The Musicals List REDUX

[knives]

I just imagine that it's a ten year old doodling.

[Tom Hagen]

The Country song in Team America is all kinds of genius. It would be better if the actual country music from the era wasn't so outrageous that it existed in a state completely beyond parody.

[Matt]

Switching gears slightly: Easter Parade: It's so much fun to see Judy Garland and Fred Astaire working together, and Fred really seems to enjoy working with Judy. Too bad this is their only pairing.

The movie kicks off with a song, and then another song before we even get the first words of dialogue. It's magnificent. And then there's another song, and another song, and another song. Seriously, 5 songs in about the first 20 minutes (though one is just the music playing during Judy's entrance dance number, which happens in the background behind Fred, which is a great star entrance). The music, being Irving Berlin, is all wonderful. Even his cast-offs are top drawer. Ann Miller gets a song and tap number (one of my favorite tunes from all of the MGM musicals, "Shakin' the Blues Away") and even Peter Lawford gets a charming song.

However, some of the direction is just off. Granted, this is only Charles Walters' second feature (after his Good News debut), and he could often be clumsily careless about things like pacing and framing, and Robert Alton is credited with dance direction (and I don't know if that means he choreographed as well as directed the camera framing and movement), but so many of the interior scenes seem so choppy and tightly blocked and framed (like there's no air in the room) and some of the musical numbers just feel a little flat. For example, Ann Miller does her tap number on a giant stage with no scenery but some drapery behind her and no one else on stage. Obviously she doesn't need anything else as she's an eyeful in her own right, and there are some lovely camera movements such as when she "pushes" the camera up in the air toward the end of her number and it floats back down to eye level, but in the end the whole scene just kind of looks like rehearsal footage because of the spareness of the background.

But when it works, it works. Fred's "Happy Easter" and "Drum Crazy" one-two number is a spectacular opening for a film, and it's a lot of fun to see Judy play at being a bad dancer in the "Beautiful Faces Need Beautiful Clothes" number with the shedding marabou dress that recalls Ginger Rogers' "Cheek to Cheek" dress from Top Hat. The "vaudeville montage" is also fun and snappily-paced.

I could definitely do without the slow-motion green screen special effects during "Steppin' Out with My Baby" (and am I seeing things or is this supposed to be a "Harlem" number and everyone's wearing Max Factor Light Egyptian makeup?) I've always disliked this and "Shoes with Wings On" from The Barkleys of Broadway. Fred doesn't need special effects, he is the special effect. Except for "You're All the World to Me" from Royal Wedding. That gets a pass because it's done so well and it's not distracting.

I remembered Easter Parade being one of my favorites of all MGM musicals, and it still is due to the easy charm and chemistry of Fred and Judy and the Berlin songs, but it's not going to wind up in my top 10. It's shocking to think, as good and "pulled together" as she is in this, that Judy would make only two more films for MGM. Then, of course, when you see what a manic mess she is in The Pirate, released only two months prior, it all makes sense.

[PillowRock]

Maybe I've got them mixed up. I haven't seen either since my theater put them on as a midnight double feature nearly eight years ago.

One easy visual cue that might help sort out your memory:

A Hard Day's Night is in B&W (hijinks around the band getting ready for live TV appearance) and Help! is in color (much ado about a cult trying to retrieve a ring from Ringo's finger).

In some ways Help! looks like it was the inspiration for the American TV show The Monkeys (I don't know if it was, it just looks a bit like that to me.)

[knives]

So My Sister Eileen marks me starting to truly get into this project and not just stock up and also my first Quine minus Novak. This is probably the strongest example of the architecture thing that has become a talking point for the forum (and this without seeing the original film). Not only is everything pleasantly overstuffed, but it's set around in a way that builds the compositions into something larger than a haphazard coming together would. It's also nice to see Leigh not at the butt of some man's gun or edge of their knife.

The overall tone of light fluff is such a refreshing change of pace. I wouldn't say the film is particularly funny, but it's mood makes it like breathing. I don't mean any of this as a negative either. It's a subtle way of the film attaching itself to me that I wish more films of this sort would do. Throughout there is no push and it's perfectly willing to marinate in it's setting. One interesting directorial choice that needs to be mentioned is how distant the camera is. Part of that is probably to better integrate the musical numbers, but I suspect that doesn't explain it all. The characters are always so small like they're about to be swallowed by the clutter of their earth. It's an odd little thing that made me pay attention much more strongly.

Actually now that I think about this much of the film seems full of Edwards, but the elements that I typically find grating or dull are given a whimsy and zest for life which turns them into something slowly satisfying. The film desperately needs to grow into something grand because these Edwards pieces function poorly at first. Beginning essentially at Lemon's intro the film jumps into life. I'm not sure how much of that is actually from the movie or my liking of Lemon, but from that point forward it goes from crawling to dancing towards a bizarre classicism for screwball.

As to the musical aspect I'm simultaneously impressed and disappointed. Mostly I wish there was more of it there. It seems grafted on at the last minute to pad out the film. None of the music was memorable nor the dancing. What's worse is what makes it better though. These dance numbers don't come off as arbitrary at least by Quine's end with a lot of mocking commentary that plays around with the nature of movie musicals (love the silent dance number even if it also suffers from the worst arbitrariness in the film). It's impossibly hard to dislike these deficiencies when as a result we get so many things. I doubt this is a real contender, but it was a good experience all the same.

[domino harvey]

My first reaction was similar in a general sense to yours, in that I thought it was a mildly pleasant way to spend two hours, but the numbers weren't that great and it was mostly a shrug affair. I only watched it initially because I knew Godard loved it. Well, and this has never happened before or since, but this film must have been working double-time in my subconscious, because I actually had a dream about this film urging me to watch it again. It was a strange experience and who am I to decline in the face of such tactics? Well, on second viewing it was an absolute revelation. The numbers popped, the narrative clicked, and I came to see the film for what it is, a profoundly cynical look at what it means to be a woman in what is presented as The City of Men. It's all terribly fascinating to me now and continues to grow in my estimation the more I see it, and I'll get to a more in-depth look at some point in the future when I'm not checking my phone from a bar!

[knives]

Even without rewatching the film I can tell exactly what you're talking about and it has made me put it at the bottom of the kevyip all over again to enforce that I rewatch before the end of this round. Worse come to worse it's a very enjoyable film that uses it's naturalistic sets extremely well. Also just started my first Freed musical and for better or worse it's precisely what I imagined it would be.

[knives]

Be careful what you wish for I guess. Show Boat surely does have more musical numbers than My Sister Eileen, but it sacrifices everything for it. I'm not sure if there were any characters in it and the directing put me straight to sleep. There's racism comments thrown in for who knows why, but doesn't do anything interesting with it. The DVD even seems embarrassed by the film with artifacts occasionally taking over.

Pretty colours and passable music isn't enough to carry a film, but god does Sidney try. Maybe I could excuse this if it were 1929 and sound was still new, but by the '50s this should have been old hat. I'm trying my darnest to think of anything positive to say, but the blandness even kills off the usually great Joe E. Brown. As absurd a genre as the musical lives and dies by personality even more than usual and this movie simply does not have one. it's Anne of the Thousand Days all over again so I guess I should thank Freed (who this is the first musical I've seen from) for staying under two hours than.

Also am I the only one to find the lead actor insanely creepy. There's something in his smile that screams pedophile or something along those lines. That he shows no real personality doesn't help matters either. Those eerie first impressions stay because there is nothing else to do. I just felt sorry for Grayson who at least seems to be trying. She doesn't come within a planet of succeeding, but she tries.

I guess I liked some of the songs though, but than I missed the dancing.

Edit: Is the weird out of sync slow-mo thing normal for the movie or is my DVD broke?

[domino harvey]

Some of your comments are a bit silly, but Show Boat is terrible/unwatchable-- what a rotten place to start exploring sonething as vital as the Freed Unit! Dont give up, &c. I assume you have the four film Howard Keel Warner/TCM set, which ports over the original Turner DVD, which was one of the first ever and the technological quality bears that out.

[Gropius]

Show Boat is terrible/unwatchable

What about the 1936 James Whale version, with Paul Robeson? I still haven't seen it, but Jonathan Rosenbaum rates it highly (calling it 'infinitely superior' to the 1951 version).

[knives]

That set is where I got it from. I'm sure the low level of the transfer heightened my disappointment some. I mean I hope that slow-mo thing isn't actually native to the film because that would kill things even more.

[tavernier]

If nothing else, it's clear that Stone is an unironic, diehard fan of the musical genre.

Actually, it's much clearer that Parker is the "musical queen" of the pair.

[matrixschmatrix]

Haha, yeah, I realized I'd confused the two of them a few hours later, but it didn't seem worth going back and fixing

[knives]

I hate to seem like I'm overtaking the thread, so sorry on that. Anyway leaving Calamity Jane the biggest question on my mind is if fun is enough to translate into great. This idea was there a little bit with Take Me Out to the Ball Game, but that had a few other things to offer. For instance Day, whom I'm being introduced to here, is not convincing at all as this tough as old nails gunslinger but there's so much zest (and so much acting) to the performance that I was charmed anyway.

This is a charming and fun movie of the highest order, but in it's story and characters there's nothing that screams out great. So I'm left feeling like I have watched a great movie, but music numbers aside I can't identify anything as more than fun. The casual racism doesn't help either, but there's such a feeling of goof surrounding it I'll gladly ignore those unfortunate implications to get into the spirit of things.

That said this film features all of the best musical numbers I've seen yet for this project. Dom's beloved Windy City is just the tip of the iceberg with not a single turkey present. It helps that even the more purposeful songs (my favorite being the one on the horse near the end) feel barely contained by the singers. The music here is the best sort of ham and even if I can never resolve the fun=great question I'll at least have the first thing.

Though not as fun On the Town is still an odd piece of entertainment in the good sense. A lot of the gags are real smart and use the artifice of the studio smartly. The plot here has a bit more weight than Take Me Out, but it makes such a risk worth it by having the characters so interesting. That said the real bizarre and out of no where stuff is what I wound up loving the most.

It's weird that The Broadway Melody from Singin' in the Rain infuriated me, but a lot of the similar stuff had me falling in love here. For example the out of no where yellow room sequence had me appropriately giddy (doesn't hurt that it has the best American action scene since The Most Dangerous Game).

An other bit that tickled me was that the lyrics seemed much more necessary than what I've been watching so far. That's not to insult the other films, but words are such an important part of the joke here that my ears had to work overtime adding a lot to the charm.

Than again with Anne Miller you don't need anything else for charm. She brought a Stanwyck wit alongside some of the best dancing I've seen in films. This is really a woman that can keep up with Kelly's feet. That's not to take away from the three other leads who do a great job. The banter between Sinatra and Garrett is fantastic with their big song possibly being my favorite of the movie. The chemistry is so great here that I'd watch any movie no matter how bad in which they were featured together. Kelly and Mushin (who I am finding terribly underrated) do their typical thing, but my is it a great thing. I could put up with these two through a lot.

In general these two have used the genre better than I have encountered so far with a clear stream, the perfect ratio, and memorable melodies that are meaningful or fun enough that the fact they'll never leave my mind becomes a positive (seriously is there anything more addictive than the main theme for Calamity Jane). Now I just need forty more or so like them.

[domino harvey]

Which Sinatra/Garrett number? I assume you mean "Come On Up To My Place," but there's also "You're Awful." For me the best number's a toss up between "Prehistoric Man" and "Count On Me," though. "Count On Me" in particular sums up the joyful, positive tone of the movie perfectly-- it's such a sunny, uplifting experience!

Monopolize away, this is the best thread we've ever had on the board as far as I'm concerned. And once you realize the fun of a musical is its substance, you'll feel a lot less guilty about your enjoyment (one hopes!)

[knives]

I think it's "Come Up to My Place". Whichever one is in the taxi. "Prehistoric Man" is perfect, but I think my favorite one was the three colours bit. That probably is just me showing my love of the artificial again though. The red part of that sequence is just perfect and without words nor story manages to communicate sublimely all the emotion and story you'll ever need. It's easily the greatest thing I have ever seen from Kelly. And don't worry I feel no guilt for my enjoyment, but rather find it interesting how that enjoyment seems to be the specific point for greatness in a lot of these musicals. The substance really is born out of the style and I'm loving that (not to mention the catchy tunes).

[Matt]

Memo to haters: Alexander's Ragtime Band is going on my list. You can't put twenty-odd Irving Berlin songs (even as fragments), showgirls prancing around in spangled devil suits, and a dewy-eyed Tyrone Power into a movie and expect me not to enjoy it. I'm even reconsidering my long-standing ban on watching Alice Faye movies. No, it's not a great movie, and the plot of the two lovers stubbornly keeping themselves apart for pretty much no reason except to have an emotional reunion at the end is silly, but I love how it makes the history of jazz (well, a very whitewashed version) between 1911 and 1938 a backdrop for a romantic melodrama and uses snippets of Berlin hits to convey the characters' emotions. When you consider the use of music in other musicals of the same time, I think you have to admit it's pretty sophisticated here, bettered only by certain of Astaire and Rogers' dance numbers ("Cheek to Cheek").

Knives, I can't believe you just called Jerome Kern "passable music." Oh, my sainted aunt! But if you think the MGM film version has race issues, you ought to check out the earlier film version or even the lyrics to the original stage version. It wasn't always "Here we all work on the Mississippi."

[domino harvey]

Memo to haters: Alexander's Ragtime Band is going on my list.

Alexander's Ragtime BANNED

[knives]

Knives, I can't believe you just called Jerome Kern "passable music." Oh, my sainted aunt! But if you think the MGM film version has race issues, you ought to check out the earlier film version or even the lyrics to the original stage version. It wasn't always "Here we all work on the Mississippi."

I'm assuming you're talking about Showboat in which case I simply mean it does nothing with the race stuff. Even being racist would be an improvement because than it has a reason for being in the picture. As is it's more insulting because the film think it only needs a slight mention. (I hope I'm not coming off too opinionated)

[Matt]

You're absolutely correct that the 1951 MGM film does nothing with the racial elements of the original musical. It's by design. They couldn't even commit to casting a mixed-race actress (Lena Horne) for a mixed-race role because they knew the South would reject the picture. So you get Ava Gardner with a suntan instead.

[knives]

Has there been a studio era Hollywood film besides the original Imitation of Life to actually cast a light skinned or mixed actress when the role called for it? I guess one can never remember how gutsy Stahl was until it slaps you in the face.

[domino harvey]

Well, I mean, actual Lena Horne movies like Stormy Weather or Cabin in the Sky

[knives]

One must appreciate truth in advertising. Anchors Aweigh is in fact half as gay as Our Town, but what they don't mention is that gaiety is diluted further across an extra hour. Though it's easily the weakest of the three Sinatra/ Kelly films I think I still managed to enjoy more than most here. The plot is oddly slimmed down here despite the length and feels awkwardly episodic, but rather than causing the film to become more laidback it gets more stressed out over the smaller details.

I'm mostly just getting the negatives out of the way so that it doesn't look like I'm blinded to them because I did have a good deal, if not Calamity Jane level, of fun with the film. it's silly and too light to become overwrought in spuite of all effort otherwise, but the songs are good (though Grayson sounds like nails on a chalkboard during her bigger numbers) and the banter between Kelly and Sinatra is always amusing.

Speaking of the actors Grayson's eyes remind me of a Cocteau drawing, but beyond that I think I might actually like her. She's not a great actress, but she helps keep afloat a sinking boat. I'm not going to mind that I'll likely be seeing a lot more of her for this project.

Doubt it will make the end of the list, but it's still worth the brief visit. That animation sequence was a little too weird though.

[domino harvey]

She's Back on Broadway (Gordon Douglas 1953) Surprisingly dour backstage musical that ranks among the better Virginia Mayo vehicles I've sat through. Steve Cochran's around too, as are Gene Nelson and Virginia Gibson again (WB really worked these kids to the bone trying to make their unit work, huh)... the film works more than I expected with the pedigree involved, the story's as old as dirt but involving, and most of the numbers are wisely low-key bare stage affairs (esp one fine tap dancing number involving a teensy-tiny staircase). Where the film really falters are its two big numbers, "Breakfast in Bed" and the closing New Orleans suite. WB didn't have the money of Fox or the imagination of MGM, and the film hopelessly overreaches here with these two dull and clumsy production numbers that would have been better served reimagined or excised.

Lucky Me (Jack Donohue 1954) The songwriters behind those catchy tunes in Calamity Jane reteam for this Doris Day vehicle about a superstitious aspiring musical star who finds herself washing dishes in a luxury hotel. Obviously the numbers are good, and like Calamity Jane it frontloads its best songs at the beginning-- especially memorable is the opening number, a hilarious visual treat as Doris Day walks down several city blocks miraculously avoiding endless bad-luck maladies as her cheerful disposition overrules all. Wonderful! Then the "Men" number, with Day and Phil Silvers trading hysterical barbs about the opposite sex, arrives on the scene and gives the viewer hope that this could be a Truly Great Musical. However, after Bob Cummings comes on the scene about a half hour in, things settle into the less ambitious comfort of a Very Good Musical. One of the non-Day bright points in the film is Phil Silvers, whose "High Hopes" number acts as a kind of 2.0 upgrade on his friendship ode from Cover Girl, "Make Way For Tomorrow."

[zedz]

Show Boat is terrible/unwatchable

What about the 1936 James Whale version, with Paul Robeson? I still haven't seen it, but Jonathan Rosenbaum rates it highly (calling it 'infinitely superior' to the 1951 version).

I've never seen the remake (have been warned off it far too many times), but the James Whale version is great and will probably find its way onto the lower reaches of my list.