criterionforum.org

Could 'Love Me Or Leave Me' (Charles Vidor 1955) be considered a musical? I love that film.

Enjoying the discussion, and hope to join in once I've caught up and feel like I can contribute.

It's definitely a musical

For more enterprising moviegoers I would recommend taking a look at the cabaretera genre, a bizarre amalgam of music, melodrama and noir. The cabaretera became a staple of postwar Mexican cinema and launched Cuban rhumba dancer Ninón Sevilla to stardom. Alberto Gout’s Aventurera (1950) and Emilio Fernández's Victims of Sin (1951) are the unquestioned masterpieces of the genre.

Aventurera had completely slipped my mind as a musical, since I remember it as a dark melodrama. Highly recommended.

the preacher wrote:For more enterprising moviegoers I would recommend taking a look at the cabaretera genre, a bizarre amalgam of music, melodrama and noir. The cabaretera became a staple of postwar Mexican cinema and launched Cuban rhumba dancer Ninón Sevilla to stardom. Alberto Gout’s Aventurera (1950) and Emilio Fernández's Victims of Sin (1951) are the unquestioned masterpieces of the genre.

Yeah they're both pretty great. I have Aventurera on my draft list, but I excluded Victimas del Pecado. It's been awhile since I've seen either one, but in my memory the musicality is more central to the story in the former and in the latter it's more incidental to some great, great, melodrama. That whole sequence of Sevilla walking across the moonlit urban desolation felt heavy with the spirit of Murnau. In thinking one "qualifies" as a musical and one doesn't I could be remembering poorly, and I'm sure by some folks' definitions neither would qualify.

That is true. Both movies are dark dramas, but with half a dozen songs / musical numbers they would qualify as musicals.

I'd mentioned near the start of the thread that I'd comment on a couple Warner Archive musicals, and I finally got around to seeing Give a Girl a Break. The musical numbers have their moments and it's interesting to see an example of what a young Donen could do away from the Freed unit, getting some nicely staged performances on a shoestring. We also get a chance to see Bob Fosse in a starring role (and supplying some of the choreography) in his mid-twenties, as well as some good use of technicolor (as far as I could surmise from the lousy VHS-quality transfer, which Warner is now going to replace with a remastered disc, I hope).
My favorite performance was Marge and Gower Champion's "Challenge Dance," in which the latter gradually reminds his female partner of the sheer pleasure of the act of dancing, causing her to forget the internalized decision not to do so. In the dance, the two explore the somewhat rugged features of the rooftop near her penthouse apartment. The short "Applause" finale is very well done for what it is but, as a finale, is an anticlimax to those of us spoiled by watching lavish a-list musicals.

I had more mixed feelings about some of the rest, such as the balloon dance with Fosse and Debbie Reynolds, which dresses up some some not-bad choreography with reverse motion, confetti, and balloons. Other numbers also include a similar touch of the surreal and the slapstick to add interest without being able to stage big, expensive productions. The film toys with "modern dance" but seems unsure how to incorporate it into the picture and its Broadway setting.

The story is so lightweight that it wouldn't have made much sense for this to have been a major affair with a huge budget and Astaire, Kelly et al. as originally planned.

Slightly French (Douglas Sirk 1949) No idea how Sirk got saddled with this one but he doesn't do anything to help matters, either. Don Ameche's total asshole director yells at Dorothy Lamour's (too old) ingenue for a while until she falls in love with him. The music numbers are lazy and clearly the product of a director who only wanted to be making half of a melodramatic musical. Total disaster and the worst Sirk film I've seen yet.

By the Light of the Silvery Moon (David Butler 1953) No one to blame but myself for this. I hated the first film, On Moonlight Bay, so I'm not sure why I thought it'd be a good idea to indulge in the sequel. I am generally quite responsive to antiquated family hokum that came out of the studio system, but very few musicals pull it off well (Small Town Girl is the exception, and maybe the first hour of Summer Holiday). This episodic nightmare Xeroxes many of the original's flaws and it doesn't help that the songs are rotten and the numbers in which they're uttered unimaginative (and in the case of one Canterbury Tale-inspired doozy, a total embarrassment). How could Butler make both this and a masterpiece like Calamity Jane in the same year?

Juke Box Rhythm (Arthur Dreifuss 1959) A better than expected youth-pandering fantasy about a young college lad in NYC who somehow finagles his way into a relationship with a visiting princess. Features a no-name cast and decent period performances of radio friendly acts who've since evaporated to history. It's pretty silly but superior to most of the other cheap teen musicals that popped up around this time.

Sing Your Way Home (Anthony Mann 1945) Very amusing cheapie wartime musical about Jack Haley's egotistical reporter who is forced to escort fifteen ("Sixteen!") musical teens home from Europe. Some very amusing close-quarter musical numbers do their best with poverty row efficiency and the film pushes Haley's egotism to a riotous extreme with the film's finale, in which he inadvertently appears to take credit for single-handedly ending the entire second World War! Would make a good double feature with that other unapologetic musical paean to egotism, the Affairs of Dobie Gillis.

Luxury Liner (Richard Whorf 1948) Borderline unwatchable tripe about Jane Powell's spoiled sixteen year old brat smuggling herself aboard her pop George Brent's cruise ship and orchestrating a bunch of romances. The musical numbers are awful (there's even a rendition of "Alouette" for some reason) and 98 minutes never felt so long.

the Girl Most Likely (Mitchell Leisen 1957) A much stronger Jane Powell vehicle that finds her accepting three different proposals from suitors of varying economic means. Gower Champion choreographed the numbers, and there are some real showstoppers-- my favorite is definitely the decidedly un-PC "Crazy Horse," in which Powell envisions herself as a squaw to Cliff Roberton's indian chief, who sits stoned out of his mind from a "peace pipe" while she tries to remember the names of all their children. A very cute film that I'm sure this will be popping up on the Archives soon.

domino harvey wrote:Slightly French (Douglas Sirk 1949) No idea how Sirk got saddled with this one but he doesn't do anything to help matters, either. ... The music numbers are lazy and clearly the product of a director who only wanted to be making half of a melodramatic musical. Total disaster and the worst Sirk film I've seen yet.

Yep, he had no real creative control on that one, and he didn't want to be doing it. It seems he simply got it over with and then put the experience behind him. Not really worth watching, IMO.

I have nothing mature to add, but going with Dom's earlier recommendation It's Trad, Dad! finds Lester fully formed as an artist with a great deal of high end laughs along with music by some of the best rock stars of the early '60s.

So happy to be able to delete Slightly French from my TiVo unwatched.

Dom wasn't joking when he said that Daddy Long Legs was really artificial. The film looks like a Disney picture with humans superimposed over it all. Even when using realistic sets there's this sense that the film is made of tampered glass and styrofoam. The movie exposes every seam. This isn't gratuitous though and the film is willing to settle down when it calls for it, but it won't avoid a great gag either which is what many of the sets seem designed as. This helps a lot with Caron who is a perfectly fine physical actor, but has an absolutely debilitating ascent. She surely looks the part, but her voice is that of a elderly North French woman. In that way I suppose the film is preparing us for her by showing where our belief or rather lack thereof should extend to. Her bizarre voice fits this bizarre world. That's of course not even getting into the Red Garters scene which is one of the best of these excursions I've ever seen.

The widescreen usage is amazing by the way, some of the absolute best I've ever seen. He doesn't always make the people fill out the screen in the way that a lot of people do. He does at times of course such as clever little Japanese-esque stagings where the characters are at the absolute edge of the screen practically falling out (this leads to a nice visual gag where during an argument Thelma Ritter runs between Astaire and some other guy as they're arguing just to run off. The subtle little twists and turns the camera performs to keep the people dancing on the edges is unbelievable. This film should be case number one against pan and scan so much of the comedy and drama depends on the format. During the actual musical bits the staging changes significantly and while I'm sure this has to do with Astaire's restrictions Negulesco turns this into an absolute advantage with them bouncing in and out of center as the camera zooms back and forth at a wild pace.

That's as I said only a small bit to the framing story where the production design and art direction are once again at the fore. Actually given the focus on Caron mixed with this the film is probably the least Astaire starring Astaire film I've seen yet. Focus, a lot of the staging is centered around the design with large obtrusive objects invading the space and forcing the characters to move in little odd ball ways. It also does great commentary as when the lawyer is reading the letters and there's this giant boat thing covering all but the top of his head so it looks like he's peaking over a trench. That's one of the more blatant gags in the film but it's far from the only nor the most clever one. I can't emphasize enough how perfectly this film is shot.

Though I should mention one shocker. Because of how the DVD is designed I thought the film would be in glorious Black and White, but instead we have a bounty of gorgeous colours. As alluded to above much of the film uses this monocromatic background style with a bizarre mish mash of bright suits and banners to direct the eye with their contrast. This is perfect audience direction that allows for perfect deep focus photography while still visually informing only what Negulesco wants you to see. How in the name of holy fuck it lost out to Picnic is beyond any sense of reason so I'm just going to assume bribes were involved. It's Hitchcock levels of direction and misdirection and I guess I should stop before my hyperbole gets even worse. Needless to say the film gets my vote.

As to the music. Naturally the most sedate and traditionally Astaire number is the one to get the nomination. It's actually by far the weakest number, though great in it's own right, with probably the big school dance from about an hour in getting my vote. Though as I said the excursions are formidable opponents with some of the best camerawork I've seen Astaire afford a director. The music itself is amazing. Now I don't know if it's Mockridge or Newman to blame for this wondrous sound, but either way they both need a pat on the back as even the incidental music in the talking scenes has this fluttery hum that works to indicate scenes and emotion in as sly a way as the colour I talked about earlier. Everyone gives their all and it succeeds in spades.

Another Warner Archive disc I wanted to write a little about is Holiday in Mexico, but I have less to say about this than about Give a Girl a Break above. This disc is a much better representation of a Technicolor film than the DVD-R of GGB, sharper and with much better color. The film really has nothing to do with Mexico, or a holiday there, and the plot and musical numbers are undistinguished. But what really stood out to me the was the style of filming the classical performances by José Iturbi (a Spaniard). Here the camera seems to come alive, capturing Iturbi and Jane Powell extremely creatively from almost every conceivable angle. Much of the film's humor, smirking at Powell's, and especially her male counterpart's, adolescence and immature social ambitions, as well as misunderstanding about various crushes, doesn't come off at all. If only more of the film showed the flair of the way Iturbi's performances were filmed, then the 127-minute runtime might be more worthwhile.

Colleen: Meh almost sort of musical with bland performances and direction from people who should do better. If disinterest had a name it would be Colleen. Okay that's a bit harsh, but outside of the more sparse than they need to musical numbers the film for all intents and purposes just dies.

Gold Diggers of 1933: Now here's [insert song based pun here]. The story is much more energetic and dynamic than I was lead to believe with all of the performances having a severe bounce to them. I actually can't even remember when the last time was that I saw Dick Powell be so great. Of course even though the film is so successful in it's scenes of screwball I have to admit that it's the musical numbers that steal the show. That is when they do come up of course. This film definitely earns it's greatest ever hat.

Footlight Parade: More of the above though slightly less energetic and fun despite the always welcome presence of Cagney. A few of the jokes are really great, but this one doesn't really have the punch in it's main story to stay afloat entirely without the Berkeley buoys. That said they're very good buoys.

Also rewatched Hairspray and I feel more now than ever that it's a musical. There's a few unquestioned examples that fit this same style (I'm thinking It's Trad, Dad! and those mediocre Esther Williams movies).

The Little Colonel (Butler, 1935) Just about scrapes as a musical, and it really depends on your tolerance for (a) Shirley Temple being, well, Shirley Temple and (b) Lionel Barrymore being curmudgeonly. Still, it's not too long and you do get two great dance sequences between Temple and Bill Robinson. The treatment of race is probably the most interesting thing here - but that's another day's discussion.

Pal Joey (Sidney, 1957) This just mystifies me - I haven't the faintest idea what to make of it. There's some decent music, Sinatra is fine, but it all just fails to come to life. Maybe another viewing is called for, if I can be bothered.

The Barkleys of Broadway (Walters, 1949) And talking of mystification... Astaire and Rogers in a Freed unit film? Sounds promising, but it's unbelievably mediocre. The spark just isn't there. Fred dancing with the magic shoes is fun, and Oscar Levant gets the decent lines, but this singularly fails to come to life in any way. The absence of Eric Blore or Edward Everett Horton is sorely felt.

The Gold Diggers of 1935 (Berkeley, 1935) Good opening sequence, the usual nonsense in the middle, 12 or so minutes of perfection with Lullaby of Broadway. That sequence alone ensures this a place in my final list.

Fred Astaire is easily the best discovery I've had through this. He's just an absolute blast and even the weakest films I've seen of his (all of one I had actually seen before the start) are pretty amazing. I count this most recent watch, The Royal Wedding, amongst them as fun cinema even if it's not as amazing as his best. It's a fairly conservative movie with everything having it's plausibility even the dance numbers, but it takes a tired horse and plays with it in a really fun way with a central relationship that knocks it out of the park. Actually of the dozen or so Astaire films I've seen Powell definitely best matches his acting and develops a real fun chemistry.

The dances too have this excellent sense of fun with the rocking boat sequence naturally topping the charts. The goal of the film throughout seems to be boiling down itself until it's just fun. There's no real spectacle nor extreme feelings, but the movie is simply a joy to sit through. That isn't really a recipe for a great movie, but I think somehow it slips in there on occasion. It's the tiny things that push it closer to the top like the interactions and the comedy. Donnen seems really good at nursing character relationships to make them feel more complex than the page allows for. That's always a benefit, but for these musicals it becomes an absolutely necessary trait (looks to those Williams films).

I finally finished Pennies from Heaven and I don't know what to say except that I'm a tad stunned. Was the end intended as a curtain call or is it an actual part of the story?

I've got an other great find (that everyone else has seen) with Phantom of the Paradise. The funniest thing about the film is that for all of it's story content being insane it's visual content is some of the most subdued work I've seen by De Palma at this point. It's shot very straightforwardly with little in the way of tricks. Instead he seems to be relying on the energy of the sets, music, and especially William Finley who deserves to be a bigger star than he is. He's not the only one to give an insane performance (Paul Williams had me cackling from first appearance), but no body goes crazier. A single shout by him gives the film a Gilliam rubberyness and surreal appearance. De Palma simply doesn't need to film a cartoon because he has cast one (that said the entire escape sequence is full of enough tricks to fill up the rest of the film). There's also so many great gags abounding I was certain at times I was in a Lester film (Fruits Preen Swan's new Song or however the thing went is one of the louder tossed away gags).

I'm certain there's depth present in the film with it's toying with Faust, The Phantom of the Opera, and a few other things, but the other bits are far more interesting to me. I suppose that's shallow, but De Palma's aesthetic has really pushed past his purpose for once (whatever irony that creates with my previous statements I am fully aware of). Perhaps this is just a De Palma thing though and my opinion on this will change in subsequent viewings. One thing that I enjoyed though was that all of this depth seems to be an other joke. It's almost Godardian in it's willingness to dig for the obscure and well thought out to create a little visual pun. I love that he puts this much effort into making his allusions work for the story just to toss them off like that.

Broadway Melody of 1940 – I don’t generally hold Norman Taurog in particularly high esteem as a visual stylist, but that’s the genius of the studio system: the climactic numbers in this film look like a million bucks because, with those expert set designers going completely over the top and control freak Fred Astaire telling you where to put the camera, of course you’re going to look good. The rest of the film is pretty standard fare, but the hook (and it’s a great one) is that Astaire is cast opposite Eleanor Powell. The filmmakers are smart enough to know that this is all they need, so the narrative is smartly based around exactly the question the audience was already asking: when is Astaire going to dance with Powell? They even dispense with the standard romantic suspense to a large extent and focus everything on performance.

When the pairing finally does eventuate, it’s delightful. As dancers, they fit one another like gloves, but the pairing is also fascinating for the light it sheds on Astaire’s other on-screen pairings. Powell’s an appealing enough actress, but she’s limited, and is a hard sell when she’s not being amiable. In this respect, you can see just why Astaire needed Ginger Rogers’ tartness to bring his own screen persona to life.

Of course, Cyd Charisse was also a limited actress, though in The Band Wagon Minnelli tailors the film expertly to those limitations. I think Astaire preferred Charisse to Powell as a dance partner, and I can understand why. Charisse was a very different kind of dancer than Astaire, and so there’s a tension and contrast in their duets that’s missing in Broadway Melody of 1940. Powell was a hoofer, and a phenomenal one, and she’s so evenly matched with Astaire in their duets that they both seem oddly constrained. They’re matching one another perfectly, but neither one takes the lead, and so they’re both much more impressive in their solo numbers. Furthermore, Powell does not excel at the quasi-ballet number towards the end that would have better suited Charisse’s strengths. She’s not exactly inelegant, but she always seems too robust for the delicate moves she’s required to make.

All the same, this is a fine film that will probably make the lower half of my list.

I’ve also made my way through the Rooney / Garland box set and found the films generally blah. Sure, Babes in Arms pioneered a new kind of musical and started the Freed Unit rolling, but the ‘let’s put on a show’ palaver is already rather mechanical and Rooney’s narcissistic go-getter probably read as much less obnoxious at the tail end of the Depression than it does now. There was also the nagging annoyance of hearing ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ repeatedly as underscore, but never as an actual number. Let me get this right, you purchase a property that includes ’The Lady Is a Bleeding Tramp’ and you leave that song out of the film? Now, that’s crazy (almost as crazy as hiring Busby Berkeley as director but not allowing him to do any truly OTT production numbers). But still, it’s not as if they left out ‘My Funny Valentine’ or anything. Wait, what?

Really, considering the number of great songs in the film, it’s a pretty draggy musical. Not as draggy as the Gestetnered follow-up, Strike Up the Band, however, which has to make do with a lesser score and unforgivably stops dead in the middle for a numbingly tedious Victorian melodrama which is completely pointless and unfunny. There’s a similar drab show-within-a-show in Babes on Broadway, though it’s not quite as dire, but the third run-through of the formula is extremely threadbare, and there’s still far too much indulgence of Rooney as some kind of entertainment Renaissance Man, so throughout the series we have to buckle down for his tired comedy routines, shaky dramatic acting and woeful impersonations. Plus, two of these films rely on blackface routines as some kind of revelatory show-stopping performance coup, and that’s two too many.

Fortunately, the last film of the cycle, Girl Crazy, breaks with the formula and allows a less stunted narrative to develop, with Garland finally getting a fairer shake of the stick and considerably more agency (which also has the upside of her occupying space that might otherwise have been filled with Rooney’s mugging). A bunch of fabulous Gershwin songs (including the very fine opener ‘Treat Me Rough’ sung by June Allyson) and, oddly enough, more fluid direction from Norman Taurog (that man again!) than we got from Berkeley on the other films. That opening number is full of smart, punchy camera moves, and the rest of the film moves at a breezy pace the other, stop-start farragos can’t match.

Also, mopping up Garland vehicles, I was quite impressed by the simply charming In the Good Old Summertime. The retro musical numbers are generally unexceptional, but they’re so well-stitched into the narrative (with Garland as a sheet music salesgirl demoing the ‘latest hits’ for customers) it doesn’t matter, and the little community at the music store provides a showcase for some fine Old Hollywood contract players (including Buster Keaton). It’s a sweet, neatly convoluted story that allows Garland to exercise her gifts as a comedienne and her voice really shines in the low-key musical settings.

I think the only other musical I’ve watched recently was Daddy Longlegs, which did pretty well. Astaire’s always watchable; Caron sure can dance; Negulesco knows how to work the frame – but the film never dispelled the fundamental creepiness that Astaire’s character is essentially grooming and stalking a girl a third his age.

This was all the more bizarre because the film itself fully acknowledges that creepiness, with other characters basically saying to Astaire, “ew, you’re not going there, are you?” Well, he is, and so’s the film, and all as fast as possible and merrily as anything. Considering The Band Wagon did the same questionable-age-mismatch thing much more intelligently and suavely two years earlier, with an actress ten years older than Caron who was actually acting her age, why weren’t anybody’s alarm bells ringing here?

For what it's worth, I showed Daddy Long Legs to a class of high school seniors and no one seemed the least bit perturbed by the age difference. They were quite pleased by the happy ending, with the usual assortment of verbal "awws" and such. It's never bothered me much either, if just because the film goes to great pains to mock how Astaire's absent-minded benefacting can be misconstrued pruriently from the outside and then just says "screw it" and takes the movie there anyways!

Besides his Oscar-winning work on Skippy (which was justified, despite his later career choices), Taurog actually does produce one pretty good film in the midst of the chaff (I don't share your enthusiasm about his above films, or much else of his output), and lo and behold it's a musical-- the very amusing Garland vehicle Presenting Lily Mars.

domino harvey wrote:For what it's worth, I showed Daddy Long Legs to a class of high school seniors and no one seemed the least bit perturbed by the age difference. They were quite pleased by the happy ending, with the usual assortment of verbal "awws" and such. It's never bothered me much either, if just because the film goes to great pains to mock how Astaire's absent-minded benefacting can be misconstrued pruriently from the outside and then just says "screw it" and takes the movie there anyways!

Actually, I just remembered the film's even ickier sticky brush with incest, since Astaire at first tries to adopt his wife-to-be and only abandons that strategy when the red tape appears to become too much. The filmmakers really do seem to be going out of their way to make this all as unpleasant as possible.

I found the stabs at unpleasantness to be rather funny actually. It's sort of one upping itself in self aware disgust even as the film is strangely sort of innocent.

It is all played as water off a duck's back, but I don't know if it's so much a case of being ironically self-aware as of the project being battered around by different external and internal demands. I seem to recall that Astaire himself was the one who raised the age issue in re. The Band Wagon, and that it was then written into the film. If so, I imagine he would have been even more discomfited by the love match with Caron, and yet the studio had this property with a central romance that they weren't about to throw out. Maybe the compromise position was drawing even more attention to the inappropriateness, even though that leaves a weird cleft down the middle of the film - and in some scenes Astaire seems to be playing it as potentially misunderstood philanthropy, in others as momentary and quickly forgotten millionaire's whim, and in others again as calculating predation.

There's a lot I found fascinating about Les demoiselles de Rochefort, but the two most interesting to me were aspects of reality that he turned into fiction. The most obvious and fascinating of these was the Spike Lee like turning of the real world into a stage. At least from appearances there were no sets used in the film, yet he painted the world as if it were. This isn't for any baloney reason either. The way the extras and really world are set up it sort of needs the documentary people passing by set up. There's a certain quality of the extras and living background that can't effectively be staged so it must have just been easy to turn those real parts of the world into a set than vice versa.

This extends into the numbers too. Not all of them of course, but the larger numbers uses the dancers in an interesting fashion. The dancing is very strong and good, but incidental as they move forward to their own goals and tales. It gives the sense of a larger world where we are seeing just one of many different characters. They also will dance during some moments when there isn't a musical number or not dance during the musical numbers which further suggests this is a world of musicals. It's a unique prospect that goes into theory without rubbing noses. Just a lovely and perfect plan.

The other thing I found interesting is how he makes all of these complex characters and situations to make a film about something typically considered so simple. At least as far as I can tell Demy has made a film about true love in all of it's shapes (even the malformed ones). I can't be the only one who day to day doesn't treat such a concept seriously. That's the stuff of fairy tales after all, but even as the film is candy coated it treats that core. very seriously to the point that it gives me pause to treat it as seriously. That's, I think, because he is so concerned with the near misses. Finding true love is great, never experiencing it at least doesn't leave those pent up feelings, but to grasp the feeling and lose it can shatter a person.

Is anyone else a fan of Virginia O'Brien? I haven't yet seen all of the films she has been in, but I think I may have seen every one of her film appearances on youtube. Another one of those big Hollywood musical 'what if's is what if Virginia had accepted the offer she got to replace Judy Garland in Annie Get Your Gun. According to The Guardian obituary for her, it was the fact that she turned down the part (due to her fear of horses) that made MGM decide not to renew her contract. It's a shame probably her biggest part was in The Harvey Girls, where she didn't really make an impact performance-wise, and actually disappears half-way through the film because she was pregnant during shooting.
This particular song was a highlight of the otherwise turgid Dick Powell/Lucille Ball wartime vehicle 'Meet The People'. I haven't seen the film 'Du Barry Was A Lady' (another Lucille Ball musical), but I've watched this clip so many times, I love the casual striptease mime she acts out throughout the song, her beautiful dress, and the song itself is pretty great too. I think half of her roles were 'speciality' appearances in wartime revue films, not sure if I should pick up 'Thousands Cheer', but her wonderfully funny trio with June Allyson and Gloria DeHaven certainly makes it tempting.