Silk Stockings (December 2011)

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Arthur Freed, Billy Wilder, Cole Porter, Cyd Charisse, Fred Astaire, Jules Munshin, Lubitsch, MGM, Peter Lorre, Rouben Mamoulian

A sad disappointment of a film.  Any project that combines the talents of Cole Porter, Rouben Mamoulian, Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse ought to be something wonderful and stylish.  Instead, it is a jocose, vulgar wreck.  When Cole Porter et al. reworked Philadelphia Story and Taming of the Shrew, they managed to retain the spirit of the originals and to create something that stands up in its own right – fine songs, great dancing, good performances.  Maybe the art of Lubitsch is more intractable.

The script did not help.  It seems that George S. Kaufman’s book for the stage version did not make much use of the three rogue commissars so we have to blame Leonard Gershe and Leonard Spigelgass for what went wrong.  Instead of the rapier of Billy Wilder we get a plastic dagger.  For example, the second time that Ninotchka is sent to sort out the commissars, it is because they have entered a dance contest and won it with a cha-cha-cha.  I think that the version in Ninotchka when they throw a carpet out of a window and complain that it doesn’t fly is about one million times more amusing.  Not least since this particular cha-cha-cha would have been danced by Jules Munshin, Peter Lorre and Joseph Buloff!  Who could possibly have seen fit to give them a prize?

In this film, Peter Lorre cuts a particularly sorry figure.  For all his gifts, he was no physical comedian and it is painful to see him reduced to feeble clowning.  He might well have been this kind of person in real life, but this does not mean that he could act that way on screen.  He was M, der Verlorene, Joel Cairo, that guy in Casablanca….

Possibly the crux of the matter is that the script of Ninotchka has real emotional content.  The plot has been constructed by a watchmaker.  The commissars have to stay in the Royal Suite at the Grand Hotel because it is the only room with a safe big enough to hold the jewels they have extorted.  We feel the sense of betrayal when the White Russians manage to rob the safe while Ninotchka is on the razzle with Melvyn Douglas.  In Silk Stockings, the plot motive is simply deranged.  Why would an American film producer commission a Russian composer to write music for an adaptation of “War and Peace” in which a Hollywood mermaid à la Esther Williams will star?  Strange things happened in Hollywood but they need to meet the standards of probable possibility to make a film about them.  It is an idea worthy of The Producers rather than a bittersweet romantic comedy.  And then, to have the moment of betrayal triggered by a scene in which the Russians hear their adored music arranged as a swinging dance number!  It is just too stupid to carry any emotional punch.

Cole Porter, for all his legendary refinement, was no enemy of vulgarity – he did write Mexican Hayride after all, and held stars such as Bobby Clark and Ethel Merman in high regard – but it is hard to see why he went along with this.  Then again, it is a very weak score:  only “All of You” has achieved any life outside the musical.  Fred Astaire also seems out of place – hard though it is to imagine.  It is strange that he is not involved in the best dance sequences in the film – Charisse’s elegant solo where she dresses in finery to the strains of “Silk Stockings”, and the athletic, rumbustious “Red Blues”.  Dance styles had changed by 1957 and he was not getting any younger.  The physicality of “Stereophonic Sound” or his duet with Charisse, “Fated to be Mated”, really do not suit his style.  He also does an awkward jive take on his classic “Puttin’ on the Ritz” routine – “Ritz Roll and Rock”.  It is well-documented how much Porter hated rock ‘n’ roll.  His duet with Charisse to “All of You” feels like a pallid remake of their duet to “Dancing in the Dark”.  There is no real chemistry between them this time.

And what was Mamoulian up to?  He moves the camera gracefully.  He introduces Fred Astaire in a sequence of foot-level shots – did anyone ever walk as distinctively as Astaire?  He conjures a reasonable facsimile of Garbo out of Charisse but the script is so feeble that it is impossible for her to make us forget her predecessor in the role.  What is really hard to accept is the terrifying vulgarity of Janis Paige’s performance as the Hollywood mermaid.  She comes across as a blend of Ethel Merman and Martha Raye.  In any other Astaire musical, she would have had a brief scene or two as comic relief:  perhaps to make Ginger Rogers jealous.  She slaps the side of her head repeatedly – apparently in an attempt to alleviate the deafness brought on by all the swimming she has done in Hollywood.  They must have paid a lot for such a great gag!  Her boisterous, stentorian performance of “Stereophonic Sound” threatens to shatter the screen.  Her partner, Fred Astaire just looks ill-at-ease.

And then there is Jules.  Sig Rumann at least had presence and authority, which made his slide into decadence amusing.  Munshin was someone who aspired to be merely decadent – a man constantly striving to be no more than just tasteless.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ihiy4O9lsY

It’s Always Fair Weather (December 2011)

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Andre Previn, Arthur Freed, Comden and Green, Cyd Charisse, Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin, MGM, Michael Kidd, Stanley Donen

It is 1955 and the indefatigable team of Comden and Green write what you have to see as a follow-up to On The Town.  After the situation has been set up with the three pals’ return to New York at the end of the Second World War and their boisterous routine with dustbin lids, the action takes place in the space of a single day, ten years later.  We are spared Jules Munshin:  his place is taken by the much more assured and skilled Dan Dailey.  Perhaps it had also got through to MGM that Gene Kelly was always better when paired with dancers, because the electric Michael Kidd is the third of the trio, rather than a singer such as Sinatra or a straight actor such as Van Johnson.  It is a sour, alienating film.  For none of the three has civilian life lived up to their hopes and dreams.

Gene Kelly almost always seemed to play an obnoxious guy in his movies – so annoying that, at times, you wonder why the women on whom he was forcing his attentions did not just ram a pencil up his nose.  In this film, he has a motivation for his behaviour.  He was jilted by his sweetheart before he got back from combat and has become a gambler rather than the lawyer or politician he seemed destined to become.  Cyd Charisse had always had rather a spectral film career.  Although in The Harvey Girls she had a few dialogue scenes, she was really there to do a graceful balletic dance to “Wait and See”.  She appears in Singin’ in the Rain merely as the gangster’s moll in the “Broadway Rhythm” ballet.  In The Band Wagon, her part fades away, although she does have the “Dancing in the Dark” and the “Manhunt” routines to imprint her on our minds.  In It’s Always Fair Weather, she actually gets a substantial role as the TV producer.  She also gets to perform a more vigorous routine than the ones she usually glided through – hurled round a boxing gym by a bunch of very physical men in “Baby You Knock Me Out”: the antithesis of “Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love” sung by Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.

As was customary in so many films of this particular era, there is a ferocious attack on the television industry in the shape of the show Midnight with Madeline with its blend of glamour and emotional overload epitomised in the performance of Dolores Gray.  The style lives on today in any show hosted by Graham Norton.

The fact that the film was shot in Cinemascope does not seem to have hampered Stanley Donen at all – he is still addicted to fluid, complex tracking shots.  But because this would tend to show up a lot of empty set in a standard solo musical number, it is possible that he deliberately decided to get around this by making the solos either group numbers – such as Charisse’s “Baby You Knock Me Out” or Madeline’s “Thanks But No Thanks”, or by setting Kelly’s “I Like Myself” on a street teeming with people and cars who have to make way for him.  Donen also uses some highly creative touches to vary the size of the frame, for example, in the restaurant where each of the three old buddies shows up in his own slice of the frame to reveal his thoughts about his former comrades to the strains of the “Blue Danube” waltz.  Later on, the three dance in perfect synchronisation, in three separate locations, to “Once Upon a Time, I had A Friend” – a split-screen effect that recalls Abel Gance’s Napoleon.

The highpoint though is surely Gene Kelly’s finest dance routine on film – “I Like Myself”.  André Previn’s music is bouncy and rhythmic enough to allow Kelly to take flight on roller-skates, alternating tap steps with long graceful glides.  The effort required stops him from falling back onto his tired clichés – such as the big dopey grin.  In fact, in this film, the skittle only appears for a split-second, in the opening number.  His character is not the sort of smug, self-satisfied man who did this mugging in so many other films.

As with On The Town, the film ends as the opening sequence did, with the camera craning high above the subway bridge, showing the three pals going their separate ways:  but this time, Kelly has a girl.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game (November 2011)

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Arthur Freed, Betty Garrett, Buster Keaton, Comden and Green, Esther Williams, Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, Jules Munshin, MGM

Just before On The Town, the Freed unit at MGM seemed to have settled on the trio of Kelly, Sinatra and Munshin but they only had Betty Garrett of their female counterparts.  Her plot strand is almost identical to the other film.  She makes a forceful play for Frank Sinatra, who eventually gives in although the routine to “It’s Fate, Baby, It’s Fate” in which she pursues him around the bleachers of a baseball stadium is considerably more taxing than the taxi scene in the other film.  Gene Kelly is without a dancing partner, which is no bad thing as we are spared one of his ballets.  Having Sinatra as his main partner limits the number of times he can do his teetering skittle dance too.  He is, however, allowed to do an Oirish routine: “The Hat My Dear Old Father Wore Upon St Patrick’s Day” – as if we cared greatly – and, in the action, is allowed to be a rather objectionable person.  However, because he was seemingly unable to construct a dance routine around Esther Williams, he is firmly overshadowed by Sinatra, who serenades her with comfortably the best song in the score – “The Right Girl For Me”.  Jules Munshin is there for his incomparable ability to irritate, which he manages as only he can.   Buster Keaton seems to have worked on the gags in the film without receiving a credit but it is very hard to see where he might have made any input.  Jules Munshin and Gene Kelly shared an approach to comedy that was very different.

As with On The Town, Betty Comden and Adolph Green teamed up with the hard-worked Roger Edens to do the score.  Baseball in 1906 does not really play to their strengths.  They had to do a number in praise of small-town America – “Strictly USA” – where the strain really shows.  They put in a line about a four-door Chevrolet, in a film where the only cars on view have no doors at all, and Betty Garrett drives a horse-drawn buggy onto the pavement to trap Sinatra.   Seeing this film on a big screen does make a difference.  That number about “O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg” for once did not make me want to throw a brick at the screen:  it actually expressed enthusiasm and bonhomie.   The only real Comden and Green song came right at the start when Kelly and Sinatra tell their team-mates about some of the women they met in their last vaudeville tour – completely undercut by the fact that Sinatra’s screen character never even looks at women.

So it has a weak score which does not integrate very well with the script; it does not play to Gene Kelly’s strengths; it contains Jules Munshin and an Oirish routine but it is enjoyable enough.   You just do not need to see it very often.