italian lead (Tito Schipa) was unknown to the French audience; the other way round for the rest of the cast , in their vast majority,from France :Mireille Balin got top bill ,but she has only two scenes in the movie and her role is insignificant.

After a promising part ,where real life extends the opera ,in the wings then the court , the rest is routine:the opera singer is sent to a penal colony , then tries to find his daughter -who may or may not be his- and to resume his career .

One scene recalls the great director L'herbier was able to be : one of the convicts dies of a bad fever and his funeral takes place in a gloomy church in a cave :faces are tired,marked, in this twilight :suddenly the former singer breaks into an "Ave Maria" and some sunshine breaks through.

It's the voice that counts.

[ItalianGerry · 5 May 2004]

(Some spoilers) TERRA DI FUOCO/TERRE DE FEU/LAND OF FIRE was created as a vehicle for the great Italian lyric tenor Tito Schipa, and the best parts of the movie are those in which he sings. Unfortunately those parts are excruciatingly few. The rest of the movie is a turgid melodrama about a tenor named Berti, a famous opera singer, who is so saturated with the dramatic performance he gives on stage, that upon return to his dressing room, he kills a man he finds there with his wife, when he thinks that he is her lover. This startling bit of precipitous action lands him, after the trial in which he is found guilty, in a penal colony in Tierra del Fuego. I don't know why he was sent there in particular, since much of the film seems to be set in Italy and in France in this French-Italian co-production directed by Marcel l'Herbier. Of course "Tierra del Fuego" would be the title in Spanish, and might have helped with the market in Argentina, where Schipa was well-known. Anyway, after atoning for his sins through hard labor and singing an Ave Maria for the prisoners, and the passing of about ten years, he is released and spends some time in Buenos Aires and then as a light-music performer in Paris. Later he returns to Rome, is re-united with his wife. The daughter she had is really is (he had had his doubts) and the three seem to have happy days ahead of them. All this happens after a comeback performance in Massenet's WERTHER at the Rome Opera, in which he is first hooted as a criminal, and then subsequently applauded through the intercession of his future son-in-law. Like Beniamino Gigli, another great tenor who made films in the 1930s and 1940s, Schipa's forte is not dramatic acting, especially with banal material like this, but in singing…in singing…in singing!

I could not find any indication that this film was ever shown in the United States, although it may have played some Italian-language houses. The subtitled video I watched hailed from Australia. I was grateful for the chance to see it, because anything with Tito Schipa is worth seeing, just to hear his voice. I had the opportunity to see him in a live performance in Providence in 1962 at the Columbus Theatre, during his farewell tour.