With a Song in My Heart - 1952 - Susan Hayward, Thelma Ritter, Rory Calhoun, David Wayne

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• published: 15 Jun 2017
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This is a tremendous musical made in 1952 and based on the life of popular American contralto singer Jane Froman. By all accounts the story-line is a pretty close fit as Froman herself was heavily involved with over-seeing the production. The film is sumptuously staged and excellently acted, in particular by the leads. Some of the set-piece numbers are somewhat over-blown and sentimental, particularly the violins at the start of the title number, sung as a duet with Richard Allan, but in the main the numbers are involving and lovely to hear. Susan Hayward gives a stupendous Academy-nominated performance as Froman, and looks stunning in some truly gorgeous gowns designed by Charles Le Maire. Her lip-syncing to Froman's voice is perfect and being an adequate singer herself (‘I'll Cry Tomorrow') I'll bet she sang along with the pre-recorded tracks all the better to interpret the songs. All the crowd scenes are handled with aplomb utilising a vast cast of extras. Thelma Ritter has some sharp and amusing dialogue, caustically delivered, as only she could, and David Wayne compliments Hayward's performance well as her manager, Don Ross, who then becomes her first husband, though he ends up more as "Mr Froman". Later, scenes with a young Robert Wagner (while Froman sings "Embraceable You") are very sensitively handled and will certainly bring a tear to some eyes. When the airplane taking Froman to perform for servicemen in 1943 crashes, the co-pilot, John Burn, saves her life, in spite of his own broken back, and they convalesce their injuries together, falling in love, of course, and finally marrying after divorce from Ross. Burn is played with great suaveness by Rory Calhoun. It was pure chance that Froman was saved from the crash at all, as by a misunderstanding, she had exchanged seats with another passenger who was killed, and following the accident she had 39 serious operations on her injured leg and arm. However, she had the courage to come through it and the film's finalé is a tremendous pot-pouri of well-known songs given to a huge gathering of troops, which was brilliantly directed and acted - the dozens of extras playing soldiers where clearly having a genuinely good time, and Hayward's control and performance is mammoth, though why, for this particularly important sequence, they put her in a drab brown dress is anyone's guess, especially when her previous costumes had been so spectacular. Perhaps it was supposed to compliment the khaki of the soldiers uniforms, but it actually just blends into the background - a small piece of mis-judgement, in my opinion. Nevertheless (apart from that minor quibble), this remains arguably one of the best biographical musicals ever made - it was directed with aplomb by Walter Lang... After the success of the film, Capitol released an album of songs from it which became the No 1 best selling album in 1952 and an interesting piece of ‘trivia' is that Froman was also given a TV programme called "Jane Froman's U.S.A. Canteen" which ran till 1955 on which she sang the very first No 1 hit introduced on television which was "I Believe", written especially for her by the show's musicians, Ervin Drake, Irvin Graham, Jimmy Shirl, and Al Stillman - the song most people, of course, relate to Frankie Laine, who had a mammoth hit with the song in 1954. This is definitely a film to cherish and watch again and again...