The Great Caruso Crowther says, "All of the silliest, sappiest clichés of musical biography have been written by Sonya Levien and William Ludwig into the script. And Richard Thorpe has directed in a comparably mawkish, bathetic style." Nearly 40 years after its release, Caruso's son, Enrico, Jr., reminisced that, "Vocally and musically "The Great Caruso" ...has helped many young people discover opera, and even become singers themselves."He added that, "I can think of no other tenor, before or since Mario Lanza, who could have risen with comparable success to the challenge of playing Caruso in a screen biography." The film has also been
Henry Caruso Henry Caruso Henry "Hank" J. Caruso (born February 24, 1922) is an American businessman, the founder of Dollar Rent A Car. Of Italian heritage, Caruso was born in Pennsylvania. His father, August Caruso, worked in the landscape business and decided that the weather in the Mid-Atlantic was problematic and moved the family to Los Angeles, California in the mid-1920s. They first moved to East Los Angeles but soon settled in the Silver Lake neighborhood where Henry and his brothers, Albert and Lawrence, were raised. He enrolled at the University of Southern California (USC) in 1939 with plans to study medicine,