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Archive for the ‘MUSICAL’ Category

A Star Is Born 2018

01 Nov

A Star Is Born—directed, written, composed, produced by Bradley Cooper. Musical. 136 minutes Color 2018.
★★★
The Story: A catering waitress meets a singing star who helps to turn her into a singing star, while, because of his alcoholism, his own star fades.
~
A Star Is Born is a poor title for this material, since we never sense we are dealing with anyone close, in any sense, to their birth.

No actress who has ventured into this part has been a beginner, either in show business or in life. When Janet Gaynor did it in 1937 she was 31 and had already at 21 won an Oscar, Judy Garland in 1953 was 31, Barbra Streisand in 1976 was 34, and Lady Ga Ga in 2018 is 31.

They were all ten years too old for the role of an undiscovered beginner—particularly since musicians are generally discovered young, as each of those actresses in real life were.

Lady Gaga is up against some pretty memorable guns. She cannot match the charm of Janet Gaynor. She cannot match the lovability of Judy Garland. She cannot match the vocal prowess of Barbra Streisand. Although she is inherently a better musician than any of the singers, she is not young and from the look in her eyes, never was young.

As a show-woman she is in the line not of a pop singer but of Madonna (“madonna” means “lady) but is a better singer and musician than Madonna. As a show-woman, of the four women she is the most striking, daring, and original, but not in this part which has nothing to do with Lady Ga Ga on evidence on TV. Instead she remains a squat, olive skinned, Italian-American Joanne Germanotta with eyes that have already seen beyond everything they happen to be looking upon.

Keeping Lady Gaga in this incarnation, when everyone knows that Lady Gaga is at her most endearing, most real, and most vulnerable to our interest when she is most transvestited. Only when most artificial, most gotten up, most bewigged is she truly revealed.

Being a lump of ordinary neighborhood does not work for this material, even as a starting point. Garland, Streisand, Gaynor were never ordinary. But Inherently Joanne Germanotta is nothing special. What is special is her sense that something wild and bizarre must be constructed to frame and paint on its canvas that which can embody a soul for all to see and delight in as universal to us all. But this is not the story of the caterpillar, Joanne, drawing out of herself that true beauty and butterfly Lady Ga Ga. Therefore, alas, Lady Ga Ga is not in the film. Instead Joanne Germanotta is. And no one is born.

The only thing that carries her performance in A Star Is Born is that, as an actress, she is as good as any of the others who have played the part.

The film is misnamed also because her emergence as a star is not the real story of the film before us. The real story of this version takes place in the relations she has with her established singing star husband. That relationship begins and is played charmingly by her and by Bradley Cooper who produced, wrote its music, wrote its script, acted it, sang it, and directed it.

So, you would think he would take care to present his own character on camera properly and to ask someone to correct his acting choices

But for the last three quarters of the film, Cooper disappears. He disappears because the camera does not look at him full in the face. He disappears because he mistakenly plays Mr. Maine as inverted, introspective, reserved. He plays everything into his lap. But A Star Is Born is not a comedy in which shyness might be fun. Of course also, Maine is also an alcoholic, and alcoholism is an ocean in which one is invisible while standing right there. So the real story is lost in the disappearing act of its male star.

I made sure to see it in a picture palace, but the Dolby Sound drowns the voices of each singer, such that not a word they sing is discernable. Or else the actors speak in under-articulated whispers or in whispers their mikes could not articulate. You may as well be deaf as to attend.

If you want to see a marvelous movie about a singer who rises from ethnic obscurity to birth as a star, see Jersey Boys. It’s about Frankie Valli, and is a much better film as film. Better as to the approach to the music. As a musical. The music’s audibility. The thru-story of the characters. The relationships. The acting of everyone in it. And the ability of director Clint Eastwood in executing the material to slowly win the audience’s engagement such as to make our seduction into it part of the story as well.

None of this is true of A Star Is Born 2018. A star is stillborn is the obvious, unfortunate, bad joke finally required.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Backstage Musical, Bradley Cooper

 

Broadway Melodies of 1936 & 1938

08 Jul

Broadway Melody of 1936 & 1938 – directed by Roy Del Ruth. Musicals. Black And White.
★★★★★
The Stories: Where is the leading female dancer going to come from for the Broadway producer’s first show?
~
Robert Taylor.

We became allured.

Here he is in the plum of his youth, 1936, aged 24, a good actor and completely accessible – which establishes him as someone an audience wants to watch.

For what does an audience do to make a star?

In the audience it is the inherent desire to dive into somebody more admirable than themselves – or more noble, more detestable, more beautiful, more adept, more funny, more something. And to do that one must be allowed to stare at that person in a way real-life ordinary modesty never permits but that movies do.

This happens at virtually the first glimpse of Robert Taylor.

Wow! – what a beautiful male! – beauty – with its untouchable advantage – human survival made easy!

An easy masculinity, too – a passport which – male or female – we all all wish we could own.

And so we become fans. Which is to say we, unbeknownst to him, start going steady. We write fan letters so he shall know it. Or we don’t. We simply buy tickets to see how we’re doing around hm.

Soon we become enamored, we lose critical discretion, for we are engaged. We can’t help ourselves.

The unwitting habit of loyalty weds us to him in a sort of morganic marriage. Marriage. which means we put up with anything – any alteration, miscasting, loss of skill, or scandal. Old and beat up, our star still lodges, and, also inside us, a fidelity remains as a memento of an aspiration felt when both his body and our own were young.

For years our bodies will remain faithful to that first fresh impression, keep seeking it whenever we go to see him– that impression stamped not always in the first movie, but soon enough – Roman Holiday for Audrey Hepburn, A Place In The Sun for Elizabeth Taylor, his early comedies for Tyrone Power.

The movie-goers’ eye awakens, and our spirit reaches out for something true. As in Robert Taylor in Broadway Melody of 1936. Here, he is, more true than he will ever be again.

It’s partly the casting. He plays a Broadway producer – that is to say, no one with any ancestral ties – a free-floating, natural-born businessman with the easy self-assurance of a man used to himself, one with no particular fear of failure, his body relaxed and his responses spontaneous. His mouth, smile, eyes, gesture, emotional shifts are immediate, ready, unself-conscious, and devoid of vanity. His response to other actors is fresh and right. He a young man of breathtaking beauty, but one who knows how to husband it ethically and isn’t fooled by it. We like to watch its play across his face. To follow it we become a following.

All this would disappear from Robert Taylor’s instrument as he was cast in noble roles of he-man, hero, and morally elevated Westerner. The intelligence of his instrument quickly fled. So did his sense of humor. Five packs of cigarettes a day dissipated his looks. He will in l937, be miscast, for instance, as Garbo’s young lover in Camille, for the part requires, among others, the quality of a sexually fresh boy, which Robert Taylor probably never was. A 25-year-old male that good looking has long since not been a boy.

Nevertheless, here he is in Broadway Melody of 1936, an actor of 24 yet of such ease of being it is no wonder he entered the aesthetic souls of audiences his same age who stood by him through the years.

He was never a bad actor, but he became a lesser actor. Here, he is nothing of the kind, and the story – although Jack Benny, the radio humorist is starred – is about Taylor and his maiden effort to mount a Broadway show. It is backed by a rich tootsie who has eyes for him. But no dice! His gaze is fixed on dancer Eleanor Powell, whose maiden voyage into leading roles this is.

What can be negatively said about the film can be said about every female in the piece: Sydney Guillaroff has not yet been hired by MGM to do their hair. The women are hair-doed in skull-gripping sausage curlettes, unbecoming to all, particularly to Powell, whose Dracula dog-teeth, small features, and large flat face require international espionage to be properly revealed.

Everything else about Broadway Melody 1936 is neat! Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed do the songs, the same songs they will do again in Singing In The Rain and In Broadway Melody of 1938.

In Broadway Melody of 1938: same Broadway producer, same gal dancing her way to stardom. Same backing of a blond bitch. Same Buddy Ebsen galumphing around as a Vaudeville rube. Same writers, Sid Silvers and Jack McGowan. Same brilliant editing by Blanche Sewell. Same impeccable direction by Roy Del Ruth. Francis Langford and Robert Benchley and the stifling Sophie Tucker appear in one film or the other. Una Merkel with her pecking voice wittily plays the producer’s conniving secretary in 1936, while 1938 displays a fourteen-year-old Judy Garland full of hope and good will, and in great voice to woe Clark Gable.

In ’38, George Murphy dances with Powell in a spectacularly good singing-in-the rain dance that is not danced to “Singing In The Rain” – and what all this means is simply that one good thing follows another.

For the dance numbers and specialty numbers in both films are imaginatively introduced and wittily executed. An extended Murphy, Powell, Ebsen dance sequence in a boxcar with a horse, surprises with an imaginative use of camera in a small space. The premise of every number seems right and fresh and vivid, and we are spared the staginess of Warner musicals of this era.

The stardom of Eleanor Powell was different from that of Robert Taylor in that it never took place.

Two reasons for that. Maybe more. But one was that her dancing, while effective, was not graceful. She employs the high kicks and top-spins and cartwheels of the acrobatic dancer, which is to say, it is closer to a circus performance. When you see her en pointe, the elbows and knees are over-extended. The ballet dancers chorus behind her makes her look like a horse.

She had phenomenal speed as a dancer and an eagerness to please. Unlike Ruby Keeler, he didn’t have to look at her feet. There is a witty glee in her eyes while tapping that has miles to spare. She is above technique. It’s fun to see.

But none of this ever changed. She always does the same thing, the same kicks, the same spins, the same tommy-gun taps. Astaire and Kelly took great care, in each film, to present something new in dance. Eleanor Powell has a good figure, the right height, 5’5”, and she’s pretty. She is a passable actress, too. She’s not unlikable. But she’s not very open. She’d like to be, but she’s not. And you’ve seen it all before.

This may have come about because she was a female, and, in those years, males controlled movie choreography in a way that females would never be allowed to do. She may have been told, “Do what you did before, Eleanor!” Or, maybe that’s all she could do. Anyhow that’s what happened.

Monotony, and not being open, the audience could not dive into her, nor really could a leading man. You are absolutely convinced that Robert Taylor loves her – simply, directly, happily – but there is no chemistry between them, because, in her, love is not a cartwheel. In her, a cartwheel is a cartwheel.

Judy Garland in ’38, as a frumpy, unformed teen-ager, starts singing, and no matter what the song, you root for her. In you go! You take the risk. Wow! What is going to happen here?

I feel for Eleanor Powell. I admire her. But she does not become a movie star – not because she isn’t placed as one, for she is – but because she is supremely good at one thing and is less good at all the rest. Momentarily arrested, audiences turned away.

Here she is at her best, and so is everybody else. Foolish entertainment was a staple of Depression breadlines. This one is glitzy, light, and slightly fattening – although the costumes by Adrian will mask it and so will the lighting by William Daniels. He began filming Garbo and ended filming Elizabeth Taylor. All this brings you something beautiful, a diversion both working-class and classy.

I recommend it, not for a history lesson but for an evening’s innocent pleasant diversion. You won’t feel cheated by any of it but feel surprised by most of it!

Check it out.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, ACTORS FEMALE, Backstage Musical, Eleanor Powell, George Murphy, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Benny, Judy Garland: Acting and Screen Goddesss, Robert Taylor, Una Merkel

 

The Greatest Showman

09 Jan

The Greatest Showman – directed by Michael Gracey. Musical. 105 minutes Color 2017.
★★★★
The Story: An orphan boy, spurned by his betters, rises to prominence, wealth, and expression through an ability to amaze the public with the odd, the daring, the questionable, and the spectacular.
~
Hugh Jackman is an actor very hard to miscast. Tall, lithe, handsome as the day is long, geared to acting with a winning zest, he plays villains and rotters with the same dispatch as he played Curly in Oklahoma! He is the only principal actor in the world with the talent, background,and range to play the lead in a major film musical. He is the springboard of this film and he’s adept in all departments.

The problem is that some of the departments are not adept. You listen for a song in the songs that are sung and they sound just like other songs in other musicals that others have sung in just the same way, which is to say without distinction. Song, but no melody, song no one can hum, song that does not support the wit of the lyric.

And if the lyric has wit, you cannot tell because the sound recording of modern film musicals is atrocious. It’s partly mic-ing the actors. It’s partly the fault of melodies which do not support lyrics. When Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds dance together, you hear every word and every word connects with every note and every note tells the story required at that moment.

But here you cannot make out the words. All you are perhaps meant to get is a smear of the thing the characters are supposed to be feeling. Rushes of energy and sweeps of frenzy are meant to convey what? – enthusiasm? hope? a change of heart?

What a shame! Because a great deal of wit is evident in this show. Marvelous costumes, raves of choreography. Surprises and entertainment at every turn.

One of the difficulties with the Phineas T. Barnum story is that Jackman is too old to play Barnum when young. He is paired with Michelle Williams in the stereotypical role of the society girl (Alexis Smith) who marries hypogamicly below her class, but marries talent. Williams is an actor of sterling resources. Give her a scene with mundane demands, she always brings something from those resources that capture us with its counterpoint. But she is also too old.

To youthen things up the screenplay supplies us with handsome young Zac Efron as Barnum’s partner (in real life Bailey but here Carlyle, for some reason) and a mulatto trapeze artiste girlfriend played by Zendaya. Will Carlyle cross the color-line? It’s a cheap trick and an unworthy one, considering Barnum’s own bigotry.

All this detours our attention from Barnum himself and his wonder-working and leaves the film unfocussed. Miscegenation is touched on. Barnum’s snobbery is touched on. His workaholism is touched on. His fraudulence is touched on. Mob violence is touched on. Prejudice against the physically challenged is touched on. And the musical touches down on all this like a mechanical firefly, putting in cameo appearances of its own themes.

And yet you want the whole thing to succeed as well as the energy, color, vibrancy, magic, fun, and superabundant talent succeed in bedazzling us.

But the whole shebang is simply manufactured. Jackman and the director introduce the film by congratulating the audience for being in a movie theatre to watch it, and at the end we are told that 15,000 were given jobs in the making of it – dull remarks which P.T. Barnum would have exploited more vivaciously.

We’ve all seen spectacles about Barnum’ accomplishments – Rogers and Hart’s musical Jumbo, and de Mille’s The Greatest Show On Earth. And I have been to the Barnum and Bailey Ringling Brothers’ Circus in the ’40’s when the freak show which made Barnum’s name (Tom Thumb, Jumbo the elephant, and The Siamese Twins) still included a magical juggler of boxes, a fat lady, a thin man, a sword swallower, a tattoed man, a bearded lady, and Gargantua and Toto, gorillas who glowered. (That’s all they did but it was plenty.)

This was in the heyday of three-ring acrobats, aerialists, tight-rope walkers, the Wallendas, clowns including Emmett Kelley, dog acts, dancing elephants, and prancing horses, a tamer of lions, and a flight of hundred white doves released en mass to swarm through air of the Madison Square Garden and back again to the woman whose arms had a minute ago released them.

Showmanship!

Animal acts gone, side-shows gone, and Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus gone. Not forgotten.

But, like this film, soon to be.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, Hugh Jackman, Showbiz Comedy, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Sing & Moana

29 Jan

 

Sing – directed by Garth Jennings. Animated feature. 110 minutes Color 2016.

★★★★★

Moana – directed by Ron Clements and John Musker. Animated Feature. 110 minutes Color 2016.

★★★★★

Stories: Both stories deal with ambitions thwarted and then triumphed.

~

Both films are perfectly suited to adults. And where I sat, the children were as quietly attentive as the adults that accompanied them. Why is that?

A maximum of surprises, movement, angles, colors.

An amplitude of wit.

And they supply – worse than any live action film can – horrendous catastrophe. In Sing it’s a catastrophic flood. In Moana it’s deified lava.

But the young hero and heroine surmount all difficulties. Not without unlikely escapes and rescues and a sentimentality that would crush a nun dressed as a dragon. (Neither of these feature such a creature.)

In Sing, to save his theatre, the young Koala Bear owner must put on a talent show. In Moana, a young woman must bring back a talisman to save her island people.

I enjoyed myself no end. I simply wandering in to sample them while waiting for the feature I’d paid for to start. Remained riveted to my seat.

In the watching, these films dwell on nothing. Remarkable individual beauties and Voltaire-like coups of imagination flit by in sumptuous plentitude. I wish they’d wait for me – I was reared on Pinocchio.

 My favorite character of all was played, in Sing, by the director Garth Jennings as Mrs Crawly, a superannuated loyal iguana secretary with a wandering glass eye. Every time the old woman meandered on in her well-meaning way, I rejoiced.

Such films are rightly called “animated.” For they animate the variety and particularity of the truth and comedy of human gesture in a way that no straight film actor can achieve – because animators are more daring than actors. Because more shameless.

In animation, we expect over-acting. Which means more acting than is necessary. Animation cannot achieve depth of performance, which is what human screen acting can, but it can achieve breadth of performance, which is what human screen acting avoids like Swiss cheese.

In Sing the characters are animals; in Moana, humans. I notice the animals in Sing are more human than the humans in Moana. But I quibble not.

I loved them, and you won’t waste your time, nor is time wasted on you, should you drag your inner or outer child to either or both.

 
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Posted in ACTION ADVENTURE, FAMILY FILM, MAGNIFICENT FEAT DRAMA, MUSICAL NUMBERS, SERIOUS FAIRY TALE, SINGING MUSICAL, SURVIVAL DRAMA, Variety Show

 

La La Land

17 Dec

La La Land – directed and written by Damien Chazelle. Musical Dramedy 128 minutes Color 2016

★★★★★

The Story: A to-be actress and a to-be jazz pianist strive for their callings and their love for one another, both in the big-time.

~

How joyful it is to have a good old fashioned Hollywood musical to top off the Holidays, not the cherry on the sundae, but the sundae itself!

It may be observed that Ryan Gosling is more of a dancer than Emma Stone is and that Emma Stone is more of a singer than Ryan Gosling is, but put them both together and they spell why bother. They’re easy, they’re difficult, we want them to work it out. And will they?

As they go about their business in Los Angeles, where she is a barista on the Warner’s lot, and he is tinkling out dread pop tunes under the baleful gaze of J.T. Simmons, the piano bar restaurant owner, we are treated to massed production numbers played out around swimming pools and on the tops of stalled rush hour cars.

But there are two greater treats in the picture – three if you count Ryan Gosling ‘s miraculous spectator shoes – which he never takes off as the years roll by – and the first of these is a hill-top dance duet which is a masterpiece of simple choreography in concert with two performers caused to be willing to be in such concert that you leave knowing the story has told us, if they don’t quite know it themselves, that they are in love.

The second of these greater treats is a monologue Emma Stone does as an acting audition for a film. I say not one word more about any of this or these.

The film resembles New York, New York, with Emma Stone in the Lisa Minnelli part and Ryan Gosling in the Robert De Niro part, except that Gosling is more convincing as a musician, and, of course, De Niro is never convincing as A New York Jew, either there or in The Last Tycoon. He was and has remained a New York Lower East Side, Little Italy Italian. So, on the level of acting La La Land is the more satisfying picture.

Ryan Gosling is a cold actor. And I like him for it. It suits the cool, hip flat affect of a jazz person, because they’re a lot of them like that. But I like that quality in him anyhow. It reveals a certain ruthlessness of temperament which does not seek approval. Not too many actors get far as cold actors, but some do, and there are some I like a good deal. Barbara Stanwyck was one. Gosling’s face is a mask that reveals everything. Everything that belongs to his part, and nothing besides. I honor him for it every time.

So, do go to see La La Land. Waiting for the show to start, I nipped in to catch the end of Jackie. Six people were in the multiplex. All I can say of what I saw is that Natalie Portman has misconstrued the role and is not talented enough to play it even had she not misconstrued it, that the authors have misconstrued the picture, and that Billy Crudup is a top-flight talent no matter what. La La Land was mostly full and ended up, having gone through some interesting, and difficult passages, with an audience satisfied.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Classic Movie Musical, Dance & Dancing, Emma Stone, J.K. Simmons, Ryan Gosling, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

The Barkleys Of Broadway

23 Jun

The Barkleys Of Broadway – directed by Charles Walters. Musical. 109 minutes Color 1949.

★★★★★

The Story: A renowned Broadway dance couple bicker beautifully until she decides to act in a legitimate play.

~

Charles Walters was one of our best director of musicals. One would say he has no personal style, but his presence is effective in releasing performances in female stars. Judy Garland in Summer Stock, Girl Crazy, Ziegfeld Follies, and Easter Parade. June Allyson in Good News. Leslie Caron in Lili and The Glass Slipper.

What you have here is Ginger Rogers’ return to screen musicals, and this is her last. She’s 38. She’s been playing a lot of tennis. She’s no longer the girl of 22 when she started dancing with Astaire. She’d entered movie stardom as a teenager and she had made many movies; he only a few. She’d been an experienced vaudevillian and had a smash in Girl Crazy on Broadway. She did a great Charleston, but she had no tap, jazz, or comic dancing experience. But she learned so fast she got to make it look easy.

And she sure does so here. But what’s amazing about her is not just her beautiful and flexible back, and her finished porte de bras, or the fact that she had that perfect female movie star figure of broad shoulders and no hips.

What is remarkable about her here is how funny she is.

Keep in mind that musical comedy means that most of the dances and songs of a musical are going to be comic. We think of Rogers and Astaire as dancing those lyric masterpieces of ballroom romantic movement in which they were unsurpassed. But actually, most of the dance in musical is comic dance.

Such as we have here in Astaire’s playing a cobbler whose shoes come alive, in the manner of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, and dance him almost to death. And we also have Rogers dancing with him two light comic numbers. First is taken in rehearsal clothes, and the second is the famous “My One And Only Highland Fling.”

Yes, watch her dance. But also take in her lightening responses to Astaire and to the situation. And watch this while she isn’t dancing.

Behind her skill as an actor is its basis, unusual in a top female star, which is that she is willing to look absurd, to make a fool of herself, to make herself odd. She enjoys herself doing this, and it’s infectious. As much as anything, her gaiety and fluidity of emotion carry the film – a film which is an MGM gem from The Freed unit, its book written by Comden and Green who gave us On The Town, The Bandwagon and Singin’ In The Rain; its music by Harry Warren and Ira Gershwin; and also by Khachaturian and Tchaikovsky – for Oscar Levant is found here for some reason playing The Sabre Dance and The First Piano Concerto.

It’s a wonderful part for Ginger Rogers, because she is playing a married woman, Astaire’s dancing partner and wife. This gives her comic latitude. She doesn’t have to play sardonic hard-to-get, which was the case with their first movies together. Here she is already gotten and so she is open to the wide range of comic response of a woman who knows her man as well as Rogers in their 10 movies together managed to get to know what she could dare with Astaire.

It’s a must-see musical, the only they ever did together in color. A delight.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Classic Movie Musical, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Oscar Levant, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Damn Yankees

30 Mar

Damn Yankees – directed by George Abbott and Stanley Donen. Sports Musical. 1 hour 51 minutes, Color 1959

★★★★

The Story: A baseball nut sells his soul to the Devil so the lame Washington team can win the pennant against The Yankees but then the Devil must set a grande horizontale to sabotage the magical home-run hitter he created to achieve it.

~

In the theater, it was originally conceived by its choreographer as a dance vehicle for his wife Gwen Verdon, and it remains that in the film.

Verdon had phenomenal ability as a show dancer, and she also had the rarer ability of being able to sing while she danced.

In her big successes, Sweet Charity, Chicago, Redhead, and here and after, however, you see her playing women who are not quite real. That is to say, the delivery of their lines suggest that her acting ability is less than her ability to dance, and that its naïve emotional range is not personal, or rather, not normal.

As a dancer of comic and specialty numbers, Verdon is without parallel, however. She was never to be a movie star, because emotionally she is a stage star. Broadway is her true milieu, her nation, the land of her birth. Her acting style is too broad and too backstage for film. If you set her next to Betty Grable, who was herself a deft comic dancer, and who danced with Verdon in movies, you can see that Grable’s acting dimension is perfectly suited to film. In movies, you don’t have to have a large Broadway style, like Verdon’s, because the screen is already large. Screen size is its actor’s projection. On Broadway you excused such acting as Verdon’s as a musical comedy convention and because her dance feats were actually taking place before your very eyes at that moment.

The show of dance as an art is not subtle; its subtlety is always telegraphed; you cannot mistake it. So Verdon’s big projection as a dancer does not stand in our way. Unlike her acting, its excesses are natural to dance, and Verdon achieves the comic feat of the dances with a suppleness, naturalness, and ease that is amazing.

The dances of course, are garish. They are all by Bob Fosse, who choreographed Verdon’s Broadway shows, of which this was one. Tight, tense choreography is his earmark; whatever he has borrowed from Cole and Kidd has been given its dose of Novocain. And here he even appears dancing with Verdon in Who Feels The Pain When They Do The Mambo? – a famous duet from the Broadway show, brilliantly executed here. However, she is the one you will watch, because she is so alive. He is too, but she more so.

Many of the actors from the Broadway Show are here, too, and the film welcomes their experience and talent. The reason it does is that there are five important singing parts for performers over fifty, from Jean Stapleton to Ray Walston who plays the devil. Their abilities with these parts being already in place make them essential to the integrity of the film, and we are fortunate to have them brought over. They lend a coherence that the direction of the piece lacks.

George Abbott, its Broadway author and director, is also brought over, and one wonders what he thinks he is doing here. He directs certain numbers exactly as they were directed on stage; you can tell this because there is no other reason why a great song like Ya Gotta Have Heart should fall flat. Stanley Donen, director of Singing In The Rain fortunately is co-director, and one suspects he directed the only parts of the film that work. In addition, the directorial storytelling style is triply uneven because the movie is so much a dance musical and Fosse predominates. Three different styles. Nothing holds the film together.

But there is an element that carries the film – and that is the presence of Tab Hunter as the athlete of the devil’s doing. He is perfectly cast. First because he was a superb athlete in his real life. Second because his great physical beauty works as a devil’s creation. But most of all because his natural modesty about himself is so beguiling that you can easily get behind him as the focal point of the story.

Tab Hunter’s ability as an actor grew with time in the craft. He is one of the great learners. He learned voice-placement, projection, truth. By the time of Damn Yankees you have no trouble accepting him as a good actor. He, quite rightly, was the biggest star on the Warner lot at this time.

The film is the best record we have of the uncanny ability of Gwen Verdon as a dancer, and anyone interested in great dancing will have a lot of fun seeing her strut her stuff. Talk about facility! Talk about dance energy! Talk about technique. She was a national treasure and a wonder of nature. She was litheness incarnate.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Dance & Dancing, DIRECTED BY: Stanley Donen, Gwen Verdon, MUSICAL, Singing & Dancng Musical, Tab Hunter

 

Magic Mike

10 Aug

Magic Mike – directed by Steven Soderbergh. Backstage Stripshow. 110 minutes Color 2012

★★★

The Story: Experienced male strippers introduce a teenager to their chorus.

~

We haven’t got much story here. And the teenage lad is not a performer of much interest. But that’s not the problem.

The problem lies with the director’s penchant for dialogue improvisation, with the notion in his noggin that improvisation produces an effect, if not the reality, of natural spontaneity. What it actually produces is a baroque elaboration of painful discursiveness. The décor of the palace of Versailles is a final resting place for the over-complicated. Improvisation generally leads to splashing around in the shallows. Its effect is arch, longwinded, and spurious. It enervates drama. And it does not allow the audience to reveal human nature any farther than a raindrop’s circles in a puddle.

The effect on this material is that it attenuates the material beyond necessity, style, or stretching point. The result: so much time is wasted by the halting of scenes with their improvisation that there is hardly a story at all.

It doesn’t matter that a very good actor, Channing Tatum, is called upon to engage in it. In natural, real life people come into big dramatic scenes knowing their feeling exactly. Whatever hems and haws it takes to arrive at their utterance are over once over. Underlying the style lies a disgraceful bid for sympathy.

The annoyance of the inappropriateness of this style of directing – for which Soderburgh is renown – is remedied in part by the garish dancing of the men, particularly Tatum, whose métier this world once was. He is astonishing to behold.

It is also salvaged in part by the verve of Matthew McConaughey, playing the strip club owner.  As an actor, his application to the moment is admirable, and just what’s needed to play a character living on a racket. His seizure of every actor on stage with his attention enlivens every scene he is in. He is an actor of great wit, as well, which means he is quick enough and willing enough to play a character where he can make the joke be on himself.

The sequel, Magic Mike XXL, is better. For one thing, it has a story. It also has more interesting women. In Magic Mike all we have is Tatum’s leading leady, a pill. In Magic Mike XXL we have Andie McDowell and Jada Pinkett-Smith, both brilliant, both fascinating, both fun. The dancing more than carries both films, but in Magic Mike the only reason to revisit the film is the dancing itself. None of which is improvised.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Backstage Musical, Channing Tatum, Dance & Dancing, Matthew McConaughey

 

Magic Mike XXL

31 Jul

Magic Mike XXL – directed by Gregory Jacobs. Comedrama. 115 minutes Color 2015.

★★★★★

The Story: A gaggle of male strippers veers to Florida for a grand finale to their careers.

~

A picaresque backstage musical – or perhaps we should say buttstage musical – or backside musical. For Channing Tatum when he drops his drawers sure is callipygian.

But don’t expect no full Monties here. Their private personalities remain studiously reserved behind sequined pouches. And this puts the show on a different footing from what actual male stripper shows offer, which is pornography in the flesh. Pornography is unearned nudity. The price of admission to this movie does not include this on the menu.

Instead, we get a level of comedy, drama, and human interest of a parallel order, not too distant from smut, fortunately, because what’s low-down in life may have the robustness of its own vulgarity to recommend it and can be a lot of fun to boot.

The boys are aging burlesque kings. They have exhausted their talents, mislaid them, or mis-apprised them. So the drama consists of their getting their acts together in such a way that each of those acts becomes truly personal to each performer.

In a pal’s taco truck, they make a journey down the East Coast to The Big Florida Competition. On their way they take a detour or two.

One of them is the plantation of a free wheeling widow, gorgeously played by Andie McDowell. She allows herself a flutter with the title character, XXL, an Adonis, saddened because so overly endowed that no woman has ever quite fitted him.

Another detour spots the fellows in a sex club run by Jada Pinkett Smith – and, if for no other reason, the film is worth seeing because of her. She’s the former doyenne of Tatum. She carries a torch. She also operates an establishment in which all the women are treated to male-flesh danced before them in tribute to their wildest dreams. Smith’s creation of her relation to Tatum is something to behold, the space she seizes for the character to operate in and be known is a lesson in acting command and dignity. I’m going to see the film again just to watch her make room for herself.

To watch her character be wrong, and the actress dare to let this happen. You’ll see.

Anyhow. she plays a great big part in the film. Jada Pinkett Smith is clearly an actor who should be declared a National Park. Yellowstone The Black Canyon Of The Gunnison, Jada Pinkett Smith – we must preserve these treasures with our attention.

Leading this troupe into the dance lists of Florida is Channing Tatum, who at 35 is a ripe fig about to fall. So this film comes at just the right moment for him.

Two things make him good. The first is that he is a natural dancer – a talent demonstrated at the start when, although well established in a new career, he first hears of the Florida completion, and tosses his body into the nostalgic moves.

The second thing is that he is an excellent natural actor, having learned his craft through a bunch of films. His endowment consists of a sensibility which is fluid, responsive, witty, open. He’s so good looking you might think he’s not worth watching, but his face is more interesting than handsome, but flexible and alive, because the actor himself is these things.

I am not turned on by burlesque, male or female. But, male chauvinism be-damned, one of the aspects women love in males is the sexual rooster. Here these males preen it in their gaudiest feathers.

And perhaps the dances these blokes do in the faces of all these ladies are really no more than valentines to honor the sexual liberty every creature has a right to. The prig, the prude, and the puritan have their place in this world. But so does the God Priapus. For, if this film is any indication, the God Priapus has a much better sense of humor.

 

 

 
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Posted in Andie McDowell, Channing Tatum, Jada Pinkett Smith, MUSICAL NUMBERS

 

Ted 2

27 Jun

Ted 2 – directed by Seth MacFarlane. Lowbrow Comedy. 115 minutes Color 2015.

★★★★★

The Story: A living Teddy Bear denied his human rights, takes it to the law of the land.

~

This is perfect material for Mark Wahlberg. It’s a home-town lower-class Boston bachelor–buddy comedy. In this one, one of the bachelors is a foul-mouthed Teddy bear.

So it’s a Buddy Movie, and the premise of the film is that the Teddy Bear is deemed not a person but a property. This leads to convolutions which it is not my place as a sober person to relate to you. But the real fun lies in passing moves of charm and energy and dim wit, and the playing of Mark Wahlberg, an actor whose work I never tire of seeing.

He plays a character who must be ready for anything, and he is never off base, never overstates, never sucks a scene dry, never falters. He is right there in each of the zillion ways his moments require. It is interesting to see an actor at work in a comedy who is himself not funny, but can so fully invest himself in having a good time; it is even better.

The picture opens today, the very day The Supreme Court finds in favor of same-sex marriage, and it is on the instant. For the case before the courts here is exactly the same as that before the courts in Ted. The question is not whether the Teddy Bear can have sex and conceive children. He cannot. He is married to a mortal, however– although at a crucial point his marriage is judged unlawful. The question is, despite his appearance and label, is he a human being?

The very lawyer to argue his case is, of course, played by Morgan Freeman, the least lower-class person you know.

But on the way to this denouement we have many a jest and jape and gaucherie. The funniest of these consists of Liam Neeson at Ted’s supermarket checkout counter purchasing a Box of Trix Breakfast Cereal. For once, Ted is straightman. Neeson, playing A Man Of International Intrigue, grills Ted in whispers about the propriety and legality of himself buying a cereal designated for Kids. Neeson creates a delicious moment of high tension as he knows so well how to do. Every line he says is funny.

Another delight is the law library ballet, and a third is Astaire takeoff on “Stepping Out with My Baby,” a delirious production number that reassures one that Hollywood can still make a musical ­– which this is not, save for a sweet ballad sung half-way through.

I like low comedy. But there are so many of them, I simply miss them all. I didn’t go expecting beefsteak. I expected a frank and beans, and that’s what I got.

 

 

 
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Posted in BROAD COMEDY, Dance & Dancing, John Slattery, Mark Wahlberg

 

Annie

16 Jan

Annie – directed and written by Will Gluck. Musical. 118 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story: An orphan becomes publicizable as a prop to a politician’s election.

~

In silent film there was a lot of noise. People on the screen were talking all the time. The most famous film stars whose work we see nowadays were mimes: Harold Lloyd, Harry Langdon, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, but most films then involved dialogue. In dramas, melodramas, westerns, and straight comedies, there was lots of words exchanged, and always lots of music from the piano player in front of the audience, following sheet music written to ornament the scenes. Of course, you couldn’t hear a word anyone said.

Annie is just like that. When they are singing, you can’t hear a word anyone said. Oh, a word may drift into intelligibility from time to time, but for the most part, the singers are as mute as Mary Pickford. The orchestrations crush them. The booming sound system of the multiplex cooks them to death.

So what I did, and I counsel you to do the same, is to sit back into the inevitable and enjoy yourself.

For there is much to enjoy. Having to set aside the songs and the music, one expects to see a dance musical, but to call the dancing dance is to misapply strutting for choreography. It is not a dance musical. It is a prance musical.

But as such it is imaginative and entertaining. The prancing is original and daring and fun. Everyone is good at it. And once you get the gist of it from a song’s title, everything fits in real good. I would almost say it’s the most entertaining thing about Annie.

Except we have a couple of delightful players up there. Two people who belong in film work like anything! Two people the rest of us humans pay willingly to just to watch. Two humans we want to get close to because they have so much human juice available to them. Two naturally gifted entertainers.

The one is Mr, Jamie Foxx. The other is the inestimable Quvenzhané Wallis, whom we were privileged first to meet in Beasts Of The Southern Wild. She’s just entrancing. She is a great star. She will led the nation to freedom. But only if she never reads this. She is about 10.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Cameron Diaz, Jamie Foxx, MUSICAL NUMBERS, Quvenzhané Wallis, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Into The Woods

04 Jan

Into The Woods – directed by Rob Marshall. Musical. 125 minutes Color 2014.

★★★★

The Story: In art, all woods are The Woods Of Error. Here, Little Red Riding Hood, The Miller and His Wife, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Jack and the Beanstalk stumble into one another’s stories in the woods in order to lift the curses of their various character traits.

~

It’s so unevenly cast that I didn’t know what to do with it. Then I just sat back in my seat and decided to let it wash over me. After all, here I was being presented with a great big dolloping Hollywood musical: just my dish of tea.

What’s wrong with it is that some of the principles seemed not belonging in a musical at all. Actors who might be able to sing, as opposed to singers who might be able to act. No dancers in sight. That sort of thing. I name no names. It’s too late for that.

What’s good about it is the rampant artificiality of the sets. What’s not so good is that one senses the two brothers who sing on a waterfall appear to have been filmed somewhere else and then stuck onto the cascade like paper dolls. They relate neither to the water nor to the peril of their situation. What’s good about it is that the two young men sing a song of the agony of frustrated love wonderfully.

What’s bad about it is Steven Sondheim’s hardened acidity, a quality which has etched away melody from his songs and left him with utilitarian recitatives, systems of music he can open like bureau drawers and put some new words into. (He used the same music in A Little Night Music.) His songs have no song. What’s good about it is that if the words are sometimes too witty to go anywhere inside you, they are matchless in their dexterity, which like a rapid game of badminton, is fun to watch – or rather hear.

What’s good about it is the complicity with which the plots of the story intersect and feed one another. What’s bad about it is that the stories eventually over-complicate.

What’s good about it is that happily-forever-after is just a trope to close down a tale, not an oracle of future bliss. For what’s bad about it is that, once we reach that point, the movie extends itself into unhappily-ever-after. Plot developments then wreck the use of fairy tales. Fairy tales are psychologically profound without the intrusion of a realism inapt to their own decorums.

What’s good about it is that it’s delightful to meet the old friends of these tales. What’s bad about it as that towards the end one wishes they would pick up their skirts and dash for the finish line.

I loved Daniel Huttlestone as Jack and Johnny Depp as The Wolf. I like mischief. I liked the intimacy and realism of Meryl Streep’s witch singing of motherhood to Rapunzel. I wished the story’s director had rationed her trick of goosing the story up by sudden magical appearances out of nowhere.

But I didn’t let any of this bother me at the time. Or only a little. I watched. As I say, I let it wash over me. I shall go to the theatre to see it again – or rather to listen to it again. I say all this to encourage you to go also. But be warned in advance. Gird yourself. The fractured fairy tale does become compound.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Johnny Depp, Meryl Streep: ACTING GODDESS, SINGING MUSICAL

 

Orchestra Wives

05 Nov

Orchestra Wives – directed by Achie Mayo. Back Bandstand Musical. 98 minutes Black And White 1942.

★★★★

The Story: A young woman marries a trumpet player with a touring band and lasts.

~

If you want to see The Glenn Miller Band in full force in one of the two movies Miller made before he died in WWII, here you have it and him. He’s a good actor, and the band is allowed to play their full versions of big hits such as “I’ve Got A Gal In Kalamazoo.” This is the grand finale, and it’s placed there because it is performed by a dance act which no other act ever could follow. That is to say, of course, that is danced by the Nicholas Brothers. Ann Rutherford, into her nineties, reminisces about the shooting of this sequence. She says you could not fit a sardine into the sound stage when they shot it; everyone on the lot came to watch. Fayard Nicholas tells how Daryl F. Zanuck would come down and watch rehearsals, and how Fayard was worried to show him an unfinished piece, but Zanuck said he wasn’t concerned because The Nicholas Brothers always did good work for him.

They sure do it here. And The Fox Contract Player Treasure Chest is opened up to reveal the presence of Gale Evans, Harry Morgan, and Jackie Gleason – none of them even credited, for some reason. Another group of contract players just above them at the time, Mary Beth Hughes, Virginia Gilmore, and Carole Landis play bitches, opposite the super bitch Lynn Bari. Cesar Romero in impeccable suits plays the smarmy but ever-affable piano player of the band chased by alimony-hungry wives, and that excellent actor Grant Mitchell plays the father of the heroine of the tale.

She falls under the spell of the trumpet playing and gorgeous masculinity of George Montgomery. He had a face, unlike Carole Landis’; his is filmable at any angle and in any light. To humanize his looks, they do have a character eccentricity to them, and he does not look well in hats.

Opposite him and playing the leading role is Ann Rutherford. She is not an actor who can carry a film any further than apple pie can carry a banquet. She plays her attraction to Montgomery as a form of coma. The sexual eagerness which all the other orchestra wives have for him is circumcised from her performance, and so the film sags when her character lies in the accustomed comforts of such a film.

But the film comes back to full life when the songs by Harry Warren and Mack Gordon are sung. They are wonderful songs: “Serenade In Blue,” “People Like You And Me,” “Bugle Call Rag,” and the really great, “At Last.” These are sung by the stars of the Miller band, Ray Eberle and the saxophonist Tex Beneke, The Mondernaires, and Marion Hutton, who looks so much like her sister Betty Hutton, you’d find it distracting were she not so good. If all this is not sufficient, adding one more notch to your collection of the Nicholas Brothers’ film work will be.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Ann Rutherford, Backstage Musical, Carole Landis, Cesar Romero, FOX MUSICAL, George Montgomery, Glenn Miller, Grant Mitchell, Harry Morgan, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jackie Gleason, Lynn Bari, The Nicholas Brothers, World War II

 

Mame

04 Nov

Mame — directed by Gene Saks. Musical.  132 minutes Color 1974.

★★

The Story: A free-thinking New York sophisticate suddenly becomes the guardian of her eight year old nephew.

~

This is the musical version of Auntie Mame, a play which Rosalind Russell made her own and which she was too ill to make the musical of. A shame. Because Lucille Ball plays it here, and she is importantly miscast. Rosalind Russell had hidden weapons. Lucy’s weapons are pasted all over her. Auntie Mame is a highball. Lucille Ball is beer.

Lucille Ball is in her early sixties when she does this, which would have been all right, but, because she desired not to look what she is, she is horrible to behold! The plastic surgeons have mummified her. The wigmakers have stretched her skull skin up into a ponytail. The spectacle of her face, a puss which we have all found endearing, and which has been the chief tool of her outer clown, has resulted in Lucille Ball playing the entire part in a Lucille Ball mask. It’s so sad. It’s so unnecessary. And it is unwatchable.

When you look away from the star, which is the only sane counsel, you may notice Bea Arthur playing a sort of Tallulah Bankhead, as Mame’s best friend. But she isn’t given enough camera time, and when she is, the writing is too broad and the direction broader. The last part of the story doesn’t work. It never did work. It was too bad mannered.

It is pleasant to see Bruce Davidson as the boy grown up, and John McGiver as the stuffy guardian (we actually tend to sympathize with). And eventually the proceedings are given a shot in the arm by the zest of Robert Preston who sings and dances and steals the show, right and left. What investment he had, what wit, what genuine virility. He departs midway.

The songs are good but they are laid waste by over production, as are the sets and costumes. Beekman Place apartments never looked anything like Mame’s. They are much more interesting, and, had one of them been approximated, its confines would have lent pressure and force to the songs, which are pretty good. Beekman Place had taste. And a certain kind of taste, for it was and is a co-op for millionaires. Built in 1929 Beekman Place refers to this structure, rather than the neighborhood around it. The Rockefellers, Aly Kahn, and Huntington Hartford lived there. And, it was built after The Crash which takes place in all versions of Mame, the first of many anomalies, good taste being the first, from which the sets are eon light years away.

But never mind that. Never mind the movie either. I wish its composer had been better served. I wish we all had been better served. With a Manhattan, which was what was on order, instead of Blatz.

 

 
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Posted in 1930s, Bea Arthur, Bruce Davidson, John McGiver, Lucille Ball, Robert Preston: acting god, SCREWBALL COMEDY, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Nine

22 Oct

Nine – Directed by Rob Marshall. Soundstage Musical. 2009 COlor 118 minutes.

★★★★

The Story: A film director puts off everyone as his film goes into production, but he can’t admit he has no script.

~

Daniel Day-Lewis stars in this musical in which one cannot say he dances any more than a monkey might, for his strong body is put to musical acrobatic uses, and perhaps he has two left feet. The dancing and the singing are left up to the cherishable skills of Marion Cotillard, Penèlope Cruz, Fergie, Kate Hudson, Judi Dench, Nicole Kidman, and Sophia Loren. Who could ask for anything more?

Not I. The dances are super-duper and the songs are fun. Judi Dench is a musical comedy singer from way back, and does a wicked Follies Bergère number with a mile long boa. Fergie in a wilderness of hair that somewhat unnecessarily masks her interesting face reviews her philosophy of Italian love in a wild song and dance. Kate Hudson plays an American reporter who does a big witty number about Italian Cinema.

For the musical is about the block Day-Lewis has in writing his next musical. All the women pose delays, distractions, denials. And in the end Nicole Kidman writes his new film off because he cannot show anyone a script. He is impotent. She sings goodbye to him.

What starts with Penèlope Cruz performing a hot comic turn as his mistress winds up with Sophia Loren singing him a lullaby to reform – no two actresses have resembled one another in film history more than these.

One would not question the execution of this material. One might question the strength of the source of this material. For it devolves from Fellini’s 8 1/2, which is about a similar predicament for a director. It starred Marcello Mastroianni. Mastroianni is an interior sort of actor, the kind that doesn’t move much, and the story of impotence is too navel-gazing to move me much either. Both seem weak. And Day-Lewis is cast in and plays the part along the lines of Mastroianni also. His opening scene where he lies to the press is his funniest, and it also displays his Italian accent and manner ruthlessly.

No, it is neither he nor the story that carry the film, but the women, their exuberance, their talent, and the dances in which the choreographer has put them to use.

I liked it. I didn’t think I would. But I like it. Because I liked these women, their sauciness, their independence, their smart take, their beauty, their agility, their out-front-ness, and the talent in each of them whose bigness warrants their being up there before me. They gave me their all and I took it for the plenty it was worth.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, ACTING STYLE: INTERNATIONAL REALISTIC, ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Backstage Musical, Judi Dench, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard, Nicole Kidman: SCREEN GODDESS, Penelope Cruz, Singing & Dancng Musical, Sophia Loren: SCREEN GODDESS

 

Sweet Charity

15 Sep

Sweet Charity — choreographed and directed by Bob Fosse. Musical. 147 minutes Color 1969.

★★★★★

The Story: A good-time but naïve dime-a-dance girl hopes for a better life and falls into many comic and confusing situations.

~

Shirley MacLaine is not an actor I much like, and so I keep waiting for her make a misstep here, and then I stop waiting, because she is really remarkable as this cockeyed optimist girl who continually finds herself outclassed by the men she stumbles onto.

To perform it the actress might play off of her own innocence as Giulietta Masina did in the part which was written for her, in her husband Federico Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and play it as a charming, ingrown, shy, child, which worked real well for Masina.

Or what Gwen Verdon did which was to play it with Broadway-patented false naiveté, which would have been workman-like and freed her for the dance marathon her husband Bob Fosse created for her in the part.

Or the actor would play her as a raving extrovert, dancing down the street with glee, and speaking her mind as she sees it wherever she lands. This it seems to me is by far the more dangerous of the two possible approaches. And MacLaine negotiates its perils easily.

She was at that stage in her work that she understood something about screen acting which she has since forgotten or dismissed, which is the virtue of being unforced. So everything that comes out of her mouth, onto her face, and off of her body registers as honest, sudden, unpredicted. Whatever she does is right, and often unexpectedly funny.

MacLaine was never a musical vocalist; one doesn’t go to her for that. But she more than sells the songs on the surfboard of her enthusiasm, projection, and physical investment. As a dancer, she is right up there with the phenomenal Chita Rivera and Paula Kelly.

The result of all of this is that she is highly entertaining throughout. And since the work is focused on her solely, since she is in every scene, both our eye and the camera are justified by being on her every minute.

Except for “Big Spender” Cy Coleman’s score lacks lyrical interest, but Dorothy Field’s lyrics supply the deficiency. Neil Simon’s book is drawn out unduly, and the choreographic showcase, which it is, extends the film even into the realm of a parody of New Age spirituality, with Sammy Davis Junior miscast as a guru and inadequately used even then. It’s cluttered and advances the story not an inch.

Nonetheless, Fosse is a master of sleazy choreography. And his directorial manner is striking. The film sustains itself with MacLaine, Fosse, and most important with Robert Surtees who filmed it so magnificently he proved that nothing can date a masterpiece.

 
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Posted in HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Ricardo Montalban, Sammy Davis Junior, Shirley MacLaine, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Two Weeks With Love

10 Sep

Two Weeks With Love – directed by Roy Rowland. Period Musical. 92 minutes 1950.

★★★★

Jane Powell is 21 here, playing a 17-year-old who desires to grow up.

Up is where Powell would never grow, because she is 5’1” and doomed to play shrimps. Her perfectly convincing 12 year-old younger sister is so because she is 5’2” and is played by Debbie Reynolds, aged 19, also a shrimp.

Personettes. Movies are full of them. Gloria Swanson, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, James Cagney, Joe Pesci, et al: tiny dynamos all.

Most of the musicals of this era are somewhat flaccid of plot, but they each usually have one marvelous number in them. And this one has Debbie Reynolds singing “Abba-Dabba Honeymoon.” It’s the number that made her famous and funneled her into Singing In The Rain. She joins cheeks to duet it with Carleton Carpenter and knocks it out of the park. There is a lot more to be said about Debbie Reynolds’ gifts and give than her first name has so far permitted.

The story is the same old strain on our credulity as so many other Powell films in which she is a sweet young thing in love with a man way out of her age range and class.

Here he is played by Ricardo Montalban, who is only 30 but is a man of such aplomb as to be almost on the level of Louis Calhern who plays Powell’s father.

Ricardo Montalban was an actor who could turn a thankless role into an occasion for our gratitude. If you compare him to the ill-natured Edmund Purdom in Powell’s Athena, you will see why we are so lucky to have Montalban before us here. But the idea of his marrying Powell is as inconceivable as a nightingale wedding an elk. We swallow this pill in order to get to the good parts. And all the musical matter is delightful, as is the ice-cream soda style of the film as a whole.

It does not seem strange to me that these musical are on DVD now and that people are seeing them for the first time. It isn’t nostalgia that causes it, and it isn’t scholarship, and it isn’t because they are classic, because they’re not; they’re simply of their period. It is because they remain entertainments as simple and pleasing as they were ever meant to be. These are not musicals about the horrors, or social and sexual mores, or a moment of history, and they are not sophisticated musicals, although they often include highly talented and sophisticated people. They are as easy to take as the ice-cream soda mentioned above. You don’t need to remember them. They’re not meant to stick to your ribs, any more than an ice-cream soda is.

They’re popular because ice-cream sodas never go out of style.

 
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Posted in Ann Harding, Backstage Country Dramatic Musical, Debbie Reynolds, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jane Powell, Louis Calhern, Ricardo Montalban, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Begin Again

11 Aug

Begin Again – directed by John Carney. Showbiz Musical. 104 minutes Color 2014.

★★★

The Story: A record producer hitting bottom discovers a singer of uncertain talent.

~

“Why doesn’t that young woman have her teeth fixed?” is my mantra watching Keira Knightley, and it comes up every time her acting fails her, which is half the time. Otherwise I watch her with surprise that she has any talent at all and with admiration for it when it arises.

The problem lies with over-writing, a common flaw with a writer/director. They never know when to cut the dialogue. There’s some very good stuff in this script, but every word is not a darling. A good example of this is a brilliantly directed scene brilliantly played by Knightley when her singer/boyfriend comes back to New York from a trip to LA and sings a song he wrote while away. It slowly dawns on her that he has been unfaithful. Without a word, the look in her eyes tells the story, and is the only story we need told. She boxes his ear. It’s enough. But no. The banalities start: “It just happened,” and so forth.

Another error is that this boyfriend returns to the story, too late to reengage our interest in him, if it was ever engaged, which it probably was not, because it is played by Adam Levine who is too perfectly cast as self-centered. Again, as the credits roll, the director continues the denouement of the story in a way that is both unnecessary and distracting from the honor owed to those on those credits.

Knightley’s character begins interestingly, as a diffident, sharp-tongued young songwriter, and at first this is so well rendered by Knightley, we actually imagine we are presented with a character. But the script fails her, and she is left, as are we, with an actress having to come up with something. Sometimes she’s pretty good at it. Other times not.

Eventually what she has to come up with is the singing of songs, which she does in a sweet small voice. The difficulty is that the songs by her and Levine are sung with such poor enunciation one cannot make out the words, and, the melodies being undistinguished, the words are where the action is supposed to be. For the punch of the story supposedly lies in the brilliance of these songs. It’s not my sort of music anyhow.

Mark Ruffalo’s acting contained his customary riffs and ruffs and a beard, which is an error of histrionics. He is a leading man whose face you cannot really see. Otherwise he is fine; the script supports him when he is, when it doesn’t he fails. But the ad hoc working up of the demo disc in New York locales is a lot of fun, and so is James Corden as Knightley’s sidekick, Cee Lo Green as an old crony of Ruffalo, Mos Def as his business partner, Hailee Steinfeld as his wayward daughter, and Catherine Keener as his diffident, sharp-tongued wife.

I liked the ending. There was applause when it came. But me? – I didn’t get no satisfaction. Try it. See what you think.

 
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Posted in Backstage Musical, Catherine Keener, Keira Knightley, Mark Ruffalo, SINGING MUSICAL

 

Small Town Girl

01 Aug

Small Town Girl – directed by László Kardos. Musical. 92 minutes Color 1953.

★★★★

The Story: A small town girl acts forbidding to a passing socialite jailed for speeding, until she lets him out of his jail and herself out of her own.

~

Competent directors of musicals of that era were somewhat discounted, but this is a well directed picture. It tracks through a half dozen different movie musical modes, the night club, the town square ho-down, the smash Broadway production number, the jig on the street, the church solo, and so forth, yet all of them are cohesive with the film as a whole.

Jane Powell remarks in her autobiography: “I was mostly in pictures set in sunny climates…. It makes everybody look better, and more romantic, and it makes everybody happy, particularly audiences who live in cold climates.” There is a good deal of plain truth to her observation, and the hot lights Technicolor required in those days also work to produce that sunshine to illuminate a small town no larger than Culver City.

Duck Town is the town into which speeds a snooty socialite played by Farley Granger. His spoiled, lubricious face fits the part, a part which becomes more fun as he plays off the gullibility of Chill Wills, the local constable. We warm up to him.

Granger is affianced to the Broadway musical star Ann Miller plays. She spins about in circles like a mosquito, this time upon a carpet of disembodied musical instruments. It’s sensational. Busby Berkeley choreographed, of course.

Even more sensational is the dancing of Bobby Van. Van appeared and disappeared  like a mushroom overnight. And the reason is simple. He was a spectacular specialty dancer along the lines of Ray Bolger and Dan Dailey and Dick Van Dyke, gangly, lithe, and homely. He might have gone on to a career, but, when Louis B. Mayer left MGM, the new management was not interested in musicals any more, and, besides, Van spoke with a pronounced Bronx accent such that no fancy footwork could drown.

But whenever he is dancing we watch his talent with wonder and appreciation. At one point he performs a seven minute number in which he simply hops right through the town. What he wants to do is move onto the big time, although his father, S.Z. Sakal doesn’t see it that way. Perhaps because he might, like us, meet Nat King Cole singing there.

Powell sings with her usual gleam of eye and voice. Here she is no longer a teenager, but a proper young lady and about time too. Her underlying quality of righteous authority plays through the perky daisies of her doily, and gives a likeable because recognizable resonance and ground to her. Before Powell had always wanted to be liked, which didn’t quite work, because we already wanted to like her. Now things are simpler. And better.

It’s a bright accomplished musical suitable for the whole family, and anybody who might drift by.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Ann Miller, Billie Burke, Classic Movie Musical, Farley Granger, Jane Powell, S.J.Sakall, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Holiday In Mexico

20 Jul

Holiday In Mexico – directed by George Sidney. Musical. 128 minutes Color 1946.

★★★★

The Story: The daughter of the ambassador to Mexico convinces herself into an imbroglio and then sings her way out of it.

~

Jane Powell’s first film at MGM which produced, let’s say overproduced, ten years of her subsequent films. These were the sort of films one stayed away from in the dull days of DDI. Those were the times when The American Dream was just invented. It consisted then as now of two things: a tract home and golf. And that demented fiction: The Girl Next Door. Taken over from Dianna Durbin and Judy Garland, this presented the American teen-age lass as sparkling, as jolly, and as virginal as an icecream soda.

Jane Powell began very good at this, except that she not only plays characters who are irritating but she also is so. And she is so because, at this point in her development, everything she does as an actor is pat. It is new but it is never fresh, which makes it shiny but conventional. For she is never in the moment. She on top of the moment as one might be said to be on top of a carousel horse. So, while her responses are always on the money, they come out as miniature mugging. She’s not riding a real horse.

Three kinds of acting are on display here, and they are wonderful to behold in juxtaposition. Next to Powell as her father is that master of imperturbability, Walter Pidgeon. He is riding a real horse. He never brings anything new but everything he does is fresh, so it looks new. Everything he does belongs to him. Nothing is forced. Everything is right. He is easy in his craft. He has presence. He has bearing. He has humor about himself and others. His alias is Aplomb. He is completely responsive to the actors opposite him. And at the end he gives one of the most beautifully delivered, down-to-earth tablecloth speeches I have ever heard an actor negotiate.

The speech is good also because it’s well-written, although the same may not be said for the scenario as a whole, which involves our Jane, aged fifteen, running after José Iturbi, a grandfather. We won’t go into it. It is a wonder Xavier Cugat himself does not go after her; he was said to have an eye for Chihuahuas and nymphets. Chihuahuas and nymphets? Actually they’re both the same thing.

In the third kind of acting, Mikhail Rasumny, plays a Russian Ambassador whose daughter has fallen for Pidgeon. What was going on in The Moscow Art Theatre at that time had nothing to do with Lee Strasburg. This is brilliant prototypical comic Russian acting. Don’t miss it. One scene. He’s hilarious. A masterwork of its type. A lesson in the craft.

To say the film is a holiday is bunko; it is not a holiday; they are in residence – which is no more Mexican than the MGM backlot. And Cugat and Iturbi were Spanish.

Yet the whole business is beautifully produced and costumed and directed. And Iturbi’s piano numbers are a lot of fun to watch. As is the finale – where they all appear in a outdoor concert with our Jane singing Ave Maria (written by an Austrian) in an open air arena the size of Arizona.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jane Powell, José Iturbi, Roddy MacDowell, SINGING MUSICAL, Walter Pidgeon, Xavier Cugat

 

Nancy Goes To Rio

15 Jul

Nancy Goes To Rio – directed by Robert Z. Leonard. Backstage Musical. 100 minutes, Color 1950.

★★★★★

The Story: A great musical stage star’s daughter is given the part her mother is supposed to play, leading to many complications.

~

The costumes by Helen Rose which exploit The New Look, the settings by Gibbons and Smith, the hairstyles by Sydney Guillaroff, the set decoration by Edwin B. Willis are as fabulous as the makeup that pinks every pore of the leading ladies’ cheeks. Each production-value detail is given full focus, every color full registration, every sequin stardom. The dictum insisting that everything show is the earmark of true vulgarity. It is one typical to this studio. MGM, and it is mighty entertaining.

For the costumes are super-duper and the apartments are fabulous. As fabulous as the ever-sedate Carmen Miranda’s hat of 30,000 tiny open umbrellas.

The movie takes us to Rio, one supposes because Carmen Miranda was a contract player and she had to be used. She has red hair here and she is wonderful as always, with lightning-flash eyes and a smile as wide and gaudy as all Brazil. This was to be the last film in her MGM contract, and it was also the last in that of Ann Sothern, and the last film in which Jane Powell would contrive to appear as a teenager.

At twenty-one she is quite convincing as a seventeen year old hoyden. She plays and somewhat overplays one of those young thespians who performs real life as Drama. But she is very good to be with. She has that combination of a righteous center with a giving humor that Katharine Hepburn had her own version of. It gives Jane Powell’s playing solid ground – but with a playground on it. In her glassy soprano she sings Gershwin and she sings Puccini. She’s laid back as a singer, never forcing, focused on her tiny body and keeping that sparkle going in her generous blue eyes.

The film is a form of entertainment that probably killed MGM before long, reflecting as it did the dangerously influential unrealistic American family values of Louis B. Mayer — a continuation in Technicolor of the Andy Hardy/Judy Garland musicals of a few years before. It is a masterpiece of the expertise of artificiality.

I was also seventeen when this came out, and I took care not to go. Now, I sit back and enjoy the false virginity of MGM. Neat production numbers, a variety of songs, and a not-to-be-missed scene with Barry Sullivan and master actor Sig Arno as a waiter. Glen Anders is also on view. But one of my real reasons for watching it was the presence in it of that magnifico Louis Calhern. This was his year: he introduced Marilyn Monroe in Asphalt Jungle. (Monroe was best opposite much older men, and she had the greatest character actors in films to prove that true, Charles Laughton, Charles Coburn, and Calhern.) Calhern was an actor of insuperable finesse. The scene when Calhern’s and Sothern and Powell sing and dance to “Shine On Harvest Moon” is the most endearing musical number I have ever seen in a musical.

Now, That’s Entertainment! Catch it.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Ann Sothern, Backstage Musical, Barry Sullivan, Carmen Miranda, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jane Powell, Louis Calhern

 

Calamity Jane

05 Jul

Calamity Jane – directed by David Butler. Musical Western. 97 minutes Color 1953.

★★★★★

The Story: A wild and wooly hoyden from Deadwood, Dakota, plays superwoman to Wild Bill Hickock.

~
If ever a performer and role collided triumphantly it is Doris Day and Calamity Jane.

Here we have her notorious pep, deleted of her starchy virtue, and elevated to a jig on a bar.

Day began as a dancer, and she is a good one, and the choreography designed for her is perfect. She is game, athletic, and lithe. She can be tossed around like a kite. She is vigorous and full of fun. She hasn’t a vain bone in her body nor one that isn’t limber.

Day was an amateur with the uncanny ability to throw herself into a scene like there was no tomorrow. This means that the selection of her resources is narrow, since it consists only what full emersion offers to one in danger of drowning. Which is to say, tension or thrashing about. But not here. Here all this works for her. The foolish tomboy turns out to be just her speed, in a velocity generally reserved for Betty Hutton.

She opens her mouth and sings with a natural brass in her vocal chords that has big carrying power, and a catch of emotion she probably can’t help, but which would be better supplied by the listener than the singer. She has perfect diction at full volume, and it seems her displayed singing technique has no borders. She is different from many pop singers in being able to negotiate comic songs – different from Sinatra who was not good in musicals because he crooned, which means that he sings legato, everything is slowed down, and so comic songs, of which musicals mainly are constituted, fail with his voice around them.

Day is right on top of those comic songs, and every single song in Calamity Jane is one, but one. “A Woman’s Touch,” is an example of her ready attack on a song – this a duet with Allyn McLerie – but “Just Got In From The Windy City,” and “Whip-Crack-Away,” she sings with zest and a joy that is real. Calamity Jane came out when I was a soldier on the front in Korea, and “Secret Love,” played over and over, had a painful meaning for me, quite separate from the movie, the meaning being a declaration of something that could not be declared. Her version, her way with it, is to declare it. Wow.

Howard Keel, opposite her, is relaxed, confident, humorous about himself. He has a big baritone, and he means what he sings. Tall, dark, and handsome, Howard Keel fit perfectly opposite every single leading lady he ever played with: Betty Hutton, Kathryn Grayson, Jane Powell, Doris Day, for some.

For the sheer entertainment of two performers ideally suited to doing what they are doing, with one of the best lyricist/composer combos ever to make songs together, Paul Francis Webster and Sammy Fain, you’ll see there isn’t a single missed beat or one too many.

I saw it when it came out. It’s better than it was before.

 
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Posted in Classic Movie Musical, Doris Day, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Howard Keel, Period: 19th Century, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Ziegfeld Follies

13 Jun

Ziegfeld Follies – directed by lots of people including Vincent Minnelli. Song and Dance Musical Scrapbook. 110 minutes Technicolor 1945.

★★★

The Story: None. Flo Ziegfeld in heaven reminisces into being a last great follies. When it is over, he reappears as the other slice of the sandwich. The filling is a compendium of talent then under contract at MGM.

~

Some of these acts lie dead in the water. Others dogpaddle around. All of them are with Olympic grade performers, including Esther Williams who actually was Olympic grade. She tumbles under water smiling valiantly amid the kelp in a piece that feels forced, and, of course, is just that, as we are forced to believe that when she swims off-camera she wouldn’t dream of taking a breath of air there.

Judy Garland plays The Great Movie Star giving an interview, but the chorus boys have more life to them than the piece. Not even Garland, full of vaudeville fun as she was, can energize the flaccid material. For once, though, she is properly costumed and it’s good to see her looking so grown-up, cute, and soignée.

Red Skelton’s immediacy is funny as a TV pitchman for a brand of gin. And Victor Moore brilliantly convinces himself and each of us watching that he is being reduced to desperation by his blowhard lawyer, well played by Edward Arnold. It looks like an old Orpheum Circuit skit, and it probably was one. As does the piece with Fanny Brice playing a housewife who has to recover a winning sweepstakes ticket given by her husband to the landlord, William Frawley. The skit was must have been funnier on the stage; Brice must have been funnier on the stage, she probably relished her audiences, they in turn enriching her. Hume Cronyn surprises you by his deftness as the comic husband in this piece.

The one solid dud in the collection is Keenan Wynn in the telephone sequence. Directed by the famous acting teacher Bobby Lewis, one would have thought something might have been made of it, but it would have been better played by his father Ed Wynn, or at least by someone with natural funny bones, like Durante or Hope or Raye. Keenan Wynn could be funny as a character but not as a stand-up single. He is suicidally bad, poor guy. Let’s sink down into our seats and spare him further shame.

This being MGM, everything is over-produced, including Lena Horne’s solo, the wonderful song “Love.” With her hot eyes and powerful arms and elbows, Horne moves through the song’s genius in a costume wrapped around her like a wound.

Another singer, James Melton, sings the waltz scene from Traviata. And Kathryn Grayson sings the finale, in which Cyd Charisse twirls about as the ballerina, as she does in the opening, briefly with Fred Astaire.

Astaire dances four times in this film. And he sings. And there is no one like him, and, without meaning to, he really puts everyone else in the piece outside the pale. He is the one who’s worth the ticket of admission.

One of his dances is with Gene Kelly, in a frivolous duet, “The Babbit and the Bromide,” and Astaire opens the entire show with a turn or two in which Charisse dances and Lucile Ball appears wielding a whip as a dominatrix. Except for two sideways glances she asks us to take this hysteria seriously. No one with hair that particular color could possibly be serious.

But Astaire dances twice with the stony Lucile Bremer, once playing a society dame at a ball being wooed by a cat burglar, and in the second with Bremer as a Chinatown doxie being woed by Bobby Lewis, terrifying as the ganglord, and by Astaire as a Chinese peasant.

Bremer was a talented dancer, with good carriage, and a fine figure. She dances beautifully with Astaire, but as a screen personality she is meaningless. Astaire is dancing with a mummy, and it is odd that this was not found out sooner, when all Astaire needed to do was turn to Cyd Charisse who was standing there right next to him. Bremer’s face is cold; she can’t help it, but it is just awful to look at. She had made Minnelli’s Yolanda and The Thief with Astaire and Minnelli, another failed film, and these two pieces, one suspects, are left-overs from that film. Bremer was Arthur Freed’s mistress. He is the producer. Indeed, “Raffles” – an upper-crust dance at a satire ball – is an exact duplicate of the plot of Yolanda.

“Limehouse Blues” is fan dance, and is especially interesting as Astaire retains a poker face, his slant eyes expressionless, while they both wield four fans in startling metronomic display. It is actually a ballet, such as Gene Kelly would mount, and it works like all get out. Astaire’s cooperation with a partner on the dance floor is meritorious. The more you look at him perform the less you believe your eyes. Credulity is inapt to a miracle.

Both pieces seem to have been augmented by Minnelli’s set designs, décor, and color sense – with big corps de ballet. And certainly by his desire for fantasy-dance and dream-dance, of the kind he would put into play at the end of The Bandwagon, also with Astaire.

Why sample this smorgasbord?

Because Fred Astaire had the greatest body ever to appear in film.

One looks at all the Rembrandts one can.

 

 

 
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Posted in Cyd Charisse: screen goddess, Dance & Dancing, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Edward Arnold, Esther Williams, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Gene Kelly, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Judy Garland: screen and acting goddess, Kathryn Grayson, Keenan Wynn, Lena Horne, Lucille Ball, Red Skelton, Variety Show, Victor Moore, William Frawley

 

Springtime In The Rockies

04 Jun

Springtime In The Rockies – directed by Irving Cummings. Backstage Musical. 91 minutes Color 1942.

★★★★★

The Story: A Broadway star flees from the unsteady attentions of her fiancé and dances off with a cad to perform at Canada’s Lake Louise, which is somehow invaded by Brazil.

~

There are sixteen reasons for the focus on the Latin American market in this musical. The first one is the wartime need to confirm South-Of-The-Border friendly relations in order to keep the Axis out of the Western Hemisphere. The other fifteen are that island of repose, Carmen Miranda.

For here she is friends, in all her comic electricity, her big heart, her fanatical hands, her inexplicable and perfect enunciation, and her hips. She appears before us at all times on heels which are stacked as tall as she. She delivers her good natured malapropisms with zest and shrewdness and conviction. She brings every scene she is in to life, and she would exhaust us if she were in any more of them.

We also have Betty Grable at her best, and this is one of Grable’s best musicals. As usual she is better in her early scenes because the writing and direction is fresh, and because she was left to her own devices. But she is one of the most outgoing of performers – the most widely skilled of all the female musical stars of her era – generous and loads of fun.

As a dancer she is a power in a body. She moves with miles of technique around her. She dances with John Payne in a thunderstorm and is brilliantly inventive and right. In the finale, she appears with him in the most beautiful dance costume she ever wore – bare shoulders and turquoise sequins from her bust to her hips, then half fringed to her thighs and fully fringed to her calves. Take your eyes from her if you can.

She is essentially a comedy dancer. Cyd Charisse was one too, but Grable is quite different, so that, unlike the poker-faced Charisse, you cannot take Grable seriously in a solemn tango with Cesar Romero which Hermes Pan has choreographed for her in a misguided attempt to imagine she has the port de bras of Ginger Rogers.

Charlotte Greenwood does her usual high kick number she – which she has done in many musicals and whose merits I have never understood. Jackie Gleason has moments of his characteristic authority as the agent. Harry James, who married Grable, is mercifully whisked off stage when he is not playing the trumpet. And Edward Everett Horton plays the millionaire butler always so necessary for these musicals.

The Whitman Sampler plot of these Fox musicals is before us, and carries us in any direction that appeals to the eye. It does not much matter. For Grable is an actress of wonderful application, as witness her delightful scene with Miranda in the powder room.

Entertainment is the order of business – and why not? Sample it, whydoncha? It’s not fattening and it leaves no bitter aftertaste. Indeed, no after of any kind. And taste was never the issue to begin with.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Backstage Musical, Betty Grable: screen goddess, Carmen Miranda, Cesar Romero, Edward Everett Horton, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Footlight Serenade

03 Jun

Footlight Serenade – directed by Gregory Ratoff. Backstage musical. 80 minutes Black And White 1942.

★★★★★

The Story: A chorus girl is wooed by an egomaniacal prize fighter who won’t take “Not tonight, Joe,” for an answer.

~

Victor Mature is a gas as the prize fighter who is so full of himself, he can’t see that Betty Grable does not have eyes for him at all. It’s a wonderful piece of comic acting by an actor who at other times performed excellently with Grable, and certainly with Rita Hayworth, but here he takes the cake. The screen comes alive when he jolts into view.

And he is extremely funny.

Unlike Phil Silvers, who is a cactus desperately trying to flower. And he is also playing a cactus who is desperately trying to flower – but he does not have the chops to distance himself from the role sufficiently to see that it is exactly like himself. It doesn’t work.

But never mind that. He races around promoting the fighter for all he isn’t worth. And the fighter is opposed by the droolingly handsome John Payne, whom Grable really loves. Payne is always so at ease as this sort of curl-on-the-forehead hunk that you can’t take exception to him. His masculinity is a treat, and he strips down real good for fights with Mature and a jolly song with Grable on a parapet of an apartment roof.

James Gleason, Prime Minister Of The Slow Burn, is the producer hooked into the caprice of a prize fighter starring in a dance musical when the fighter can neither sing nor dance. And a blond Jane Wyman plays Grable’s sidekick. She supposed to be sardonic, but you feel she just wants to sing and dance, at both of which she was superb and alive! A missed chance.

But with Grable in the piece, we have no need for another female talent at all. Grable is a master of comic song and dance. People raved about her perfect legs and cute figure and she sure had ‘em, but Grable’s open face and delight in playing the fool, moment by moment, is one of her most endearing gifts. It’s an early musical for her, and her strokes are a little broad, but she lands her lines perfectly, and carries herself through the masher maneuvers of Mature with skill and smarts.

Grable was one of the great screen entertainers of all time, and I still find her so. She was unusual in that she had the strength of the chorine with the vulnerability of a custard. On screen, stage, or nightclub, she was dear to her audiences as long as she lived – because she was hard-working and you could see into her. The dances are by Hermes Pan, Astaire’s co-choreographer, and Pan dances with her here. He had great respect for her talent, and it is justified by what she does for us still.

She, like the others, were masters of that most essential of all dramatic modes – Frivolous Entertainment. They had the talent for it with every move they made, and the cast of this piece is crammed with them. Open The Fox Talent box and this is what you got!

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Betty Grable: screen goddess, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, James Gleason, Jane Wyman, John Payne, Phil Silvers, Singing & Dancng Musical, Victor Mature

 

Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe

02 Dec

Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe – directed by George Seaton. Musical. The female star of a celebrated New York nightclub falls in love with a man she is trying to con. 104 minutes Color 1945.

★★★★★

Pinup Girl was Fox’s top grossing film for the year. Betty Grable retired to have a baby. Then returned, high spirited as before and even slimmer.

William Gaxton is her co-star on stage, and his grown son, Dick Haymes is her co-star off. Gaxton , a seasoned vaudevillian, refuses to allow his son to enter show business, and Gaxton’s girlfriend Beatrice Kay is jealous of the father’s attention to his ambitious son. So she contrives to bribe Betty Grable with the lure of a mink coat if she can distract the son, whom Betty doesn’t like at all, from the father’s watchful eye, and keep the son on his path as a doctor of medicine.

It sounds like a bit of a stretch doesn’t it? Well, it is, for Dick Haymes had, of all the singers of his era, the most beautiful singing voice. He could have succeeded in show business without really trying. His singing makes your heart stand still; he’s a good actor; his face is interesting to watch. And we only go along with the plot against him because we are told to.

What works, as usual, is the abundance of comic dance and song numbers – which Hermes Pan staged and choreographed. And there is one in particular with Beatrice Kay and Betty Grable competing – modern songs against old-fashioned songs ­ that made me laugh myself silly. It is Beatrice Kay who does it: she is a high-priestess of camp. So if you ever wondered what camp really is, take a look at her in that number.

All this takes place in the crude backstage of the glamorous Diamond Horseshoe in New York, which we see very little of. The bristling Phil Silvers is around, as a stage manager, of course. The noble Margaret Dumont has a cameo, as does the suave pianist Carmen Cavallaro. In short, the whole affair is a pleasure feast, and, with the country at war, a war relief.

I saw this when it came out. I went to every Betty Grable musical when it came out. Everyone did. She was dessert served once a year, and if you don’t know what war-time rationing was, that’s all right. We were on less food, less gas, less clothing. We had rationing booklets. I still have mine.

And if you don’t know what it was to need wartime morale-boosting, well, good, but Betty Grable was the lady to do it. Why don’t you catch her act and see why?

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Betty Grable: screen goddess, Dick Haymes, FILMED BY: Ernest Palmer, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Margaret Dumont, Phil Silvers, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Meet Me After The Show

01 Dec

Meet Me After The Show – directed by Richard Sale. Musical 87 minutes Color 1951. ★★★★.

The Story: A Broadway star gets amnesia when she get fed up with her husband’s controlling behavior.

What made Betty Grable the biggest star of them all?

She could two difficult things well which no other musical star could do: she could both sing and dance. Neither Judy Garland nor Rita Hayworth nor Doris Day nor Cyd Charisse could do both. They could all act, and each could do one other thing well, but could not do two things well. Betty Grable could.

She is also a true soubrette (in leading lady disguise) – meaning that she is a master at low comedy shenanigans and comic byplay, particularly in dance. She was always dolled up and presented as The Great Beauty, but most of her musical numbers were comic specialty numbers, and at them she is superb. As instanced by her number with a polar bear or dancing with two sixty year-old twins or with Gwen Verdon as juvenile delinquents or dancing with the beefcake boys (of which Jane Russell’s “Is Anyone Here For Love” from Gentlemen Prefer Blonds” is a reprieve. Russell leads with her pelvis; Grable with her eyes and ready wit). Her timing is impeccable and she understands and gives her own human folly to everything she danced. Her choreographer Jack Cole understood her well.

But the main thing about Betty Grable is that she is the most inherently optimistic human in the world, and anything that happens to contradict that hurts her in a way that hurts us.

This is a woman who is completely trusting. And you love her for it. Watch how she plays right out to the audience. No other musical star did that. Grable is playing to a “theatre” audience, but the effect is darling for the camera. She gives herself so innocently.

She is never hard or troubled. There is no neurotic edge to her. But she can contend. She is not without ways and means. She is never a victim long. She has background and resources. She is hard-working, and she plays hard-working girls. It’s always her ace in the hole. You respect her for it.

The plot of this picture is unusual for a Fox Betty Grable musical, which usually had Betty as an up-and-coming star, involved with two men at the same time. Here she is established and married, The second half, where most musicals fail, actually picks up color and pace, as Betty reverts to her vulgar down-South saloon beginnings and where she smooches on the beach with the dripping Rory Calhoun.

Arthur Arling shot it. Fred Clark and Eddie Albert lend good support. Cary Grant was set to do it, but couldn’t. MacDonald Cary, a really competent actor, does not have the sense of fun required for musical comedy style. But Betty carries the film. But more! When she appeared in Hello, Dolly! later in her life, no star who appeared in that show ever received the ovation she received when she entered. Why was that? Why did people love her? She gave it all she had – yes – but she was so open.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Betty Grable: screen goddess, Eddie Albert, FILMED BY: Arthur Arling, Fred Clark, Gwen Verdon, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Macdonald Cary, Rory Calhoun, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Cover Girl

28 Nov

Cover Girl – directed by Charles Vidor. Musical. A hoofer in A Brooklyn nightclub becomes a fashion magazine cover-girl and a Broadway star, much to the chagrin of her buddies. 107 minutes Color 1944.

★★★★★

Rita Hayworth was a true dancer, which is to say she was born to dance, and if one could say she was a great dancer, it would have to be not because of her technical prowess and range. There were things she could not do, had not been trained to do, did not have the body to do.

But on the grounds of musicality, enthusiasm for the dance, and port de bras, she is one of the greatest dancers ever filmed.

By musicality is meant: is she just ahead of the beat? She is. This means that the music is a response to the dance, that the music comes out of the steps, rather than the other way round. That is what makes a dance a musical dance insofar as a dancer is involved. It gives something for the orchestra leader to follow. For it is the dance our attention is primarily on.

Enthusiasm is the sense that the dancer loves to dance. This comes off of Hayworth in every dance she does here. Dancing with Phil Silvers and Gene Kelly in “Make Way For Tomorrow” you see how dance gives her glee and glee her drive. You see she is the one of the three most enjoying herself. She does not intend it to, but this draws focus to her. You want to watch and stay with such happiness.

It also validates her being a dancer at all, for this enthusiasm makes clear that she is a born dancer as well as a trained one. It gives us pleasure in her confidence in her physical strength and in her natural power, as this enthusiasm releases the spectacle of her might to us. Which brings us to the question of port de bras.

By port de bras is meant how the arms, shoulders and upper back are carried – the sheer beauty and propriety of her arm movements, how they are held, where they are held, how they float. But in Rita Hayworth’s case, superb as she is at port de bras, she is also endowed with broad flexible shoulders, a back strengthened by practice, and the most beautiful arms and hands in the world.

Of course, usually Hayworth’s arms are held above her waist, but they work with a grace so rich and natural and skilled, that it constitutes a dance in and of itself. This comes out of nightclub flamenco where she danced as her father’s partner from the time she was twelve. So it is not the difficulty of the execution of steps that makes her dancing great, but the grasp of it with the flamenco fire-carriage of her arms, carried high above her diaphragm. This is flamenco-style; it gives her dancing duende. Watch her as she dances with Gene Kelly in the fashion showroom number. Look at his port de bras. And then look at hers. Gene Kelly was an agile dancer, good looking, and sexy, as was she, but she is the one you look at, and you can easily see why.

Rudolph Maté films her magnificently, as he was often to do. He discovered how shadow revealed her inner visage, and he knew how responsive she was. Watch for those lingering closeups on her subtly changing face.

Cover Girl is probably some kind of ur-musical, in that we get Kelly first doing the sort of work that would change musicals to an earthy, lower-class, non-backstage, jazz/ballet style. We have the first of his famous, midnight, city-street dances, which we find again in Singing In The Rain and It’s Always Fair Weather – dances where he uses trash cans, street lamps, and passing drunks as props; indeed we have two such dances. His dance to his own reflection in “Long Ago And Far Away” is probably the most elaborate and interesting dance he ever did, because he dances the truly neurotic.

Kelly, selfishly, loses the opportunity to properly dance “Long Ago And Far Away” with Hayworth. Is it Kern’s greatest ballad? Most of a musical’s numbers are comic numbers, and Jerome Kern is the least original of all the great composers at them; there are a number of them here; they are serviceable. But no one could write a more rapturous melody than Jerome Kern. “Long Ago And Far Away” is still with us.

Phil Silvers, Eve Arden, and Otto Kruger fortify the tale of a chorus girl from Brooklyn becoming a fashion magazine cover-girl and then a Broadway star. Apart from this, you might notice a certain treatment going on here: you might notice that Hayworth is becoming enshrined.

But never mind: here she is in all her grace and beauty and skill. Ask yourself the question: whom do you care about here and why?

Or don’t ask it. She doesn’t ask for analysis. She’s an entertainer. That’s what makes her happy.

So just treat yourself to her. She is receptive, she is talented, she is ravishing. She gives off sexuality like fire. And she is also that oddly rare thing among actors: she is touching.

 

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Backstage Musical, Classic Movie Musical, Dance & Dancing, Eve Arden, FILMED BY: Rudolph Maté, Gene Kelly, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Lee Bowman, Otto Kruger, Phil Silvers, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess, Singing & Dancng Musical, Thurston Hall

 

Tonight And Every Night

26 Nov

Tonight And Every Night – directed by Victor Saville. Musical. Starring a loyal American girl drawn to leave by her romance with a Canadian flyer, still a London musical theatre stays open during the blitz. 92 minutes Color 1945.

★★★★★

Baz Lurhmann, in an Extra Feature, describes Rita Hayworth as a big tall girl.

Actually she weighed 120 and was 5 feet 6. She gave the impression of being tall because her male dance partners, Astaire and Kelly and others, were short, and because of her long, slender arms and legs, and because her rib cage was straight, and like many dancers, her hips were shallow. This gave her more of a long, tubular, model figure.

Jean Louis her designer at Columbia Pictures said of her, “She had a good body. It wasn’t difficult to dress her. She was very thin limbed, the legs were thin, the arms long and thin and beautiful hands. But the body was thick, She also had a belly then, [She was pregnant by Orson Welles.], but we could hide that.”

Jack Cole, who did her choreography, said, “She did not have a good figure, but she had beautiful breasts, beautiful arms and the most beautiful hands in show business …. As a young woman she was always a much more beautiful person than she photographed ‘cause they did really icky Columbia make-up for star ladies, with that too hard glossy mouth.

“She was a wildly good humored lady to work with, and she worked very hard. Not that she was wildly talented, but she was wildly suited to what she was doing at the time she was doing it. She was the sum total of a group effort – the way they dressed her, made her up, wrote for her, what she did with it, was a group job. What separates her from similar studio products is this inherent erotic thing of her own.”

So Sammy Kahn and Julie Styne will do the songs. Rudolph Maté films her in a way that gathers her up and continues to film her in a way that produces the Hayworth as we will come to know and admire. She will have a top supporting cast: that emerald lavaliere of an actress, Florence Bates will play the eventual Judy Dench part, Lee Bowman is the leading man, Marc Platt does a sensationally funny dance audition number, she has a couple of delightful cockney charwomen to give it a London lift. And Jack Cole will do her choreography, and go on to do it for her signature dance in Gilda. 

“You couldn’t treat her like a dancer – she could dance, but you couldn’t put that burden on her, she didn’t go to class every day .… I got to know what she could do facilely .… With Rita it looked like she really could do it, and more. There was the effect of ‘stand back I’m going to move now.’”

Since the dancer scheduled to do “What Does An English Girl Think Of A Yank” sprained his ankle on the day it was to be shot, Victor Saville asked Cole to dance it with her himself. He felt ill suited to the character, but there was nothing else to be done. “So I rehearse with Rita a couple of times around and we’re ready to start. Well, baby, I don’t know what hit me, when they turned the camera on. Monroe was the same way – when it was for real, it was like ‘look out.’ For this first shot …suddenly this mass of red hair comes hurtling at me, and it looked like ninety times more teeth than I ever saw in a woman’s mouth before and more eyes rolling, and … you know, she was the most animated object ever.

“Rita always did it for real – she always gave more than she got.

“We got along good, we liked each other, Rita knew I was very understanding of what she could and what she couldn’t do. She was very good humored and disciplined. If it was in her to do what you asked of her she’d do it very well and with energy, unlike some.”

These remarks by Jack Cole are from John Koball’s astute book on her work, Rita Hayworth, Portrait Of A Love Goddess: The Time, The Place, And The Woman”. I quote it because it helps tell you what you are looking at. Which is why I write these pieces for you.

Here we have Hayworth in a jolly good part in a book musical, shot in glorious 3-strip Technicolor. The color scheme is rich and quiet. The songs are light and the numbers odd. The plot is unusual. You’ll see.

For, all around, it is one of her most entertaining musicals. She is absolutely lovely.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Florence Bates, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Lee Bowman, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess, Singing & Dancng Musical, World War II

 

My Gal Sal

22 Nov

My Gal Sal – directed by Irving Cummings. Period Musical. American songwriter Paul Dreiser struggles from the rural Midwest, through raree shows, and into the arms of a beautiful musical star. 103 minutes Color 1942.

★★★

Like Victor Mature, the movie is a big lug. It is also A Gaudy Fox Musical, first meant for Alice Faye, then for Betty Grable, but finally made with Columbia-import Rita Hayworth, and Gaudy doesn’t suit Rita Hayworth, because she is already gaudy enough, with her dazzling smile and power to seduce.

It is also true that Fox musical numbers were usually comic numbers, and they don’t work well for Hayworth, since they are not in her proper range.

Finally, while Hayworth lip-syncs her songs well, she is not actually singing them. Only two major musical comedy stars of that era actually could both sing and dance well: Grable and Garland. Ruby Keeler did neither well, though she did both continually, as though talent for one or the other would one day break through.

What Hayworth did better than any of them was dance her particular dances. Only one of them works at all well for her here, a ballroom number, choreographed and partnered by Hermes Pan, and even here the costume is a demerit. Still and all, watch her port de bras. Her arms are lyric. Pan said she had the most beautiful hands he had ever seen; her upper-body carriage is always emblematic; she had a goddess in her shoulders.

But she does not prevail over the stupidity of the musical numbers staged for her. A movie of the previous year, Strawberry Blond, at Columbia is a much more heartening film. Again, she plays the title role, and it is of the same period and features the same sort of barber-shop songs – although in Strawberry Blond, the music is a constant background, not hitting us in the face like a fly ball as it does here. Besides, that was directed by Raoul Walsh, and this wasn’t.

Phil Silvers, with his personality of a merry cactus, has a couple of good scenes, The lovely and talented Carole Landis plays an early girlfriend of Mature. James Gleason is the cheating music publisher Mature makes rich.

Indeed, as you can see, we are generally in the realm of Gilded Age con men, and all the males of the film, save for the constipated Bruce Cabot, fall into this category. Mature is the con man’s con man. And his playing two pianos at once in a medicine show he works is spectacular and fun and odd and endearing – indeed, an act of genius. Mature was a big hearted galoot and game, and these qualities were a fine foundation for his career in films. As an actor in his craft he is without particular interest. You might say that even interesting roles didn’t lend him interest. He could do it and do it full out, but he lacked the artistic intelligence and imagination to create something marvelous – unless playing two pianos at once is imaginative and marvelous – and you know something? – I daresay it is!

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Backstage Musical, Carole Landis, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, James Gleason, Phil Silvers, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess, Turn of the 19th Century, Victor Mature

 

Strawberry Blond

21 Nov

Strawberry Blond – directed by Raoul Walsh. Period Comedy. A bad-tempered dentist falls afoul of a beautiful woman and a con man. 97 minutes Black and White 1941.

★★★★★

A Whitman’s Sampler of 1910: beer halls, high button shoes, brass bands, barber shop quartets, and Irish wildness.

Perc Westmore did Rita Hayworth’s makeup and discovered that her hair was so abundant that she could never wear a wig. But he dyed it to make her the title character, which she carries off beautifully. This is her second A-film, having just made Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings. She is very young. She is flabbergasteringly beautiful. She is perfect as the phony flirt and even better as the rolling-pin wife of Jack Carson.

James Wong Howe upgraded every film he filmed, and you can see it in this one, which otherwise might have been a Fox Betty Grable musical. He colors scenes with shadow, the play of leaves across a face, and this gives them a romantic importance which they actually inherently possess and need.

For as with all of Raoul Walsh’s films, the love story grounds the project. Walsh tells the story imaginatively and crisply, as usual, and his actors are on the mark – free and liberal in their choices. It is entirely without the crass Irish sentimentality you find in Ford and McCrary. Walsh was great with actors. He did not watch their scenes; he only listened to them off-stage. The great stage director George S. Kaufman did the same. If the truth was heard, it would be seen. The result is the actors shine. And this is Walsh’s favorite picture.

It is James Cagney’s film, and he abounds; scarcely a scene he does not appear in. He was after a change of pace, and balked fiercely about doing this, until Hal Wallis and Jack Warner offered him 10% of the profits and brought in the Epstein brothers to rewrite it. It had been a stage play and then Gary Cooper’s only flop. They switched the milieu from the Midwest to New York City, where, of course, Cagney belonged.

Cagney is a curious actor. He acting personality is one who wants to be ahead of the game. This means that he is not actually a responsive actor, since he always has his fear for the possible in mind. His definition of acting was: “Look ‘em in the eye and tell the truth” – which is fine if you are a machine gun. So I find it hard to acknowledge his talent; I do but I find it hard to. His headlong “personality” worked well here, since he plays a man consistently duped. He was high-waisted, long legged, and short, and carried himself  step-dancing tall at all times, which is nice. His scenes with Alan Hale as his Irish blarney drunk father are scrumptious. Hale is just terrific in the part, and Cagney plays along with him almost bursting out laughing at Hale’s inventiveness.

But it is Olivia de Havilland who carries the film. She is full of mischief, sweet, pretty, and real. Raoul Walsh’s acknowledgement of the truth of her love is the waking moment always. James Wong Howe films her like the bonbon she is, full of flavor, rich, molded to a shape, and toothsome. The passage of feeling across her face validates this charming comedy, and carries its value as an entertainment right to this day.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Alan Hale, FILMED BY MASTER PHOTOGRAPHER James Wong Howe, George Tobias, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Jack Carson, James Cagney, MUSICAL NUMBERS, Olivia de Haviland, Period: 1910-1914, Rita Hayworth: Screen Goddess, ROMANTIC COMEDY, Una O'Connor

 

My Blue Heaven

08 Nov

My Blue Heaven – directed by Henry Koster. Musical Comedy. A famous couple want a baby. 96 minutes Color 1950.

★★★★★

If you are interested in musicals at all, My Blue Heaven is one of the breakthrough ones to see. For it is a Fox musical with the glare amputated. Formerly and for the most part, Betty Grable musicals were set in exotic settings or in The Gilded Age of vaudeville, and Grable would depict an unmarried star on the rise, being two-timed along the way by some handsome cad in a moustache. But here she is already well married and also already well established as half of the Lunt and Fontanne of musical comedy. And the color coding of the musical is no longer loud, vulgar and gaudy, but subdued and natural to its era, which is the ‘50s. The setting is modern, and the story has to do with Grable becoming a mother. Odd.

In 1929 when she was 12, Betty Grable’s mother dyed her hair blond, put her a G-string, and got her in as a chorus girl in the film Happy Days. By the time she made My Blue Heaven she is 33, earning $300,000 a year, Fox’s top star, and for ten years one of the ten top box office attractions in the world. What this has to do with this film is that she had three failures before she made it, and Fox musicals were very expensive to make: $3,000 a minute – partly because of the enormous time rehearsing the numbers. So on the one hand musicals had to succeed and on the other no one quite knew how to make them. But MGM had led the way, so now Betty Grable was made a contemporary American, which made sense, because nobody in the world was more so.

For this one Grable has again her most likeable co-star Dan Daily. He also was her only true co-star, because he was the only one who had big musical comedy chops. He is a gifted dancer, clown, and actor, as was she. Daily has an entertaining face, as did Grable, and they both liked one another enormously, you can see it on the screen. In all four musicals they made together, they are married from the start. But most important, for this film they used a script by Claude Binyon and Lamar Trotti, which is witty, cogent, and surprising, one of the best musical comedy books I have ever seen. Arthur Arling, who had filmed her often and knew now to do it, shot it. It is well-paced, plausible, and bright.

Also on board were oodles of musical numbers written for it by Harold Arlen. These consist of a series of light comedy satires, one of Rogers and Astaire, one of Rogers And Hammerstein’s South Pacific, one of Irving Berlin holliday songs, and the last, also of Ethel Merman and Bing Crosby in Berlin’s Anything Goes – Don’t Rock The Boat, Dear, which was a hit in its day and is still a delight. The witty lyrics of this and all these songs were written by Ralph Blane. Mitzie Gaynor, David Wayne, Jane Wyatt, Una Merkel, Louise Beaver lend a happy hand.

Of all the movie stars in the world, Betty Grable is the one most easy to love. If you love loving someone, and I know you do, watch her. She’s a tonic.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Backstage Musical, Betty Grable: screen goddess, Classic Movie Musical, Dan Dailey, David Wayne, FILMED BY: Arthur Arling, FOX MUSICAL, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, Jane Wyatt, Louise Beavers, Mitzie Gaynor, MUSIC BY: Harold Arlen, Singing & Dancng Musical, Una Merkel

 

Cony Island

21 Oct

Cony Island –– directed by Walter Lang. Period Musical. A vulgar saloon singer gets mentored into Broadway by a con man who loves her. 96 minutes Color 1943.

★★★★★

Betty Grable remains the greatest female “entertainer” of movies. She remained on the top ten box office stars list for ten years, one of the few actors and the only woman ever to do so.

It is easy to write her off. Oh, yes, she was all tarted up in spangles. Yes, her hairdos were mad confections and her costumes Technicolor flamboyant.  She played low-class dames from show-biz, and she was famous for her legs. She was the star of mere Fox musicals. She lacked class. MGM was more high-tone. Fred Astaire never danced with her.

Well, Hermes Pan, who choreographed Astaire’s sequences with him, choreographed this film and dances with her here. In his view, she and Rita Hayworth were the best of the female dancers. He could give her an elaborate sequence and was amazed that she could copy it immediately! “Honey, I’ve been doing this since I was eight.”

She was a good singer, she had a complexion that Zanuck demanded always be shot in color, she had a living-doll figure, with a subtle sensual hip action natural to her.

She is equaled only by Judy Garland, a performer of enormous actor-intelligence, who had many of the same qualities as Grable – one being, a wicked camp humor. Neither were ballroom dancers — those were Rogers, Hayworth, and Charisse — but Grable in her way was just as much fun.

Grable was a superb film actor in the Musical Mode, which has its own acting tropes and requirements. Within this mode, she clearly can do anything, and as such she is one of the greatest film actresses who ever lived. Oh how dare you, you might say, Bette Grable was not Garbo. But it would smarter to say, Garbo was not Betty Grable. Betty Grable  is fresh-as-a-daisy, highly responsive, giving, funny, emotionally susceptible. She could be frequently wrong-headed and often embarrassed. Fox gave her stories to suit her bent and nature, because she was unchallenged in her craft, talent, and appeal. In comic dancing, which most of her numbers were, she has no rival. Watch her for her speed, delivery, imagination, and self-parody.

Grable’s energy is essentially volatile but longing to settle down. She chases men, which Garland also did and which Monroe never did. Grable has a big open expression, is vulnerable to being hurt, is eager, and the most obvious thing about her is that she always plays someone hard-working. She’s in rehearsal; she’s got to step for a living; she’s a vaudevillian with a lot of shows to do a day. Betty Grable, unlike Alice Faye, has not got a lazy bone in her body. She’s a good singer, but can’t coast on the power of her singing, like Faye and Garland. But inside, she is naturally musical. She loves music; it’s so plain; it’s a treat to see it – it’s a physical entity with her like her cute figure and full lips. It’s in every dance she dances.

When she is on screen you cannot take your eyes from her. This is not just a result of the solo position of her numbers or that she is the lead. It is the inherent talent to draw focus. Her like-ability makes her a great star, and the fact that, behind the sequins and feathers, she is unpretentious, good-natured, innocent, accessible, and real. It makes her the pin-up of World War II and the top female star in the world. She deserved it and still deserves it.

Cony Island one her many hits, is a piece of Gilded Age froufrou.  It begins with four rowdy musical numbers in a row, topped by Charlie Winninger singing Who Put The Overalls In Mrs Murphy’s Chowder. No, it aint refined, but boy is it good! There are two kinds of vulgarity, one is empty and one is full; one is flaccid and one has vigor, one gives you a belly ache and one gives you a belly laugh. Neither type have any taste, but the second type, to which Betty Grable and her films belong, sure is tasty. Indulge yourself. She’s like an icecream soda. You’ll end up refreshed.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Backstage Musical, Betty Grable: screen goddess, Cesar Romero, Charles Winninger, DIRECTED BY: Walter Lang, FOX MUSICAL, George Montgomery, Phil Silvers, Singing & Dancng Musical, Turn of the 19th Century

 

Broadway Melody Of 1940

19 Jul

Broadway Melody Of 1940 –– directed by Norman Taurog. Backstage Musical. 102 minutes, Black and White, 1939.

★★★★★

What is the critic’s job? Praise or blame? Curse or bless? Give credit or give frowns?

What difference does all that make now?

Perhaps it’s just to notice what is there.

So, in the case of a critic really interested in the craft of acting, when looking at a performer such as Eleanor Powell, what does one do?

Watching her dance is like watching a songbird sing. She does it with a technical zest that has miles to spare. Nothing that even approaches difficulty is what we appreciate while watching her perform the impossible. She would rather dance than eat. She is dance compulsion.

As an actor, is she in line with her costars, George Murphy, Fred Astaire and Ian Hunter?

You bet she is. And she is always in the mode of performance which light musical comedy prescribes, particularly as she is involved with a master of it, director Norman Taurog.

A friend of mine said to me today that Fred Astaire was a terrible actor. So wooden. I suppose that’s a common view, I don’t know, but if you think so, then give yourself the chance to be disabused and watch him, not as he is “acting,” but as he listening to someone else. Watch him in the best-friend relations he creates with George Murphy. What I see in Astaire here is a man virile, alive, and full of fun. He also had the most beautiful eyes.

Astaire was Mr. Finesse. If you imagine he is a bad actor, that may be because there is hardly a moment when he is not dancing when acting, such that his animation might tend to side-line his words and make them, because they are irrelevant, sound forced. But just take a look at what he does after the fatal telephone call, when he blurts out something he ought not to have.

Was Frank Morgan a good actor?  Here he is a staple of the absent-minded old hoodwinker, such as we just saw him be in The Wizard Of Oz. Can you figure out exactly what he is doing? Without imitating him, which would perhaps not be hard, can you do your own version of what he is up to?

Well, perhaps I sound scolding. See it, for the fun of it, as I just did. Astaire has a phenomenal solo – imaginative, acute, down to earth.

Eleanor Powell – she of the pleated skirts and pneumatic smile – dances on point here in a hideously costumed ballet, and she is not at her best. Alas, she was also an acrobatic dancer, which is dance at its most foolish because most contorted to amaze. But, when she and Astaire dance, they have done the choreography together, and she is just grand – never more so than the finale of Begin The Beguine (the whole score is by Cole Porter) – in what is the most astonishing, fun, celebrated and electrifying tapdance duet ever filmed.

Don’t miss it.

 
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Posted in 1940s, ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Backstage Musical, Dance & Dancing, Essential Musical, Frank Morgan, Fred Astaire: Screen God, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Ian Hunter, WORDS AND MUSIC BY COLE PORTER

 

Gold Diggers Of 1933

19 Apr

Gold Diggers Of 1933 – directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Musical. Will three chorus girls land rich husbands? 97 minutes, Black and White 1933.

★★★★★

In writing a review of a movie I saw two days ago, I have to look up on Google to remind myself what the the heck the story was. Oh, yes, I remember now. It is, let us say, pleasingly forgettable.

For why should we not forget it? The point of the Warner Brothers Musicals is the appeal of the stark contrast of a striking presentation with the ordinariness of the story and the actors. At MGM Judy Garland was many things but ordinary was never one of them. Alice Fay and Betty Grable and Shirley Temple at Fox were lavishly unordinary. Rogers and Astaire frolic through the vast white telephone art deco concoctions at RKO, and you can mistake neither of them, together or apart, for anyone else at all.

But here at Warners we have the endearing Joan Blondell, someone leaning over the backyard fence for a good gossip. We have Ruby Keeler whose musical comedy talent verges on the indiscernible. She carefully watches her feet when dancing, and her singing voice makes a rusty bedspring glad it doesn’t sound worse. But she’s sufficiently pretty and has the correct specific weight to play opposite the collegiately cute Dick Powell, who does have talent, and also has the smarts to sing and act with such conviction as to completely elude embarrassing himself.

What we want is these perfectly accessible folks skirting around the sets and gesturing in odd counterpoint to them. For what is also going on is the Busy Berkeley kaleidoscopical monstrosities of choreography to give the lie to ordinariness at every glance. You think Warner Brothers is the out-at-elbows studio of the ‘30s? Nah. Here’s production values up the wazoo.

We return to the Warners musicals for the juxtaposition of the modest talents of the performers counterpoised against the immense immodesty of the regimental use of the females of the chorus numbers for which these musicals remain famous. Escapism knows no more distant exit than these deliriums.

Things start with the witty Ginger Rogers singing the great lampoon song, “We’re In The Money,” which was the Depression era mock-anthem. This in a movie which is to end in another production number, the funeral march of : “The Forgotten Man, ” the dirge of the impecunious.

Ginger is somewhat sidelined by the story of chorus girls eating beans while waiting for a part, for they are Aline MacMahon as the cynical funny one, Ruby Keeler as the star, and the one-in-between, Joan Blondell, who recites rather than sings the words to “The Forgotten Man,” and does so with enormous effect.

Probably the most popular songwriter American ever had was Harry Warren, and so the score also includes ”In The Shadows When I Sing To You.” That lovely actor Warren William injects a dose of realism as the out-of-town interloper, and a strain of actual elegance. But we don’t go to Warner’s movies for elegance. We go for the energy of the vulgar. It’s a great energy. Sometimes it frightens me. Sometimes I like it. Here, I like it.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Aline MacMahon, Backstage Musical, Dick Powell, Directed by Busby Berkelely, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, Guy Kibbee, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Joan Blondell, Ruby Keeler

 

The Jazz Singer

09 Mar

The Jazz Singer – directed by Richard Fleischer. Musical. A Jewish cantor is cursed by his father for going into popular music. 114 minutes Color 1980.
★★★★★

This is the third version I have seen of this and the best. It was originally cobbled up by the great screenwriter Samson Raphaelson for Al Jolson, and became the first talking picture. Jerry Lewis played it; then (with Mildred Dunnock and Arthur Franz) with Danny Thomas, who is no more Jewish than my cat and certainly not a singer (Peggy Lee supplied the deficiency), and now with Neil Diamond who certainly is both. Samson Raphaelson thought it was the cheapest piece of crap he’s ever written, but it’s not. In fact, the versions get better over time.

I didn’t see it when it came out, but I hear that Neil Diamond’s version was much maligned when it came out, which probably had to do with the nature of Neil Diamond’s singing or his music or both. I had never heard him sing before this movie. His energy, in the rock and roll era, rolls but does not rock, true. For his natural beat is settled and steady, not volatile and Bacchanalian. His voice is one of those reassuring male voices like Dick Haymes’. It’s a romantic alto inhered with a pleasant crack and a good yearning. Everything he does with it is simple, straightforward, and straight. There is no gender question here. He is always honest.

As to the songs, I cannot judge; it is not my era. I have long since been inured to the doxologies of popular music. I like “Hello, Again,” though it’s rather witless. But that none of the songs speak to me particularly is no gauge of their charm and of their excellence.

Certainly as an actor Neil Diamond is beyond reproach. In his late thirties at the time it was made, Diamond is 20 years too old for the part and looks it. I guess it doesn’t much matter, though; every actor I have seen do it was too old for it. It’s his first acting job and he’s just dandy. He plays firm, focused, and fluid opposite Laurence Olivier, a trixey actor if there ever was one. They have replaced Mildred Dunnock and Arthur Franz with Olivier, who gives us one of his sweet old dears. Unfortunately Olivier does it behind the oddest pair of spectacles, big square jobs that reflect and screen his eyes. Olivier was a poor technician with American accents, and, while he makes much of his Jewish one here, it also makes little of him.

And Olivier is certainly not slumming. For the film is beautifully produced by Jerry Leider, who provides an amiable commentary. And beautifully acted by Sully Boyer, Mike Kellin, and Franklyn Ajaye. What a treat they are! But the great discovery for me is Lucie Arnaz as Diamond’s manager. What a charming actress. She’s absolutely on the money, in every scene, a delightful light comedienne. And so pretty, isn’t she? I was an extra in a movie she made in Santa Fe. She was nifty then. She is so here.

If you like musicals this is a good old fashioned one. It’s the old story of the prodigal son who never comes back. Clifford Odet’s Golden Boy is another version of it. So is Humoresque. There are many, and this one will hold you, if it held me.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Laurence Olivier, Lucie Arnaz, SINGING MUSICAL

 

Les Misérables

25 Jan

Les Misérables – directed by Tom Hooper. Musical-melodrama. A prisoner upon his release breaks parole and is hounded by a magistrate all his life, despite his reformed nature. 158 minutes Color 2012.
★★★★
Many people relate to this material, for it has had a world-wide success which in no way will this film abate. But I am baffled as to why.

All I can suppose is that in an age of crass and faithless self-deception such as ours, the noble strain in humans is invisible, and that folks want to go along with and believe in someone who is faithful, not crass, and undeceiving at heart. Few modern screen actors possess a noble strain, and Hugh Jackman certainly is one of them, and is so obvious for the part one is shocked to hear others had been considered. Jackman has done various musicals before, and has the voice to boot. It is a treat to watch his beautiful face.

The terrible difficulty is that the music is paltry.

The terrible difficulty with the music is that every time someone belches they go into an aria. Every time someone walks through a door, they start singing. It’s a through-written musical, but it never knows when to be through.

The difficulty is that the part of Éponine scrambles to the fore at a late stage, where it is needed not at all, and performs nothing but a drain on our loyalties.

The difficulty is that Russell Crowe cannot perform the role of Javert, the magistrate, either musically or dramatically. He stands there pumping his energy out in little spurts. But what you need to do to play that part is either be Charles Laughton or watch what Charles Laughton did. Javert is a great role, and Laughton’s is one of the great characterizations ever put on film. Crowe’s performance is a nullity.

The supporting performances are fine, more or less, right from the stage though they are. And someone should win an Oscar for the wigs. Anne Hathaway sings her number well. Helen Bonham Carter and Sasha Baron Cohen make hay with the Master Of The House material, which is more stage-worthy than cinematic, but never mind. And Eddie Redmayne, once again miscast as a romantic lead, nevertheless once again rises to the occasion and sings all his little songs well.

All his little songs. There are no other sorts of songs, save the big patter numbers, which are the usual Broadway stuff (and welcome). Every time someone sings one of these little songs, they become self-tragic. And each time they do, the story diminishes in size, just as the songs do, just as the character who sings the song does. Everything gets littler. Perhaps that’s what miserableness means.

There is an opening image of a great huge foundering frigate being dragged into drydock. It seems a suitable symbol for Les Misérables, a vast dismembered hulk hauled before us.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Anne Hathaway, Baron Sasha Cohen, Helena Bonham Carter, Hugh Jackman, MELODRAMA, Russell Crowe, SINGING MUSICAL

 

The Pajama Game

07 Aug

The Pajama Game – directed by Stanley Donen and George Abbott. Musical. The cute blond head of the grievance committee in a pajama factory butts heads with management led by the head of production. 101 minutes Color 1957.

★★★★★

Janise Paige who played it on Broadway was strictly show biz. Doris Day who plays it on film was not show-biz whatsoever. She was the lower working class girl next door. She was the most popular blond of her era, and was a paid a quarter of a million to make this film, which was finished in six weeks, and she is worth every penny. She is an actress justifiably denounced as a hot righteous maiden in most of her film roles, but here one can see the nature of a fine talent seldom properly used or understood, even by herself perhaps. Completely untrained as an actress, she can do anything as an actress. She is direct, clear, open, with zero subtext and perfect timing. Assiduity can do no more. She has a fine slim figure, excellent carriage, and moves well. Whenever she appears she is Somebody. Her defect is her taste, meaning her choices: for instance, her playing pain, which always comes out as self-pity. Immediate application is her strong suit technically. She never hesitates to engage. Here, her notorious pep is not played as her ace, thank goodness. Instead, really worth watching,  she is responsive, humorous, and unforced – except in her singing, for she always over-sung; that is to say she emotionalized. You can see this in her “Hey There,” version. Rosemary Clooney sang it simply, with her naturally rich intonation and perfect enunciation. Clooney has no brass in her voice; its power is introverted; you are inclined to move toward it. Day’s voice is extroverted; there is a lot of brass in it; its clarion force can penetrate steel; its inclination is to move toward you. Two different sort of voice, but Day emotionalizes; even when singing softy she is putting something into it which the words alone are sufficient to provide to us. She is a highly technical singer with a range of effects she is sure of and knows how to control exactly. There’s a lovely song, cut from the movie, given as an extra, mistakenly filmed, by the great Harry Straddling, through a screen door; watch it; she’s very good in it. From the point of view of acting, Pajama Game is Day’s best film. The Broadway cast, led by John Raitt in his only film, was brought in by Abbott who directed it on Broadway and who did not directed it here, but went out and played tennis, while Donen did all. The choreography was supervised by Jerome Robbins, and cries out for Agnes DeMille in the big “Once A Year Day” number which suffers from haste and from the difficulties of being filmed on the lumpy earth of an actual public park. The day is somewhat saved by Carol Haney: “Oh, she is a real dancers!” one says and leans back to enjoy the fact that in this dance musical she is the only principal person who is. Bob Fosse did the choreography, and his trademark minimalism is vivid in “Hernando’s Hideaway” and “Steam Heat,” which Haney does masterfully. Otherwise Donen handles the movement, and his gift for giving musical numbers personal registration is pronounced: how Day in “Small Talk” and picks up a newspaper perfectly; how she is shoved back and forth on a carton on a dolly in “I’m Not At All In Love.” Sometimes the natural settings work, and often the soundstage settings really make a convincing environment, the factory being one of them, a sewing machine hall in which Eddie Foy Jr. and Reta Shaw steal our hearts as a couple of stout middle-aged hoofers, singing and dancing to “I’ll Never Be Jealous Again.” If you love musicals, don’t miss it. It’s consistently entertaining, with the full Donen idiom in play, as in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers, Singin’ In The Rain, Damn Yankees, and On The Town.


 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Doris Day, Harry Stradling: Master Photographer, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Almost Famous

26 Jun

Almost Famous – directed by Cameron Crowe. Music Drama. A teenager becomes a stringer for Rolling Stone Magazine to cover the disintegration or rebirth of a famed Rock and Roll band. 124 minutes Color 2000.

★★★★★

Well, Frances McDormand is the best actress ever. Here she plays the pestering mom of the boy journalist, and each time she appears she is both dead on true and dead on funny. The boy is a gawky pubescent chap adopted by his journalist mentor played brilliantly, of course, by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a master of eccentric timing to allow a real life character to spring up through the cracks of his lines, as it were. The whole story is a dear adventure, based on the director’s actual experience as a fifteen year old kid sliding into the world of the big Rock stars, participating in their tours, being taken as an experienced journalist, and eventually filing the story. Crowe manages the mise-en-scene immaculately. He lived the boy’s story when young, and he brings it to life with relish and a loving eye. Billy Crudup is the target of the young journalist’s particular aim for a scoop, so we see a good deal of him. Crudup does not quite nail the inner life of the character, but depends on the story to do his work. In the crucial scene, when an apology is due from him to the boy, his failure to make it goes unregistered by the actor. But still, it is always a pleasure to see this fine actor, very beautiful twelve years ago, and in fine form as a Rock star, first deranged by modesty, then by drugs. Kate Hudson is the band-aide 15 Year old sex object of both the boy and Crudup, and she plays it out with remarkable presence. Anna Paquin is in it, but for some reason is not used properly. But Jason Lee is dynamite as the less-talented leader of the band, too full of himself to face the fact. It’s a good movie, even if you don’t, like me, care about Rock and Roll. A sort of open-heart surgery on the music world of that time, but the heart, while stricken, is sweet.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Anna Paquin, Backstage Drama, Backstage Musical, Billy Crudup, DIRECTED BY CAMERON CROWE, Frances McDormand: acting goddess, Kate Hudson

 

Rock Of Ages

16 Jun

Rock Of Ages – directed by Adam Shankman. Rock Musical. A launching pad of rock and roll legends is threatened with closure, as in it new stars arise and old ones rise higher. 123 minutes Color 2012.

★★★★

Rock and roll passed me by. I was too old for it at the time. So I know nothing of it. For this reason, I believe, I found this whole endeavor consistently entertaining from start to finish. The words to the songs are audible, mirabile dictu, which means that although they do lack distinction they do not lack distinctiveness. Everyone is good in it and everyone sings good, too. The young lovers give strong performances, as they must, for they really have to carry the picture. She jumps off the bus in L.A. from Oklahoma, and he is already bussing dishes in the venue where it mostly takes place. They come to one another’s rescue throughout, for this is a fairy tale set in The Palace Of Fame, or at least in one of the outbuildings of it, The Grange Of Celebrity, a grungier pleasance. The point of the piece is immediately established behind the credits, not as parody, but as serious comedy in which everyone is played not for comment but for real, with a funny inner hat. Starting with Paul Giamatti as the star-maker manager: his prevarication of the question, “Is it true?” is hilarious, both as played and as written; you must not omit to see it. But it is not just a question of particular scenes but of consistency and sustainment of tone that made me smile from the start to the finale. That glittering puma, Catherine Zetta-Jones as the righteous mayor’s wife who wants to shut down rock and roll forever struts her musical comedy chops with great humor and knowingness. As do Russell Brand and Alec Baldwin, the latter of whose humor is particularly telling as the superannuated hippy venue owner. The songs are energetic and the choreography is fortunate. There is a cast of hundreds. And into all of this saunters the always half nude figure of Tom Cruise as the rock and roll superstar pushing fifty – a sort of combination of Iggy Pop and Robert Newton, a walking Parnassus of Sex, his jewelled crown a codpiece of rubies, in an astonishing turn by an astonishing actor – who once again throws himself into a role hook, line, and sinker. He plays him as brain-damaged by fame. His joy in his craft is abounding. His actor’s imagination is unfathomable. For instance, his character’s seduction line is so used up that there is nothing further he can find to trade it in for, and he must repeat it, knowing it will succeed with any woman in question but not with himself. He makes his character a musical star so exalted that the view from his mountain top is wise beyond knowing, but perforce also hazy as to those who live so far below that he seems out to lunch, while the fact is that at all times he has already eaten lunch. It is a wonderful piece of work. He daringly develops this character into a full grotesque ,detail by detail; that is, his fingernails are painted aubergine and bitten to the quick, so that whenever we see his hands ten tiny eggplants flash before our eyes. Well, for all these wonderful actors, and because I like musicals, I smiled all the way through this one. See it in a theatre. It’s a big show. It doesn’t belong in your living room. You belong in its.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Alec Baldwin, Backstage Musical, Catherine Zetta-Jones, Dance & Dancing, Paul Giamatti, ROCK OPERA, Singing & Dancng Musical, Tom Cruise

 

Roadhouse – 1948 version

05 Apr

Roadhouse – 1948 version — directed by Jean Negulesco. Noir. A sexy chanteuse is brought into a nightclub run by two war buddies, both of whom fall for her. 95 minutes Black and White 1948.

★★★★★

Ida Lupino is 30 when she makes this, her greatest film performance. The more hard-bitten, the ruder, the more insolent she is, the more you go along with her and care about her. She brings to the picture a twitching sexuality and the nuance of humor behind her eyes and a presence with the other performers that win her a posthumous Oscar here. When, years later, I told Celeste Holm how much I loved this picture when it came out, she told me it was junk, and, of course, it is; it is pulp, but then, then, most Hollywood films were. She said this perhaps because, after her Oscar, she is kicked to the side as a sidekick here in a thankless role. But I loved her in it. I loved everyone collectively and individually in it when it came out. Cornell Wilde with his sweet and masculine nature playing the stalwart, until he has a furious scene packing a suitcase. Richard Widmark as the unpredictable maniac. Expect the film to fall apart between the arrest and the trial scene — because there is no evidence — but expect also a superbly played finale. And rejoice in Ida Lupino. Listen to her sing “Again” and “One For The Road” – what aplomb, what wit, what negotiation of her cigarette! Nothing like it has been seen on the screen before or since, and the last shot of her in the picture is a review of that sad truth. The film is closer to Gilda in its triangle, in its nightclub setting, in its boss/lackey set-up between Widmark and Wilde, in its beat-up lady with a past. What makes it noir is not Widmark, but the presence of a woman working at a job no man could do, when during the War she would have worked at a defense plant, the males away. By which I mean, even as a nightclub singer, she would have wielded a power the return of the warriors reft her of. Both men are adolescent. Lupino alone is grown-up, too grown-up: she is without hope. And this is what makes it noir. She is a walking doom. Take it as Lupino’s polemic on the entertainment industry of which she was a knowing adjunct in Hollywood, but also take it as a bone deep characterization. Watch her weariness, her irony, listen to her skeptical grunts, her use and release of her sexual power as a barrier, and above all her wit in every move. “Wit is educated insolence,” as Aristotle said. Take Lupino’s work here as a great piece of method acting outside the Method, and don’t miss this richly comic performance.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Celeste Holm, Cornell Wilde, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Ida Lupino, MUSICAL NUMBERS, NOIR, Richard Widmark

 

A Damsel In Distress

03 Apr

A Damsel In Distress — directed by George Stevens. Musical. A fan-plagued hoofer seeks refuge in an English castle with two chums and falls for the lady of the manor. 93 minutes Black and White 1937.

* * * *

Everyone badly wanted Joan Fontaine fired from this, and one wonders why they cast her to begin with if she could not dance, but George Stevens put his foot down, and he was right. Fontaine was young and vulnerable, only 19, and she and her career would have crumbled. As it is, she said that the film set it back four years. Actually she dances well enough in the one number she has with Astaire, but it is carefully staged on woodland turf where Hermes Pan’s choreography has an excuse to be limited. Otherwise she’s rather dear. The difficulty is that Astaire’s partners always needed to dance comic turns as well as romantic ones because that’s where the love-drama was stated and resolved, and this could not happen with Fontaine or later with Joan Leslie or Paulette Goddard. Comic dance was Astaire’s forte. He had come from many Broadway years in a brother/sister act whose dances were not romantic but comic. When you look at Astaire’s solo turns in film you can see that most of them are humorous in energy and, when partnered, necessary to the love story. Recall how Ginger Rogers supplied the dance argument that set up the dramatic foundation of their courtship. With Rogers and Astaire, romance begins with comic dance bickering. George Stevens had already directed Rogers and Astaire in Swing Time, their best musical, but Astaire wanted to make a musical without her. He was tired of and afraid of fixed partners, such as his sister Adele had been and Rogers was becoming, and Rogers wanted to do her own films too, so Astaire made Damsel, and it was a financial failure, his first. but it’s too bad it is not more often seen. It failed perhaps because it needed an American girl: Rogers is ur-American but Fontaine is English; Rogers also is classless because she is show-biz, while Fontaine is clearly UC.  Also the love plot is thin, made up for by excellent supporting people, including Reginald Gardiner who at one point hilariously sings grand opera.  The Gershwins wrote the score, which gives us  “Nice Work If You Can Get It,” and “A Foggy Day In London Town,” and spiffy comic numbers. These Astaire dances with two very experienced vaudevillians, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and the three of them are super together, particularly in a production number in an amusement park, which won Hermes Pan the Oscar that year for Dance Direction. Gracie Allen was that punned combination of innocence and an empty head that produced unintended wisdom, such as would later become Marilyn Monroe’s stock in trade, and George Burns is the studio couch on which she bounces. Stevens’ skill in direction is seen right away in the most exuberant dance Astaire ever filmed, actually performed in moving traffic – and later in the moving traffic of a party as Astaire and Montagu Love sit on castle stairs strategizing the love-plot. P.G. Wodehouse wrote the book, for in those days he did libretti (even, if you will, that for Showboat). The most interesting aspect of the picture in a way is the most relaxed and natural performance of Astaire’s career. This means that he is more internally visible and does less mugging, a holdover from his long-installed stage technique, such that his presence on the screen is humanly comic. Stevens had a way with actors, which was mainly to leave them alone and let them do what they really wanted. This gave all his many comedies a free-and-easiness priceless to this day. The movie is a charmer. Give yourself a treat.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, Fred Astaire: Screen God, George Burns, Gracie Allen, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Joan Fontaine, MUSIC BY George and Ira Gershwin, MUSICAL, Reginald Gardiner

 

Swing Time

01 Apr

Swing Time — Directed by George Stevens. Musical Comedy. A runaway-groom meets up with a dance instructor who wont give him a tumble. 104 minutes 1936.

* * * * *

Oh, you may say that Fred Astaire couldn’t act, and in one sense it’s quite true. He seems awkward and embarrassed saying lines. On the other hand, everything he does as an actor is apropos, and every move he makes is a dance, just as with that other Broadway hoofer James Cagney; like Astaire, Cagney is never not dancing. Which means that Astaire’s acting is always physically animated. If there is any problem with his acting, it may be that he is never still, never grounded in his lines. Swing Time is accompanied by a terrific commentary by John Mueller, who takes us through a good deal of what went on to make this piece the greatest of Rogers/Astaire musicals — which has to do with Astaire’s grueling rehearsal work, freedom from chance in the dances, his staff, and the nature of the picture itself. It is directed by George Stevens who was one day to direct Shane and A Place In The Sun and The More The Merrier and who brings to the picture an angle of vision and an allowance for acting excellence in the principals which unify it. Of course, it is a white telephone musical, which means that it is essentially a film in which only the dances are serious art: the rest is flip. This is as it should be, because Astaire is interested in discovering and firming up the musts of movie dance. His discoveries rule to this day. The film contains wonderful numbers of Jerome Kern and Dorothy Fields, including a most endearing version of “The Way You Look Tonight” which you will never forget. And at one point Astaire applies blackface and does a shadow dance with 24 chorus girls 12 in black, 12 in white, and then dances to a triple black and white rear projection of himself. Minstrel shows embody and celebrate an exuberance which our negro entertainers alone possess: blackface gives performers freedom: that is what is being enlarged on here, and, because it is respectful at heart, it would be offensive to be offended by it.  Rogers, beautifully dressed for all her numbers, is liquid in Astaire’s arms. She had a wonderful figure, graceful arms, strong square shoulders, a flexible back. And of course she could actually act, so she moves the spoken drama along while Astaire moves the dance drama along. Dancing he led her; not-dancing, she led him, so to say. At the end Stevens directs them in the most beautiful romantic dance ever filmed. A valuable suggestion Mueller gives is to watch the dances in slow motion. What a treat! To actually see for oneself what went into these intricate, witty dances!  Astaire’s body was a genius. That body is the ur of American movie musicals.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by George Stevens, Eric Blore, Fred Astaire: Screen God, Ginger Rogers: movie goddess, Helen Broderick, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MUSICAL, MUST SEE, Singing & Dancng Musical, Uncategorized, Victor Moore

 

When Willie Comes Marching Home

10 Mar

When Willie Comes Marching Home — directed by John Ford. Farce. A patriotic soldier longs to get into the WW II action and then does so. 82 minutes Black and White 1950

★★

It seems incredible that this World War II comedy was made in the year it was, five years after the War itself was over, but there it is, gawky and out of place, and too old for its own mental short pants – as is its star, Dan Dailey, who is clearly 35 when he plays Willie, the boy who wants to go to war. Dailey was one of show business’s most valiant performers, and he brings to the tale his huge ingratiating smile and his mastery of physical comedy time and time again, as he falls, faints, collapses, and dances about to escape the nips of a nasty dog. He has the lanky agility of Ray Bolger, and it almost saves the film. For the problem with the picture lies in how many areas? Aside from being out of date, the story is clearly a bad imitation of Preston Sturges’ masterpiece, Hail The Conquering Hero, of five years before. That might work – save for the treatment by the director. For, while the story is droll, what John Ford thinks is funny, aint. Or at least I am too hoity-toity to find it so. Ford finds patriotism funny. Ford finds drunkenness funny. He finds brawls funny. And he finds stupidity funny. And maybe they are – but Ford’s touch is ham-handed. His wit is on the level of The Three Stooges, not Preston Sturges, for Ford is beer-brained and out to please the lower orders – only. In fact, he is a dreadful snob. Five years later, he was to submit Mr. Roberts to the same wrecking ball of this sort of wit, until Henry Fonda put his foot down and Ford was taken off the film and replaced by Mervyn LeRoy. As soon as Ford enters a room, the mental climate lowers. You find this over and over again in his pictures. There is a terrible disconnect in him between what he thought entertainment was and what people are. Like all artists he saw entertainment as an idealization. But, lying behind that there’s got to be the guts of reality, and where they should be in Ford I find delusion and cowardice. I think of Stagecoach as one of the greatest films I have ever seen. And among its virtues is one that When Willie Comes Marching Home also possesses – pace. Ford knew how to move things forward, he knew where a camera should be placed in a scene to make it simple and clear and arresting, and he has a sense of broad spectacle. These are no small gifts. Ford started way back in the silents. But talkies changed film radically, no more so than with comedy. Drama changed somewhat, but comedy changed completely – from physical wit to verbal. This is why silent comedy is still watchable. But Ford didn’t change with it. He is a bum making films about bums and talking down to them all the while he does it. I feel in him a very gifted, hard-working hypocrite and bully. And I don’t like him.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, BROAD COMEDY, Colleen Townsend, Dan Dailey, Directed by John Ford, Evelyn Varden, Farce, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, MUSICAL NUMBERS, William Demarest, World War II

 

Hedwig And The Angry Inch

23 Feb

Hedwig And The Angry Inch – written and directed by John Cameron Mitchell. Rock Opera. A transvestite rock singer seeks retribution for the theft of his songs by a rock superstar. 95 minutes Color 2001.

★★★★★

At the heart of Hedwig lies the soul-scar we all carry, one which would revolt and horrify others were it known, so we suppose, perhaps with justification. To countermand and also commandeer this defect, Hedwig fashions himself into being a rock singer. Of course, it works and it does not work. The platform upon this performance is built is that Hedwig is also an orphan, raped by his father and abused by his mother, and eventually sold into marriage with a handsome black pedophile soldier, who eventually shucks him off for fresh chicken. His parents abandon him, this soldier abandons him, his band member lover abandons him, and his songwriting partner abandons him and steals his material and becomes a star. Hedwig is abandoned. But Hedwig is not his name. For he also abandons his name and takes his mother’s name, puts on glitz rags and Farah wigs and flames at the head of a band, Hedwig And The Angry Inch. That is to say, abandoned, he becomes abandoned. He becomes abandoned to being abandoned. He becomes not just a performer, but one who throws everything away. I mention all this because the actor who plays this part is fed by his relation to this background, and his genius does not stand apart from it. So it is impossible to give any kind of technical breakdown or analysis of a performance so profoundly integrated and so grounded that there is no risk the actor takes that proves an error. It means the actor will know instinctually what the camera can and cannot do in his favor. Of course, in one sense, the actor is operating with the full cooperation of his makeup table. The variety of being he is able to paint with this makeup ranges right left and up and down. There are times his darkened eyes are darkened thus not to blantantize an emotion but to frame the masterpiece of a subtle tragic twinge. His face is responsive and to be read, to be followed, to be empathized with. He’s a wonderful actress. He could play Medea. The film itself is not a documentary of the stage version, which Mitchell also performed. The only loss from it is his repartee with the audience – at the Victoria in San Francisco, say, where I saw it performed twice without Mitchell at all. The gain is large because of Mitchell’s sense of the décor of a mess of wigs and everything else. Somewhat over-edited, the film offers the tremendous carrying power of the close-up. The songs, which tend to be collegiately polemic, are not as good as the story, and the story is not as good as his performance, which is the raison d’etre of all. His supporting cast is splendid, especially the young man who plays his band mate lover. See Mitchell do it. He’s a singing scar.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: MUSICAL COMEDY MANNERED, Includes Some Gay Characters, ROCK OPERA, WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY John Cameron Mitchell

 

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

28 Dec

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes — Directed by Howard Hawks. Musical Two showgirl broads abroad find love and money and fine songs to sing about them. 91 minutes Color 1953.

* * * *

A perfume is suddenly in the room and one cannot think clearly of anything else. That perfume is Marilyn Monroe. Translated to cinematic terms this means you can’t take your eyes off her. Whenever she is on camera she draws focus. She is not trying to steal scenes. But there is a level of vulnerability available to her in the character she always played that is riveting. One goes goo-goo-eyed, just like the men in the movie do. The men are Charles Coburn who had acted with her before in Monkey Business, also directed by Hawks, and who is lovely here, and Tommy Noonan in a badly conceived role, playing an infantile millionaire poodling after her. Lorelei Lee certainly deserved a grown man as her vis a vis. But Hawks was not interested in Monroe’s sexuality. He liked scaloppini dames like Lauren Bacall and Ella Raines, women who were forward, the seducers not the seduced, that is he liked women who chased men, not women whom men chased, like MM. Hawks directed this movie in his usual plain camera style, but he directed none of the musical numbers except for Bye Bye Baby. He also had a terrible time with Monroe, as did everyone else, and he had no idea how to talk to her while they were making it. He could not understand how this little chippie bit player from Monkey Business could have become this big star. But Hawks had directed Jane Russell in The Outlaw, liked her, and knew her to be a woman of common sense. And Jane Russell had made herself a pal to Monroe; they both were childless; they both had famous athlete husbands; they both were disrespected sex bombs; they both sang real well. So Hawks talked to Jane when he wanted to convey something to Marilyn and Jane talked to Marilyn, and thus the movie got made. The songs are wonderful. The costumes are wonderful. Sydney Guilaroff did Marilyn’s hair in a loose pageboy for the Diamonds Are A Girls Best Friend number, which really pays off. Howard Hughes had Jane Russell under contract, but released her on the understanding that she would be given plenty to do, and she does it superbly and partners Monroe well. Russell had a remittance agreement with Hughes that if she stayed under contract to him, he would support her for the rest of her life, and he did. However, he was stingy in renting her out, so she made few movies, and she thus never thoroughly developed her craft. Monroe on the other hand is in full swing here, in her first huge role. She brings to the part exactly what Carol Channing brought to it, when I saw her do it at the Ziegfeld on Broadway, which is the intelligence of a young woman who is so ignorant she knows everything. Monroe glows with this ignorance. She even knows so little she even thinks she has to make her diction extravagant to cloak it: “Thanks ever so.”  And like Channing she brings to Lorelie Lee a vocal style that is legato, which is to say, slow of speech, as opposed to the gum snapping fast come-back type blonde, and is also unearthly. In Channing the voice is freakish. In Monroe it is a heavenly candy store. Monroe, like Garbo, made up her character in the shower. Out on the street, talking to her, she did not wear the sexual garment which she never doffs here. But the fact was that she had made it up, she had made it up not out of whole cloth but out of something real in her, something extremely painful and no older than twelve. It became her destiny. The utilitarian vulnerability combined with her dishy looks, figure, and voice released in her the instinct to know how to play a woman who didn’t know anything. But it also gave her the invitation to be taken advantage of. And to use every means at her disposal to counter the dismembering fear that gave her.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Charles Coburn: Screen God: Acting God, Directed by Howard Hawks, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe: SCREEN GODDESS, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Starlift

26 Dec

Starlift. A smorgasbord of numbers to boost morale produced at Warners 1 hours 43 minutes.Black and White 1951.

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The Travis Airforce Base stars in this pot pouri of musical and comedy numbers, designed to imitate Hollywood Canteen and This Is The Army. It is a scrapbook musical set this time not in WWII but in the Korean War, a War whose name, however, is never mentioned once during the entire film. Various superstars saunter through, among them James Cagney who is the best, and Gary Cooper who has a droll moment as a Dudley Doright cowboy in the skit narrated by the ever-bland Phil Harris. Doris Day sings whenever a bandaid appears on the arm of a returning vet. Gordon Macrae sings several numbers under his pompadour, and Virginia Mayo does a sweaty and effortful Polynesian dance in a blond wig, or perhaps the blond wig does the dance on top of Virginia Mayo. Everyone does their darndest anyhow. Jane Wyman sings, which is natural, as she actually began her career in musicals. Ruth Roman is the mother superior of  a mission to entertain the returning troops, airlifted in to Travis, (although I was in that war and we all went out by troopship from Camp Stoneman). Anyhow, the film is a actually about the movie star played by Janice Rule who is 19 when this was made. Here she is a dancer, as skilled as Gene Nelson who partners her, and she becomes involved with a forged romance, foisted off on the public by Louella Parsons who also appears. Janice Rule was to become one of the most accomplished and beautiful actresses ever to appear in film, and it is a loss that her career hadn’t more shape. She was powerful and mysterious with a beautiful speaking voice; she’s a later-day Howard Hawks sort of female, forward and humorous in her sexuality. The sides of her mouth curl up exquisitely, just as they did with that other dark-haired beauty, Cyd Charisse. What’s also fascinating is to see Doris Day in full force. Of course there never was a time when Doris Day was not in full force. She is always giving her all and it is always at the limit of her technique. Her application to the task and her daring make her look good. But she wasn’t about to play games; she was a single mother with a son to support; still, her work would appear more intelligent, were she not so eager to please. DoDo acts out of the power of a sure and certain instinct, and if you want to see instinctual acting, this is it. If you want to see instinctual acting with no discriminatory power attached, this is also it. She hits her mark every time; what is at question is the mark itself. The movie is lame, and slightly dishonest which the WWII anthology movies were not. What makes it lame is the faux naiveté of its sexuality combined with the obligatory leer of its males, wolf whistles being the shortest of all shorthands to romance.

 

 

 
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Posted in Doris Day, Gary Cooper, Gene Nelson, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, James Cagney, Jane Wyman, Janice Rule: ACTING GODDESS; SCREEN GODDESS, Phil Harris, Randolph Scott: Movie God, Ray Liotta, Ruth Roman, Singing & Dancng Musical, Variety Show, Virginia Mayo

 

Weekend In Havanna

23 Dec

Weekend In Havana – Directed by Walter Lang. Musical. A cruise ship to Cuba crashes and the lawyer assigned to prevent a suit comes up against a determined lady. 81 minutes Color 1941.

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Brilliant! Partly because of the Technicolor process that made color something it never was in real life. And, of course, one didn’t go to the Fox musicals for real life any more than one went to a box of Toffinetti chocolates for a hearty meal. One went for wit, ebullience, and a blond with the common touch. Alice Faye was an Irish lass from Hell’s Kitchen, good hearted, easy, accessible. She had an allure she seemed almost unaware of, but the camera was not unaware of it. Her big, subtle, sleepy, China-blue eyes and her sensual and volatile mouth drew one in, as did her sultry alto when singing, at which point the camera drew close to catch it all. Gosh, what a lady! And she’s a darn good screen actor, too, as is the lushly handsome John Payne opposite her. The amazing costumes of the Fox musicals are in full array on her, as they also are on that island of tropical repose, Carmen Miranda. This movie is not like one of the deep naturalistic musicals of Gene Kelly at MGM, which moved musicals forward. It was rather the confection of a brilliant production crew and a formula for entertainment that was crisp, exotic, and fantastical in its detail and array. I have a high opinion of Fox musicals. I think of Fox musicals as piñatas. They don’t change much from one to the other. They always have the same predictable function and form, but they bring delight and they are full of astonishing gifts! Also with Billy Gilbert, Leonard Kinsky, Sheldon Leonid, Cesar Romero.

 

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Alice Faye: SCREEN GODDESS, Billy Gilbert, Carmen Miranda, Cesar Romero, FOX MUSICAL, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, John Payne, Leonid Kinsky

 

The Band Wagon – more

10 Nov

The Band Wagon – more — directed by Vincente Minnelli – a backstage musical in which a fading movie hoofer resumes his Broadway career, except with a director of Orson Wellesian pretension, except, as well, with a snooty ballerina! – 112 minutes 1953.

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The Greatest Musical Ever Made? Don’t answer. I’ve been watching it again in the DVD re-release, color restored and in stereo now. Two discs of background and outtakes, and three versions all of which I could not help watching in one day, the other two being a commentary by Liza Minnelli and Michael Feinstein and a monaural version, which I actually preferred, because that’s what I saw when it first came out in 1953 while I was in basic at Fort Dix. Those soldiers who appear in the Shine On My Shoes number were like me, headed for the Korean War. I went back to the post movie house and saw it all over again, just as I did yesterday. The Lisa Minnelli and Michael Feinstein version is worthwhile because Michael Feinstein is a gentleman and has useful information about the musical contributions of Adolf Deutsch, Roger Edens, and the arranger Conrad Salinger, while Liza Minnelli jackasses herself with moronic sentimentality punctuated with a coarse laugh. Her nostalgia is not even her own — she is nostalgic not for her father but for his work, which, however, is before us, and which speaks for itself. Vincente Minnelli was famous for his color sense, and the colors are not modest. He hired two newcomers, Michael Kidd, to do the choreography, and Mary Ann Nyberg to do the costumes. Nyberg does two unusual things with Cyd Charisse. The first is to put her in green twice, not a forgiving color for humans, except her. The second is to frame the film with her costumes, red and green at the start, then red and green at the end. In It’s Always Fair Weather, Charisse, in the boxing match dance, will wear two almost matching greens, and she has already proven she can carry the color in the great Louise Brooks finale of Singing In The Rain where she wears a green flapper dress with short flyaway skirt. Now, first seen in the en pointe ballet, Charisse is in bright red. Next when she enters to meet Astaire, she is in a black spangled lace dress over midnight green petticoats so dark you can hardly see the green, with bright green gloves. At the end, Nyberg puts Charisse in the red spangled dress for the Girl Hunt ballet and then for the That’s Entertainment finale she puts Charisse in green khaki satin. For the simple and justly famous Dancing In The Dark number in Central Park, Nyberg, in a tour de force choice, has Charisse and Astaire both in white, he in three tones of white, she in a $22 shirtwaist with a trillion pleats. White, the color of truce – for, having come to a truce in life, they are out to discover whether they can find a truce in dance. The unity of their performance is created in part by the unity of that color, to make “Dancing In The Dark” the most moving romantic dance ever filmed. (Watch: Charisse actually leads it; the focus is actually given to her.) The other newcomer is Michael Kidd. You will find what he starts out to do in the “Louisiana Hayride” number he will not long after complete in Seven Brides For Seven Brothers. But what he mainly does is remove Astaire from his usual tropes. So there are no great big tap dancing numbers and such. What we have is the amiable affair of the shoeshine dance and the jazz dance of “The Girl Hunt Ballet”. That is to say, Astaire’s dancing is technically simple, and this is rare for him, for it does not resemble even big splashy jazz numbers like “Stepping Out With My Baby” from Easter Parade. It’s a new Astaire, and it is possibly the most satisfying and relaxed he has ever been in dance. To make up for it, he sings a lot, and sings well. Watch also the chiaroscuro of Minnelli’s use of extras and bit players as they populate, move around, pass through, come forward, and then retreat into the background dark, as does Thurston Hall as the moneybags backer and the stagehands and manger. Compare “Girl Hunt” here with the similar but barely populated “Broadway Rhythm: Gotta Dance” finale of Singing In The Rain, to feel Minnelli’s genius as a colorist with chorus, with casts, with people, with extras, all of whom he instructed individually and personally as to their tasks and motivations. This makes it a musical of great warmth. Easy and essential. Singing In The Rain and The Band Wagon are the apogee of Hollywood musicals. Don’t miss them.

 
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Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Backstage Musical, CHARACTER BIT PLAYER EXTRAORDIAIRE: Thurston Hall, Classic Movie Musical, Cyd Charisse: screen goddess, Dance & Dancing, Directed by Vincente Minnelli, Fred Astaire: Screen God, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, James Mitchell, MUST SEE, Nanette Fabray, Oscar Levant, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas

24 Oct

 

The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas — Directed by Colin Higgins.  Musical. The Madame and the local sheriff  and the football team and the girls of the night in a great big tumble. 114 minutes Color 1982.

* * * *

Dolly Parton’s bosom is a national treasure because such a big heart lies behind it. Wonderful to behold in all her amplitude and fun, she sashays through the piece with rare good humor, and in the end turns down Burt Reynolds proposal with simple and complete conviction. Reynolds is perfect as the good ol’ boy who can’t grow up, and his scene with Charles Durning as the Governor is staunch acting indeed. Durning does a delicious song-and-dance as a side-stepping politico. Jim Nabors does his yokel goon just fine. Dom De Luise is insufficient as the pesky puritanical scandal-monger TV personality. The piece is richly produced and shot and imaginatively directed. The songs are patter songs and specialty songs, and are jolly good, but none of them are up to, let’s say, the songs from Good News or The Bandwagon. Dolly Parton has brought in two of her own pieces, the “Sneaking Around With You” duet, which is witty and fun, and “I’ll Always Love You” in which she is very moving. Because the direction is so imaginative, and the costuming so right, the movie is perhaps more of a dance musical, which is just fine. The scene where the football team start in the locker room after the game and get undressed and are bare-assed in the shower, and get dressed again and get on their bus and head out to The Chicken Ranch and do a hoedown with the ladies in prom gowns who in turn strip down and they all end up naked in bed upstairs is an example of musical movie direction at its best and just one of several such sequences, all brilliantly edited. Colin Higgins deserves that feather he is wearing in his cap. The movie is a strawberry ice-cream sundae, enthusiastic, friendly, frank, and satisfying. A fine way to spend time without wasting it.

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Posted in ACTING STYLE: AMERICAN REALISTIC, Burt Reynolds, Charles Durning, Comic Western, Dolly Parton, Singing & Dancng Musical

 
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