RSS
 

Archive for the ‘Ricardo Montalban’ Category

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.

 
Comments Off on Sweet Charity

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.

 
Comments Off on Two Weeks With Love

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

 

Battleground

05 Jul

Battleground – directed by William A. Wellman. WW II Drama. A platoon experiences The Battle Of The Bulge. 118 minutes Black and White 1949.

★★★★★

Paul C. Vogel won an Oscar for photographing it, and Robert Pirosh’s script won one too, and they both deserve it. For this is a wonderful war picture in just those ways, the outlying ways, rather than the performance ways or the direction ways. Whoever was assigned the mise-en-scene deserved one too, for the snow and dirt and fog and filth are convincing and important in determining the grand irony of the Tolstoyan story which tells of a platoon of men in a great battle, none of those men knowing that it is a great battle, none of them knowing if it is a battle at all, none of them knowing even what country they are in. They move in one direction and lie down and fire their guns; they dig foxholes; no sooner are they dug-in than they have to get on their feet and move in another direction. They have no sense of a plan, or who is giving these orders, or why. They shoot at the enemy without patriotism and they lie back in the snow for a flicker of rest without repose. A great deal of the time is spent waiting, scrounging, scratching. I don’t know the time-line of this piece, but it was released in 1949 or 1950 depending on where you look, and this was six years after the events described, which is The Battle of the Bulge at Bastogne in World War II. The principal players are excellent, with Van Johnson as the loud playboy, John Hodiak as a GI with some breeding, and James Whitmore as the Sargeant. (Whitmore never breaks stride with his frost-bitten limp once he adopts it, which is a tribute to his craft.) But the little moments of the picture are as telling as the characters. One wants to know what is going to happen to them rather than who they are, which is just fine, but their walking around a dead body without comment, the disarray of their combat clothes, the pile of galoshes that don’t fit — these make the film a wonder and a reward. I have been in a war and carried an M-1, and the attitudes of survival shown here are real. Besides that, it was a big hit.

 
Comments Off on Battleground

Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Directed by William Wellman, George Murphy, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED, HISTORICAL DRAMA, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, James Whitmore, John Hodiak, Leon Ames, MILITARY, PERIOD: WWI, PRIZE WINNER, Ricardo Montalban, Van Johnson

 

The Kissing Bandit

30 Sep

The Kissing Bandit – Directed by Laslo Benedek. Musical. The milquetoast son of a famed Mexican bandit longs for his son to take up the gun, and become “The Kissing Bandit.” 100 minutes 1948.

* * * *

In Ann Miller’s picture book of her musicals, this one is described, by common agreement of all its principals, as The Worst Musical Ever Made. I don’t know what the worst ever made is, but this can’t be it. First of all it is a lot of fun! It’s a Latin American farce, so, if you like The Pirate as much as I do, you will find this picture has its own version of amusement. (True, it would have been better directed by Vincente Minnelli.) Much of that amusement is supplied by J. Carrol Naish who, with a light-bulb nose, plays the funniest bandito in the world, grumpy, greedy, and galumphing. He is abetted by Mildred Natwick who is super as a lecherous duenna. For its stars we have Frank Sinatra, who is in perfect voice, and Kathryn Grayson, the same. These two had made musicals together before this, and got along. Why?  As they are so oddly matched, they are perfectly suited to one another. For Kathryn Grayson with her valentine face and bosom and her operetta soprano and Sinatra with no body weight at all and his crooner’s baritone are a naturally funny combo and they both play their parts well in the style of light farce, with Sinatra as the fool and Grayson as the femme voluptueuse. None of Nacio Herb Brown’s songs (save Love Is Where You Find It) are hits, yet that is not the problem. The problem is that the costumes are lousy. They drown the performers and the performances. They are not just over the top, which would be fun, they are vulgar, and one is wrenched from what is going on by the distraction of their garishness. Only until Grayson gets into a black dress and then into a white one, do her scenes work. A neat pas de trois, with Cyd Charisse and Ann Miller and Ricardo Montalban, is almost demolished because of the gold shoulders the two ladies wear. (As an aside, I wonder – why it was Sinatra was always presented as sexually callow in his films, a boy with no passion, sexual experience, or drive. Was it to still milk his appeal to fifteen year old bobby soxers?) The great Robert Surtees filmed it, and it still works to entertain escape and beguile. See if you don’t agree.

[ad#300×250] a

 

 

 
2 Comments

Posted in ACTING STYLE: HOLLYWOOD CRISP, Ann Miller, Billy Gilbert, Cyd Charisse: screen goddess, FILMED BY: Robert Surtees, Frank Sinatra, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, J. Carrol Naish, Kathryn Grayson, Mildred Natwick: MASTER COMEDIENNE, MUSICAL, Ricardo Montalban, Singing & Dancng Musical

 

Border Incident

23 Aug

Border Incident – Directed by Anthony Mann. Government Agency Enforcement Drama. Immigration Authorities track down trafficking of Mexican Braceros illegally imported into the US as slaves. 94 minutes Black and White 1949.

* * * * *

A strong supporting cast of Bad Guys keep putting things in their mouths and doing the cock-eyed and donning stark getups. The magisterial Howard Da Silva as the heavy is great with cigars, of course, but take a look at what the others are chewing. Ugh! Anyhow they’re all very Stanislavsky, very Russian, in their playing, and thank God for that. We have Arnold Moss, mad-hatted, with eyes like black sunflowers, wearing a checkerboard shirt as the actors engage in cards, chess, and other games of chance while the big game of chance unfolds. The great Alfonso Bedoya steals every scene he appears in simply by dint of his appearing in it. He is fascinating to watch and, as an actor, never wrong. Charles McGraw, a Mann staple, looks like he should be thrown in jail and hung.

This leaves us with the stiffs who play the Immigration Good Guys and stand up for the Mexicans who are being treated barbarously. Their on-camera representatives are George Murphy as the set-up and Ricardo Montalban, a big star in Mexico, playing the plant among the smuggled peons. But it is his bonding with the peon James Mitchell plays that holds the screen and validates the action, which consists of an insurrection of the peons. James Mitchell is very beautiful and very Mexican in his affect and his upper eyelids. He and Montalban are exactly the same age, 28; Mann has them play their scenes in great physical intimacy. They wrap themselves around one another without touching. It is interesting to see this happen in a picture of this era. In the end you believe James Mitchell would die to save Montalban’s life, for he nearly does so.

Montalban refers to it as a B movie, which at the time it was, but it’s an A movie now. He also ascribes it to John Sturges, and says nothing more except that it got fine reviews and received some awards but did not receive much attention. Though he could neither sing nor dance, he had made four musicals at MGM, playing exotics, and went back to make another. “I never did get the big dramatic role that is so important for an actor’s career. I never had gotten it in Hollywood.” He must have been dreaming. He had a strong accent and was Mexican. Anyhow, this is that role.

John Alton who shot it paints the film with light; sometimes it is dramatic; sometimes it is theatrical, but it is always gripping, as is Mann’s staging of an all-male cast, and his willingness to go to extremes.  He also ends it, as he ends He Walked By Night and Side Street, with men pursued and trapped in a narrow space, here a canyon, a death canal.

[ad#300×250]

 

 

 

 
1 Comment

Posted in ACTING STYLE: Method, Alfonso Bedoya, Charles McGraw, CRIME DRAMA, George Murphy, GOVERNMENT AGENCY ENFORCEMENT DRAMAa, HOLLYWOOD HEYDAY 1930 - 1950, Howard Da SIlva, NOIRISH, Ricardo Montalban

 
 
Rss Feed Tweeter button Facebook button Technorati button Reddit button Myspace button Linkedin button Webonews button Delicious button Digg button Flickr button Stumbleupon button Newsvine button