It is sometimes difficult for provincial America and that adjective extends in many cases to both coasts--to credit Europeans with bad taste. In the glow of motion pictures like "The Well-Digger's Daughter" and "Open City," the United States audience may be tempted to believe that everything transported from across the Atlantic is automatically blessed with good taste, subtlety, and a vague form of sex. That such is not the case is shown to painful perfection in the latest Italian film at the Fine Arts.

"The Life of Mozart," despite its Continental origin, is disfigured with every one of the flaws which have so consistently distinguished Hollywood's musical biographies. The philosophy which broke Cole Porter's leg to provide a crisis for "Night and Day" has unfortunately seeped into the portrayal of a real composer: it is made all the more annoying by the realization that such an expedient is equivalent to tinning the lily which is Mozart's life.

The events of Mozart's career form an extraordinarily dramatic sequence without benefit of external embellishments: he started as an extraordinary child prodigy, worked with astonishing success at first, then was defeated by the intrigues of petty jealousies, and died in abject poverty, chiefly from overwork, at the age of 35. To this natural and interesting history the Italian producers have added a prolonged and bitter love affair with Aloysia von Weber, whose sister, Constanza, Mozart actually married after only a brief flirtation with Aloysia.

Preoccupation with this overblown love triangle leaves the life chopped up into little disjoined parcels. But even this shattered plot would be endurable if the movie had been provided with an intelligent musical score--one item which even Hollywood seems to have mastered in such as the Gershwin and Kern biographies. Except for a few snatches of the G minor symphony--played by Joseph Haydn on the piano!--almost nothing of Mozart's was discernible.

Individual performances within the twisted framework of the plot were comparatively satisfactory. Gino Cervi as Mozart looked and acted the abstract conception of the composer, and Luigi Pavese as his father was adequately Deutsch. Italian actresses, unfortunately, do not seem to fill the bill of love interest: Conchita Montenegro as Aloysia would be enough to frighten Eric von Stroheim.

Americans who think that Hollywood has reach the depths would do well to sit all the way through "The Life of Mozart." Somewhere near the close the great Wolfgang is visited by a new pupil who sits at the piano to play a work of his own. The wild-eyed student starts into the opening phrases of the Eroica Symphony, and as the horns and strings come in from the background Mozart whispers hoarsely, "You cannot be my pupil, Laudwig; you have already learned all there is to know..."