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Thursday, July 31
EVERY LITTLE MOVEMENT (HAS A MEANING ALL ITS OWN)
by
Lloydville
on Thu 31 Jul 2008 12:19 AM PDT
"Every Little Movement" is a wonderful song from a wonderful scene in a less than wonderful movie, Presenting Lily Mars. The movie was an early Judy Garland musical not produced by Arthur Freed. In it, Judy plays one of her first grown-up romantic leads, opposite Van Heflin. She actually starts out as a lovesick teen, which is what she'd usually played in films up to that time, but becomes a mature woman in the course of the story.
Her character, Lily Mars, is a stage-struck kid who follows a Broadway producer she's met in her home town to New York, looking for a break. Unable to get an interview with the guy, and with no place to stay in the big city, she falls asleep in the orchestra pit of a theater where the producer is rehearsing a show.
She's awakened by an elderly cleaning lady, played by Connie Gilchrist, who tells her not to lose heart and reveals that she was once a leading player on the stage herself. She says she's happy to clean the stage, just to stay a part of the theater. "There was a song," she says, reminiscing, "and it got to be my song" -- and she sings it for Judy up on the stage, eventually doing a simple little dance to go along with it. (Her vocal was dubbed by Mary Kent.) The song was written in 1910 by Karl Hoschna, with lyrics by Otto Harbach.
Judy joins in the dance, and adds a harmony part. As expressions of theatrical sentiment and nostalgia for the days of vaudeville go, the scene is moving and powerful. Even though he didn't produce the film, Freed would appeal often in his own musicals to this same sort of sentiment and nostalgia, this almost mystical faith in the eternal spirit of show business.
The scene is also notable as an expression of professional solidarity between two women of different generations, a gift of empowerment from the older woman and an endorsement of self-reliance. She tells Judy not to go back home and marry her high-school sweetheart but to follow her dream. The quality of the performance of the song gives the scene its dramatic truth, convincing us that the cleaning lady could indeed have been a star in her day, and that Lily might become one in hers. The unabashed emotion of the song, and the affectionate way the two women relate to each other while they sing it, lifts the moment out of the realm of the intellectual and political and makes it emblematic of a genuine, practical, everyday sort of feminism.
You just don't see stuff like this in modern movies, for all their rote celebrations of sisterhood. That fact is in itself an indictment of contemporary popular cinema as a conveyor of humane values.
It's worth watching Presenting Lily Mars just for this scene and this song alone.
Friday, July 11
YOU AND I AND MEET ME IN ST. LOUIS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 11 Jul 2008 01:02 AM PDT
Meet Me In St. Louis may be the greatest movie ever damned by an unending chorus of faint and elaborately qualified praise. Its frank appeal to sentiment and its view of the everyday domestic sphere as an arena of profound import could not be more out of critical fashion. Aljean Harmetz, in her wonderful book about the making of The Wizard Of Oz, puts it this way: "Meet Me In St. Louis . . . is almost embarrassing to watch today with its wholesome sentimentality capped by a tooth-decaying performance by seven-year-old Margaret O'Brien." (In fact, O'Brien's performances is one of the most extraordinary in the history of cinema.)
The problem is that Meet Me In St. Louis is the story of a functional family -- a concept which modern critics simply don't have the intellectual tools to engage. They're like art critics who are physically repulsed by the color brown trying to write sensibly about Rembrandt.
The core of the film to me is a scene of family crisis in which all the other members turn against the father, unite in opposition to him, for actions they see as oppressive and destructive. So far so good -- this is a scene of family dysfunction and patriarchal tyranny which is a convention of modern drama and which many of us probably know well from personal experience.
But then something strange happens. There is an intervention of grace. The mother joins the isolated father in the parlor, sits at the piano and begins playing a song -- one they used to sing at the beginning of their relationship. The father sings the words to it, in an unprofessional voice but with a straining effort to make it sweet. In the final chorus, the mother joins in, adding a harmony part.
The sound of this has drawn all the other members of the household back to the parlor. The crisis remains but the rancor has dispersed. The image of the bond between the parents has banished the terrifying specter of the family's emotional dissolution.
The song the parents sing, "You and I", sounds like an old standard from the period the film is set in, around the turn of the last century, but it was written in 1944, the year the film was made, with lyrics by the film's producer, Arthur Freed, and music by his long-time collaborator Nacio Herb Brown. (That's Freed at the piano in the picture above, with Brown taking notes, in an earlier period of their songwriting career.) The actor playing the father didn't have a good enough voice to sing the song, but the filmmakers didn't want a voice that sounded too slick, too professional -- so Freed sang it himself, voicing the actor in a simple, pleasing, earnest way.
It's remarkable the lengths to which critics have gone to avoid dealing with the emotional and psychological meaning of this scene. Describing it in the BFI monograph on the film, Gerald Kauffman says that the mother "forces" the family to accept the father's actions, ignoring the fact that she doesn't address any of them directly and that they have not accepted the father's actions. In his chapter on Meet Me In St. Louis in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, James Naremore quotes with apparent approval the critic George Toles's observation that the children's return to the parlor is so beautifully choreographed that it's clear Minnelli cares more for the "pictorial" elements of the scene than for its emotional undercurrents.
Toles goes on to describe the children's return as a function of "prescience" -- rather than curiosity about and emotional attraction to the novelty of hearing their parents harmonizing at the piano. Toles seems to have abandoned reason entirely here, not least in failing to recognize that the "pictorial" and choreographic elements in a cinematic musical constitute, along with the songs, its primary means of conveying emotion.
Critical embarrassment notwithstanding, Meet Me In St. Louis remains Freed's masterpiece -- it speaks and sings with his voice, in this case quite literally. Take a look at it again sometime, and if you find it embarrassing to watch -- get over it.
Thursday, July 10
THE GERSHWIN CROWD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 10 Jul 2008 12:21 AM PDT
George Gershwin had an enormous influence on American popular culture, both directly, through his music, and indirectly through the circle of artists which formed around him and his brother Ira in New York and in Hollywood. This circle had a formal center in the ongoing open-house salon presided over by Ira's wife Lenore. Not only was their home a social center, a gathering place for artists the Gershwins admired -- and not just musical artists -- but Lenore (called Lee by her friends) was a kind of fixer, a matchmaker for artistic collaborations of all sorts.
In his autobiography, Vincente Minnelli -- seen above, with Arthur Freed at the piano -- tells how he was adopted by the Gershwins when he started to make a name for himself as a designer of shows at Radio City Music Hall. In time, Lee would put him together with the Schuberts, who were looking for a classy designer and director for one of their productions. That was how Minnelli made the jump to Broadway. Arthur Freed, who lured Minnelli to Hollywood, had also been part of the Gershwin crowd from his earliest days as a songwriter.
George Gershwin inspired several generations of artists who wanted to elevate the standards of American popular art. Gershwin had made the jump from Tin Pan Alley to the concert hall, from Broadway musicals to a new kind of American opera -- he offered proof that horizons could be expanded, that popular art could be art of the highest order.
[Image © Al Hirschfeld]
Even Gershwin's mainstream commercial work attracted the best of the best. Consider the opening night of Girl Crazy on Broadway, in 1930. This was one of George and Ira's most popular Broadway musicals, with a program of songs that still dazzles the imagination -- everything from "I Got Rhythm" to "Embraceable You." Ginger Rogers became a star that night, singing the latter song. Fred Astaire had been called in on an informal basis to offer some help with one of Rogers's dances -- the first time the two had worked together. Rogers would of course go on with Astaire, a close friend of George's, to expand the expressive range of the Hollywood musical, of American popular dance, in unprecedented ways. (Ethel Merman became a star at this premiere, too, singing "I Got Rhythm", though one can't quite claim for her the same sort of influence on American popular culture.)
In the pit orchestra that night, Roger Edens sat at the piano. He would later become Judy Garland's principal arranger and vocal coach at MGM, turning her from a kid novelty act ("the little girl with the great big voice") into one of the most brilliant interpreters of American popular song. Edens would end up serving as Arthur Freed's right-hand man in the Freed Unit at MGM, helping to create a series of movie musicals that revolutionized the form. Edens, working in various capacities, often uncredited, was the man most responsible for the high musical standards set by the Freed films.
Also playing in the pit that night were Glenn Miller, Jimmy Dorsey, Benny Goodman (above, some years later), Jack Teagarden and Gene Krupa -- a virtual who's who of the big band swing movement that would soon sweep the nation. George Gershwin himself conducted the ensemble.
In truth, it's hard to find important figures in American popular art from the 1930s through the 1950s who didn't number at one time, in some capacity, among the Gershwin crowd. One could almost go so far as to say that if a bomb had gone off in the Alvin Theater on 14 October 1930, leveling the place just before the curtain went up on Girl Crazy, America would be a very different country than it is today. And this begs the question of what American culture might have been if George Gershwin hadn't died of a brain tumor in 1937, at the age of 38.
After
George's death, Ira and Lee's home in Hollywood continued to be a haven for
creative types -- mostly members of the old New York gang who'd come west. When Minnelli, Freed and Edens made An American In Paris in 1952, they were still trying to live up to the standards set by George Gershwin, to honor and do justice to his legacy. Almost every musician who worked on the film argued over whether or not the new arrangements of the Gershwin songs captured the spirit of George's work. They were all still members in good standing of the Gershwin crowd.
Thursday, July 3
MEXICO
by
Lloydville
on Thu 03 Jul 2008 12:02 AM PDT
Check out "Mexico", not the James Taylor song of the same name, but a somewhat obscure Elvis track from Fun In Acapulco. Thanks to Tony D'Ambra of the invaluable films noir web site for reminding me of it, in a post about The Big Steal, a prime example of fiesta noir -- a film that starts out noir but goes goofy when it gets south of the border.
Elvis's "Mexico" is a slight bit of material but Elvis makes it fun -- and manages to remind me how much I miss Baja California and La Paz.
Elvis sings the song in the movie -- it can also be found on the soundtrack album and on the two-disc set Command Performances which collects most of the songs from the Elvis movies not included on the various Masters box sets.
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