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Monday, December 1
STUDIO SNOW
by
Lloydville
on Mon 01 Dec 2008 09:18 AM PST
Next to real snow, there's nothing quite as lovely as studio snow in black-and-white films from Hollywood's Golden age.
shahn, at the ever-magical six martinis and the seventh art, is an aficionada of bogus blizzards on film and has posted some screen shots of my favorite ersatz snowfall in movies, from Swing Time.
If you live someplace warm, like the middle of the Mojave Desert, fix yourself some egg nog, light a fake fire, gaze through the window of your computer screen and enjoy the prop flakes in cozy comfort. Better still, give Swing Time another spin on your DVD player and watch the imaginary snowflakes fall on Fred and Ginger as they sing and dance their way into your heart one more time.
Tuesday, November 25
TAKE ME OUT TO THE BALL GAME
by
Lloydville
on Tue 25 Nov 2008 02:38 AM PST
Between 1939 and 1960, Arthur Freed produced almost 40 musicals at MGM. Their range and overall quality was amazing, as was their commercial performance. Most of them made money, some of them quite a lot of money, most were wonderfully entertaining, and a few, like Singin' In the Rain, have to be ranked among the greatest movies ever made.
A few, too, were clunkers, at the box office and artistically. One of the artistic failures was Take Me Out To the Ball Game. A popular film in its time, 1948, it plays today like one of Joe Pasternak's programmers -- it's pleasant enough, with a few truly delightful passages, but never really soars. It was a follow-up of sorts to an actual Pasternak production, the wildly successful Anchors Aweigh, which featured the first pairing of Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra. It has a similar plot, with Kelly and Sinatra playing similar types. Sinatra is awkward with girls, Kelly is an expert wolf -- Sinatra falls in love with a nice girl, whom Kelly helps him court, until Kelly falls in love with the girl himself. Meanwhile, Sinatra meets a girl who's more his type, and all comes right in the end.
The film has mostly second-rate songs (except for the vintage title tune, which never fails to please) and its premise -- two early 20th-Century ball players also work as vaudevillians in the off season -- is strained. The nice girl is played by Esther Williams, who's awfully pretty and appealing but never seems fully self-possessed or erotically convincing unless she swimming, for which there isn't much occasion in the story.
The film was directed by Busby Berkeley, who seems not to have been terribly inspired by the material -- there is little of the bold cinematic virtuosity that punctuated even his most conventional MGM films.
The film is best understood as a step in Freed's absorption of Gene Kelly and his collaborator Stanley Donen as full partners in his musical unit at MGM. The idea for the film came from them, and they staged all the musical sequences -- which may have been in part what kept Berkeley from imposing his style on the numbers in a more emphatic way.
Freed would next give Kelly and Donen full control, as co-directors, of On the Town one year later. Take Me Out To the Ball Game has the mood of a Freed production, dealing as it does with vaudeville and set in the era of his youth which he returned to so often. But it also has the slapped-together feel of a Pasternak production, a jumble of elements that never quite cohere into a vision, as they do in On the Town and all the great Freed musicals.
Wednesday, September 17
BLACKFACE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 17 Sep 2008 10:24 AM PDT
There had been blackface (as well as whiteface) clowns in American circuses in the 18th Century, but blackface performance didn't become a sensation until the 1830s, when T. D. Rice popularized a dance he called the "Jump Jim Crow" -- learned, he said, from an old black stable hand. In 1842, Dan Emmett, sometimes credited with being the composer of "Dixie", created a blackface revue with three other stars and minstrelsy became an established phenomenon, one that wouldn't disappear from "the show business" in America until the 1950s, with the dawn of the modern civil rights movement.
T. D. Rice's dance had given its name to the late 19th-Century laws that made segregation in America official, and so it's fitting that Jim Crow stopped jumping on American stages around the same time that the Jim Crow laws started to get repealed.
The minstrel show served several different functions in American culture, some of them hateful and some of them more ambiguous morally. The hateful functions are clear enough. Creating stereotypes of blacks as lazy, shiftless, ignorant and childlike served as a powerful reinforcement of the second-class status imposed on blacks, cynically or paternalistically, by the dominant white classes. It assuaged the troubled conscience of the culture, seeming to justify a patent injustice.
But minstrelsy also allowed, on levels too deep and too disturbing to contemplate directly, a kind of cultural conversation between black and white America -- a coded conversation between human beings, in the transcendently human terms of music and dance. It allowed the expression, in both directions, of a kind of perverted but very real love, and a kind of ironic critique of the obscenity of America's racial system.
The complexity of it all has never been, and perhaps never can be, sorted out fully -- but one clue to the mystery can be found in an odd detail associated with T. D. Rice's appropriation of the "Jump Jim Crow" dance. After he learned the dance from the old stable hand, Rice bought the ragged clothes off the man's back, to wear in his stage performances of the number. This is very strange. Of course Rice blacked up when he performed the dance -- disguised himself as a black man. But wanting to wear the actual clothes of the man he learned the dance from takes us into a surreal realm -- suggesting a desire on Rice's part to go beyond disguise, beyond impersonation. It suggests that Rice wanted to appropriate the identity of the old black stable hand -- to be, for the time of the stage performance, an African-American.
Rice's impulse takes us forward to George Gershwin, a second-generation American Jew, born in Brooklyn, whose first big hit as a songwriter, "Swanee", a minstrel number, started the career of this quintessentially American composer, vaulting him squarely into the mainstream of American popular culture.
It takes us forward to Al Jolson, who became a different kind of performer when he blacked up, more natural, apparently more at ease in his own skin, which was actually somebody else's skin.
It takes us forward to Elvis Presley, wearing the "cat clothes" he bought at the hipster emporium in Memphis that catered primarily to blacks -- finding his truest self as an artist by appropriating the moves and the vocal style and the rhythmic sophistication of black performers.
Black identity, it seems, has always been the transcendent American identity -- a kind of matrix in which the chaos of American diversity dissolves into freedom, deliverance from conflicting and confining cultural imperatives.
Why? Perhaps because blacks had already done the heavy lifting in our culture -- creating a new style by fusing an "alien" African heritage with European forms . . . the process that gave us the spiritual, the blues, jazz and rock, the most American of American art forms. All of American culture proceeds from this kind of fusion, but it has always had its most dramatic and exemplary expression in African-American culture.
When
T. D. Rice bought the clothes of the black man whose dance so captured
his imagination, he may have been expressing more than a desire to be that man, or to know what it felt
like to be that man. He may have been recognizing, in some
subterranean way, that as an American, creating a new culture in a new
world, he already was that man.
No matter how it's analyzed, the phenomenon of white performers in blackface, literally or figuratively, remains unutterably strange -- but its flip side is even stranger. Louis
Armstrong, unquestionably the greatest and most influential American
popular artist of the 20th Century, adopted a stage persona from the
minstrel tradition, with his wide-open, rolling eyes and ear-to-ear
grin. He, too, it seems, had to "black up" in order to enter the
mainstream of American culture.
Sunday, August 17
BATHING BEAUTY
by
Lloydville
on Sun 17 Aug 2008 01:36 AM PDT
At first glance, few modes of the Hollywood musical seem as surreal and original as the Esther Williams “bathing beauty” series, whose centerpieces were Williams’s water ballets, above and below the surface.
In fact, they were, like almost everything done at MGM, derived from existing traditions. Busby Berkeley had sometimes placed his geometrically aligned chorus girls in water tanks and, perhaps inspired by this, show-biz impresario Billy Rose had created a live-action spectacle he called the “Aquacade”, incorporating large-scale water ballets. These were arena shows and featured former Olympic swimming champions as the “stars”.
Competitive swimmer Esther Williams had been training for the 1940 Olympics before they were canceled due to WWII, and she was hired for one of Rose’s Aquacades in San Francisco, replacing an indisposed star. The success of Sonja Henie’s ice-skating films at Fox inspired MGM to think of making water-themed musicals, and they hired Williams on the strength of her work in the Rose show.
Williams was cast as the lead in her first film, Bathing Beauty, without any previous experience in front of a camera. She had to ask to be cast in a supporting role before she dove into the starring part just so she’d have some idea of the process involved. (MGM gave her a bit in an Andy Hardy film, where she appeared in a bathing suit and acquitted herself adequately.)
Bathing Beauty was a hodgepodge of a film. It opened with a scene of Williams cavorting in a pool on an outdoor location, with some music supplied by a Latin singer on land, after which she stayed dry until the finale -- a modestly-scaled water ballet done on a sound stage.
In between the swimming sequences, Jack Cummings, the least imaginative of the MGM musical producers, threw in a lot of labored physical comedy by Red Skelton and a program of musical numbers by the bands of Xavier Cugat and Harry James, all tied together, after a fashion, by an utterly perfunctory romantic comedy plot.
Cummings and MGM were clearly hedging their bet on Williams, but it paid off handsomely. Williams wasn’t much of an actress but she had a winning screen presence, a fresh and appealing All-American beauty and a physical self-possession that gave her a subtly vexing erotic authority. (She made good posture seem wonderfully sexy.) She also swam with grace and looked terrific in a bathing suit.
The film vaulted her into stardom and MGM believed it had a new franchise on its hands. It then set about finding a formula that would showcase her to best effect. That search involved a lot of improvisation, and never resulted in a coherent “water musical” form, but it did produce a lot of astonishing imagery along the way.
Williams worked almost exclusively with the second-string producers and directors at MGM. It was axiomatic on the lot that Williams was, in the words of Louis B. Mayer, “a star wet, but not a star dry.” It was the job of the creative minds who worked on her films to come up with interesting new excuses to get her wet, and otherwise just to keep things moving in between the splashes.
That, as it turned out, was formula enough -- Williams became one MGM’s biggest stars, turning out profitable films for over a decade. Vincente Minnelli directed Williams in one brief sequence of the revue film Ziegfeld Follies -- it was simple but extremely beautiful. The great Arthur Freed took one stab at producing a Williams film, Pagan Love Song, but it was flop and he never tried it again.
It was left to producers like Cummings and Joe Pasternak and directors like Charles Walters and George Sidney, who made Bathing Beauty, to supply the occasional sublime moment in Williams’s movies. These were often so lovely and imaginative that one wishes more care had been taken with the water-ballet musical at MGM -- but it remained an intermittently diverting afterthought throughout Williams’s career there.
Saturday, August 2
ESCAPE
by
Lloydville
on Sat 02 Aug 2008 01:55 AM PDT
People often refer to movie musicals as escapist entertainment, but where exactly are we escaping to when we enter the enchanted precincts of a movie musical?
I would argue it's the same place we "escape" to when we watch a stage magician at work. When a stage magician saws a woman in half, we don't really believe, even for a moment, that we've escaped into a world where the human body can be bisected and then rejoined with no harm to the subject. Our eyes tell us differently, but we know we're being tricked, and that's what we love about the experience -- the split consciousness of being fooled and knowing we're being fooled.
We may feel a deep, perverse emotional satisfaction in the image of a woman being mutilated, or a more positive emotional relief in the image of violent bodily harm being instantly repaired, but we don't really escape into these satisfactions, leaving propriety and reality behind, because we feel a simultaneous and continuous delight in the knowledge we're being fooled.
The same is true of other kinds of theatrical illusion. We walk into a theater in the middle of a city, we sit down, we see the curtain rise on a forest glade with a real waterfall tumbling down into it. We know we're not looking through a window at a real forest glade, and we know there's some sort of ingenious machinery creating the waterfall, but we marvel all the same at how real it looks -- considering. And that's the key -- we are always considering where we really are and what we're really seeing.
The core of the phenomenon is being made aware of the provisional and constructed nature of all perception -- and we know that there is wisdom to be found in being reminded of this fact. All theatrical illusion has this serious function, and all theatrical illusion depends for its effect on striking a balance between the apparent and the real. Finding that balance is where the art of it lies.
Talking about that balance, however, thinking about it too directly, somehow diminishes the fun of it, the profundity of it. It seems we need theatrical illusion so desperately, and want so desperately for it to accomplish its delicate balancing act, that rational thought about it feels dangerous. We don't want a fellow audience member to shout out, "It's all done with mirrors!" in the middle of a magic act. We already know it's done with mirrors, but we want to preserve the illusion that it's not done with mirrors, holding that illusion in a dynamic equilibrium with what we know.
I say we escape nothing when confronted with the theatrical illusion of movie musicals. We know that people don't usually burst into song spontaneously to express their feelings, and that even when they do large unseen orchestras don't swell up to provide gorgeous accompaniment to their songs. We know that virtuosity of performance isn't the result of casual whim or innate capacity. We know that theatrical stages can't hold hundreds of chorus girls performing evolutions on sets that exceed the dimensions of several football fields.
We also know that to enter such illusions knowing they're illusions puts us into a very special state of mind, a state of grace, even, in which we engage the practical mechanics and mysteries of perception directly. We escape into truth, about ourselves and about the world. As the song says, "The world is a stage, the stage is a world." We dismiss the experience as mere entertainment, or escapism, to keep our intellects quiet while we absorb the truth we find in it on a level deeper than rational thought.
[The image of the toy theater comes, via Boing Boing, from this wonderful Flickr set of images from the Prague Toy Museum.]
Friday, August 1
AN IMAGE FOR TODAY: TWO COHANS
by
Lloydville
on Fri 01 Aug 2008 01:15 AM PDT
George M. and his sister Josie, when they were, with their parents, part of The Four Cohans, a family vaudeville act, before George became the King Of Broadway.
Josie later married the silent film director Fred Niblo. Josie died of heart disease at a relatively young age, in 1916, the year Niblo entered movies as an actor and director. He's best known for directing the silent version of Ben-Hur, but a film he made a year later with Garbo, The Temptress, is probably his best work.
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.
Wednesday, July 30
LUCILLE BREMER IN LA PAZ
by
Lloydville
on Wed 30 Jul 2008 12:28 AM PDT
She gained movie immortality in her first film, playing Rose Smith, Judy Garland's older sister, in Meet Me In St. Louis. The next year she danced with Fred Astaire in Yolanda and the Thief, and when that film proved to be a flop, her career took a precipitous downward turn.
She danced with Astaire again in the movie musical revue Ziegfeld Follies, adorned the cover of Life magazine in 1946 and had a supporting role in Till the Clouds Roll By the same year, but MGM gave up on her after that, loaning her out to poverty-row studios for parts in negligible films.
She threw in the towel soon afterward, married the son of a former President of Mexico and went to live with him in La Paz, Baja California, until their divorce in 1963.
Bremer had been a Rockette and a Broadway chorus girl before moving to Los Angeles. She was spotted by Arthur Freed dancing in a show at the Versailles nightclub, given a screen test and almost immediately cast in Meet Me In St. Louis, which Freed produced. She is often referred to as a "protégée" of Freed, and one of Judy Garland's biographers says she was sleeping with him, which might account for her meteoric rise at MGM. I hate to think of her sleeping with Freed, a married man, while they were making Meet Me In St. Louis, that heartfelt paean to family values, but Hollywood is Hollywood.
I don't know what accounted for her meteoric fall. She was a good actress and a talented dancer, but I wouldn't say she had star quality, and in Till the Clouds Roll By she sometimes looks haggard, worn out at 29. Of course Garland was burnt out at an even younger age -- MGM had that effect on some people.
It's a strange and sad tale, except for the part about La Paz, one of my favorite places on earth. I like to think of Rose Smith strolling along the malecón there, of an evening, enjoying the breeze off the Mar de Cortes, far from the intrigues of Culver City.
[Image above © 2007 Harry Rossi]
Tuesday, July 29
MGM MUSICALS IN THE 1930s
by
Lloydville
on Tue 29 Jul 2008 01:02 AM PDT
Even though MGM made the first real movie musical, The Broadway Melody, in 1929, and even though that film was a huge success, the studio spent the rest of the 1930s playing catch-up with other studios as far as musicals went.
Like the rest of Hollywood, MGM was taken by surprise when the musical fell suddenly out of favor with audiences in 1931, and that year it abandoned a big musical shot in two-strip Technicolor partway into production. The musical form was revived in 1933 with the movies made at Warners featuring the surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley, and it was given further impetus by the Astaire-Rogers films made at RKO, but MGM struggled to find a house style or a house franchise to compete with those of its rival studios.
It capitalized on the name of its first big musical hit, and the film's popular title song, with a series of Broadway Melody musicals, starting with The Broadway Melody Of 1936. It made the musical super-production The Great Ziegfeld in 1936, which was a big critical and commercial hit but didn't really establish a franchise, though the studio later produced a couple of films, Ziegfeld Girl and Ziegfeld Follies, whose titles and content referenced the earlier blockbuster.
MGM did create a somewhat specialized musical franchise in the form of operettas during the 1930s, many of them starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. These were enormously popular films but operettas had essentially played themselves out with audiences by the end of the 1930s. Attempts to revive the form with Mario Lanza in the late 40s and early 50s met with mixed success.
Eleanor Powell was the studio's big conventional musical star throughout the 1930s, though her magical brand of tapping wasn't really suited to romantic pas de deux. She thus never became part of a signature dance team, being usually paired up with the studio's up-and-coming, non-musical leading men, like Robert Taylor and Jimmy Stewart. She had other limitations as a musical star. She wasn't a great singer -- her vocals were almost always dubbed -- and she didn't have great range as an actress. She made one film featuring some magical dance numbers with Fred Astaire, The Broadway Melody of 1940, but for some reason the two were never teamed up again and the film became the last of the Broadway Melody series. Another was planned, to star Powell and Gene Kelly, but it was never made. After that, MGM seemed to lose interest in Powell.
At about the same time it also lost interest in Lucille Ball, whom it had hired away from RKO and tried to establish as a musical leading lady. Ball was a better actress than Powell, with a very appealing screen persona, but she wasn't a great singer, either, and her dance skills were limited to those of an accomplished chorus girl, which is how she'd started out in show business.
One reason for the neglect of both these ladies was the rise of Judy Garland as a star. After her wonderful performance in The Wizard Of Oz, Arthur Freed, making his debut as a producer, teamed her up with Mickey Rooney in a series of musicals that went through the roof at the box office. Finally MGM had a showcase franchise, based on a boffo musical-romantic team, that almost instantly vaulted MGM into the forefront as a producer of movie musicals. Before that franchise could play itself out, Freed, always looking ahead, had begun casting Garland in more mature roles without Rooney, inaugurating a series of superior and radically innovative musicals that left those of the other studios in the dust.
From here on out the rest of Hollywood was destined to play catch-up with MGM, and the Freed Unit, on the musical front.
Saturday, July 26
AGEE ON MINNELLI
by
Lloydville
on Sat 26 Jul 2008 10:47 PM PDT
Vincente Minnelli's two masterpieces from the 1940s, Meet Me In St. Louis and The Clock, got their most perceptive and flattering contemporary reviews from James Agee, writing under his own name in The Nation and anonymously in Time. These reviews meant a lot to Minnelli and he included quotes from the Time pieces in his autobiography.
Agee was probably the best American writer who ever reviewed movies -- his reviews can be read with pleasure today solely for the excellence of their prose -- but his insights into cinema were oddly circumscribed. Agee was unusually sensitive to passages of visual poetry in movies but in a largely intuitive way. His eye was not precise.
The Clock has several crane shots of great grace and power. Agee noted them with approval and Minnelli says that this was the first time any critic had praised his use of the moving camera, of which he was very proud. But Agee went on to say that the The Clock was "largely boom shot". Nothing could be further from the truth. Much of the film is shot against process screens, which virtually precludes, and certainly severely limits, the use of a moving camera. In his autobiography Minnelli observes that neither audiences nor critics of the time ever mentioned this aspect of the film.
What's going on here? I'm guessing that Agee didn't really see The Clock in visual terms except in moments when the visual technique called attention to itself -- as it did, for example, in the final shot of the film, when a camera on a tracked crane starts close on the figure of Judy Garland and then pulls up and back until it loses her in the crowds swirling through a busy train station. It's a breathtaking image -- Agee obviously appreciated it as such, and then apparently "remembered" the film he'd just seen as visually constructed along the same lines.
Part of this can probably be explained by "the enchantment of convention" in an artistic medium. When a spectator is familiar with and accepts a convention like back-screen projection, he or she tends not to notice it consciously, sees it as of a piece with the rest of the film, even though it's clearly a radically different kind of image from one shot on an exterior location or on a three-dimensional set. It's only when a convention is employed in an unusual way -- as the boom shot was employed in the final image of The Clock -- that the spectator becomes aware of it.
This explains the critical notion that Citizen Kane, for example, employed radical new techniques, when in fact almost all of them had been used before, just not so spectacularly and expressively. It also explains why Griffith was for so long given credit for inventing cinematic techniques which predated his work but which Griffith used in exciting new ways for more powerful effects.
But Agee had another limitation as a film critic. He seems to have judged all movies against an ideal kind of film of his own imagination, which was a novelist's imagination. In his own fiction, and much of his non-fiction, Agee tried to evoke transcendent spiritual values through a precise rendering of physical realities. This was why the film medium, founded on photographic reality, appealed so much to him.
Agee could accept expressionism in film, as with the work of the silent clowns he loved so much, when it was based on gags actually performed in real settings, and he could appreciate the pure expressionism of Disney's cartoons, which he saw as a kind of music, because it was divorced from all connection to physical reality. But the high theatricality of the movie musical did not capture his imagination or inspire his analytic gifts.
In his review of Meet Me In St. Louis, he concentrated on the novelistic rendering of what he called the film's "domestic poetry", and complained, for example, that the snowmen which Tootie smashes didn't look real -- as if anything in Minnelli's movie looks real by documentary standards. Agee comments on the pleasant nature of many of the songs in the film without seeming to see the ways they serve and advance the drama as integrated elements of the whole work.
In some ways, Agee was an amateur of movies, but an amateur of genius. Even though he later wrote film scripts in a professional capacity, he remained at heart a member of the audience -- often in thrall to the enchantment of convention and often projecting his own artistic and emotional values into films, rather than trying to read them on their own terms.
Agee was, all the same, a great critic, to my mind the greatest American movie critic, because his writing stimulates excitement and thought about cinema, and a passionate conviction that it could be more than it usually is or tries to be.
Wednesday, July 23
THE BROADWAY MELODY
by
Lloydville
on Wed 23 Jul 2008 08:45 PM PDT
In 1929, two years after The Jazz Singer, MGM made the first film that could fairly be called a musical, The Broadway Melody. Other talking and part-talking films had featured musical numbers, but The Broadway Melody had a book and a fully integrated musical program. It was a backstage musical about a successful New York songwriter and two sisters from the provinces who're trying to make it on Broadway. Most of the musical performances are logically motivated by the theatrical story, but sometimes the songwriter starts singing one of his compositions just to express his feelings, with an orchestral accompaniment swelling up behind him on the soundtrack -- which puts us squarely in the fantastical realm of the classic musical.
The film has some delightful songs by the real-life songwriting team of Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed, including the title number, which is presented over and over in the film -- four times in the first half hour alone. It's hard to complain about this, since the song is catchy and almost everything else about the production is shabby and second-rate. The lead performers are likable enough, and do a passable job of firing off some quaint contemporary slang, but their singing and dancing are amateurish, as are the bits we see of the Broadway show they're playing in.
The love triangle between the leads is hardly convincing as drama, and verges on the unpleasant, since the hero seems to end up with the wrong girl in the end. The backstage world is presented as a battleground of jealous sniping and general ill-will. This may have passed for a kind of realism in 1929 but it just feels nasty today. The film's locations are confined to cheap-looking interiors recorded with dull proscenium-style camera set-ups. The two girls spend a lot of time dressing and undressing, showing off their lingerie, and either being physically affectionate or wrestling angrily with each other. This gives the film its only erotic charge.
The film was a smash hit with audiences, still enchanted, obviously, by the whole idea of talking pictures, and also won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first sound film so honored. Go figure. MGM must have thought it had discovered, in the movie musical, a gold mine, if material this crummy could sell so many tickets and reap so much critical praise. All of Hollywood soon jumped on the bandwagon and the next two years saw an avalanche of musicals, a number of them shot in two-strip Technicolor, most of which made money. One of them, Gold Diggers Of Broadway, from Warners, made more money than any studio film had ever made, a record it held until 1939.
And then, suddenly, the audience lost interest -- totally. By 1931, the movie musical was all but dead -- so dead that the studios rarely even bothered to keep prints of the ones they'd made. Almost all the musicals made in this era have been lost, or exist only in fragmentary form. Not even Gold Diggers Of Broadway, one of the most successful and important films in Hollywood history, survives in a complete print today.
From the evidence of The Broadway Melody we may not be missing much in artistic terms but it's still a curious lapse in the record of American popular taste and of the Hollywood musical. The form was reborn, however, in 1933, due almost entirely to the surreal production-number spectacles concocted by Busby Berkeley. Not long afterward Astaire and Rogers, with their wildly successful dance films for RKO, established the movie musical as a permanent fixture in studio-era Hollywood. And Arthur Freed, who had, with his songs, contributed the only really enduring delights to The Broadway Melody, the first Hollywood musical, would, as a producer, elevate the form to undreamed of heights in the 1940s and 1950s.
It's all a most improbable saga.
Monday, July 21
THE GREAT ZIEGFELD
by
Lloydville
on Mon 21 Jul 2008 01:55 PM PDT
This movie is a great mystery. It has a less-than-compelling plot, tiresome dialogue and an excruciatingly slow pace, which makes its three-hour running time seem twice as long. Yet it was a big hit in 1936 and won the Academy Award for best picture.
What did audiences of the time like about this sprawling cavalcade of mediocrity? Nostalgia for a passing tradition of show business must have played a part. The movie charts the rise of Florenz Ziegfeld from midway showman to Broadway king, the inventor of a kind of glitzy, super-sized variety show that represented the apotheosis of vaudeville. Vaudeville had pretty much died out by 1936, given the coup de grace by talking pictures, and people must have missed it already -- realized that something precious from their youth had vanished from the American scene.
Arthur Freed, when he started his producing career at MGM a few years after The Great Ziegfeld, mined this mood of nostalgia often in the musicals he made for the studio.
The Great Ziegfeld also has some stunning cinematic passages in which it "recreates" numbers from Ziegfeld's shows. These involve bizarre moving sets of great size and intricacy, often filmed in long, elegant tracking shots from swooping cranes. They don't have much emotional impact, since they don't have much to do with the drama, and they lack the deranged energy and inventiveness of Busby Berkeley's big production numbers, but they're still amazing feats of filmmaking.
The best moments of the film are those few in which Fanny Brice does a brief cameo turn. She was really something -- kind of like a female Jerry Lewis with sharper timing and a sweeter temperament -- and it's a shame she never found movie vehicles that could better showcase her appealing comic persona.
Add it all up and you have the formula for a box-office and critical success in 1936. Today, the film is little more than a curiosity -- a record of popular appetites that would be fed by greater artists in the years to come, when the Freed Unit at MGM kicked into high gear.
Monday, July 14
THE LUBITSCH MUSICAL
by
Lloydville
on Mon 14 Jul 2008 04:53 AM PDT
You can comb through the silent films Ernst Lubitsch made in Germany searching for the fabled "Lubitsch touch" and you'll hardly find a trace of it. He made a few elegant historical spectacles and a lot of very silly comedies, though they're silly in an elegant way. Their tone is reminiscent of the Offenbach operettas, whose farce plots are so outrageously daft that they set off the sweet melodies (with their daft lyrics) perfectly. Lubitsch didn't have such melodies to work with in his silent films, of course, but he used mise en scène in their place -- he could send his actors off in preposterously choreographed evolutions that made his images sing.
It was when Lubitsch came to Hollywood that his "touch" was born. Probably under the influence of Chaplin's A Woman Of Paris, he began making far more sophisticated comedies, bittersweet and adult, with that subtle indirection of narrative that people came to recognize as his signature style. His masterpiece in this style was The Marriage Circle, a wry, complicated, rueful, generous look at the delusions of romance, at the delicate improvisations of marriage.
Then sound came in and Lubitsch realized that, with the aid of music and song, he could return to the style of his silent farces, that he could be wildly silly again -- and that's just what he did. The silliness soared to sublime new heights, however, because the "touch" he'd developed allowed him to create a lighter-than-air world on screen where every moment had the quality of music.
The actual music in these films was not, sadly, on a par with Offenbach's-- it was usually a sort of pale imitation of it -- and this led to a curious imbalance. The elegance of Lubitsch's choreography, his visual wit, the charm of his players was often dragged down by uninspired patter songs sung in a vaguely operatic style. He could provide an ironic visual counterpoint to these dull songs, and that could be very funny, but he had few chances to lift the musical numbers into transcendent realms, because the music just wasn't good enough.
The Lubitsch musical became a kind of dead end. Its lighthearted tone found more favor when expressed in uniquely American terms -- in Astaire's dancing, for example, and in the pop songs of the great Broadway composers. Those who still longed for the middle-brow European sophistication of the Lubitsch musical preferred to take it in straight doses -- in screen operettas, the most popular of which starred Jeanette MacDonald, who had been Lubitsch's leading lady in many of his early musicals at Paramount.
But nothing was ever again quite like the Lubitsch musical. Only Minnelli's musicals made for the Freed Unit at MGM developed a coherent visual style out of which song and dance numbers could flow gracefully, but Minnelli had a heavy hand compared to Lubitsch, whose touch was gossamer. Lubitsch hardly ever found musical material suited to that touch. He needed gossamer music like that churned out on a regular basis by Offenbach, "the Mozart of the Champs Elysées" -- which I guess is a roundabout way of saying that, visually, Lubitsch was the Mozart of Melrose Avenue.
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.
Saturday, June 28
PAS DE DEUX
by
Lloydville
on Sat 28 Jun 2008 04:52 PM PDT
In any kind of musical theater that involves dance, from ballet to a book musical, a pas de deux can dramatize a lot of different things -- flirtation, romantic exhilaration, the dawning or the fading of love. Because it involves a complex physical conversation between two people it almost always evokes the sexual act itself, and sometimes it does so in a very conscious way. It can do this without ever making explicit physical references to the sexual act, and is usually most effective when it doesn't -- when it evokes the moods and the moral evolutions of sex, mistrust, anxiety, curiosity, trust, surrender, transcendence. It can chart the interior narrative of sex, rather than its mechanics, mechanics which one proper British lady once described as "always the same ridiculous motions". The pas de deux can be a kind of metaphysical pornography.
(Image © Paul Kolnik)
It is certainly that in the ballets of the great choreographer George Balanchine, whose whole body of work can be seen as a meditation on the etiquette of sex. He saw a relationship between the formal behavior of ceremonial occasions and the courtly rituals of the boudoir -- for him, the two arenas of life informed each other, celebrated each other. His pas de deux could be funky, raunchy, wild and on the edge of control, but there was always an element of graciousness in them, of the mutual sympathy that fuels genuine physical passion. They were always about sex as an expression of love, whether sacred or profane.
The pas de deux in the musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made at RKO in the 1930s are almost always about the sexual act, and very consciously so. "Of course, Ginger was able to accomplish sex through dance," Astaire
once said. "We told more through our movements instead of the big
clinch. We did it all in dance." Hermes Pan, who collaborated with Astaire in the creation of his dances, said, "We showed things you couldn't talk about."
After their first great pas de deux, in The Gay Divorcee, danced in a seaside pavilion to the music of Cole Porter's "Night and Day", Rogers falls back on a settee in a dreamy post-orgasmic languor. Astaire stands over her with a kind of cocksure but slightly goofy satisfaction and offers her a cigarette -- a classic post-coital ritual. (The production still above doesn't really do justice to the moment.)
In Roberta, probably the worst of their RKO vehicles, the characters they play (second leads) don't have much of a romantic narrative. They seem attracted to each other from the start, and the only suspense in the relationship comes from wondering when they're going to admit it to each other. It happens, of course, after they do a highly sexualized dance at the end of the film. They exit the arena they danced in and backstage Rogers again collapses in dreamy exhaustion. "I think I'm going to have to give in to you," she says. Astaire asks her what she's talking about. "I thought you were going to ask me to marry you," she answers. "I was," he says. "All right then," she says, "I will." "Thank you," he says -- and they shake on it.
It funny and charming, and the gag works because he's already told her he loves her, already asked her to marry him, and she's already said yes -- in the dance.
In
Astaire's early years when he danced in vaudeville with his sister,
their act always had a narrative element -- it told a little story in
twelve minutes or so. In the romantic pas de deux
he created for himself and Rogers on screen he never lost sight of the
fact that the best sex always has the dynamics, the lineaments, of a
good story. It was an insight he and Balanchine shared.
Balanchine considered Astaire to be the greatest dancer of the 20th Century -- and Balanchine had seen all of them, worked with most of them. It undoubtedly wasn't just Astaire's technique that impressed Balanchine, it was his expressiveness, and the fact that for both men sexual love was at the center of their artistic imaginations.
Thursday, June 26
A FELLA WITH AN UMBRELLA
by
Lloydville
on Thu 26 Jun 2008 02:08 AM PDT
I'm just a fella,
A fella with an umbrella,
Looking for a girl who's saved
Her love for a rainy day.
Easter Parade, a film from 1948 produced by Arthur Freed and directed by Charles Walters, featured a cascade of songs by Irving Berlin, including a few of his great ones, but Berlin told his daughter that his favorite song in the film was "A Fella With An Umbrella". This surprised her, because it seemed so simple and modest -- almost a throwaway. But it's not really simple and modest at all -- or no more simple and modest than a stolen kiss.
A bit of doggerel is transformed by a surprising twist into an image of sweet, lyrical gallantry, echoed precisely by the lilting melody. What it is . . . is perfect.
The song is sung in the film by Peter Lawford and Judy Garland on a New York back-lot street, in pouring studio rain, mostly under an umbrella. Lawford delivers his part of the duet with charming amateurishness -- the choreography of their stroll is also simple . . . and just as charming. As in most Freed musicals, the perfectly calculated musical arrangement adds yet another level of enchantment to the number.
Check out the film, which is full of such moments.
Tuesday, June 24
ARTHUR FREED: THE PRODUCER AS AUTHOR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 24 Jun 2008 02:37 AM PDT
In the history of the classical Hollywood studio system there were only a handful of producers with an authorial voice which could be read in the overall body of their work. Among them I would place Walt Disney, Val Lewton and Arthur Freed.
Disney of course owned his own studio, which operated just outside the Hollywood mainstream. Disney didn't write, design, draw or direct the great animated films on which his reputation rests, but he exercised total control over all these functions and he communicated a vision to his in-house artists of the films he wanted them to make. He was technically a producer, but so involved in the minutiae of artistic decision-making at his studio, and in such absolute command of them, that he is rightly considered the primary author of his films.
Lewton and Freed operated independent units within more traditional studios. They both specialized in genre pictures -- B-horror films and musicals, respectively -- and as long as they turned out profitable examples of these genres, they were given an unusual degree of control over their films. Lewton was subject to more interference from higher-ranking executives at RKO -- Freed enjoyed a close personal friendship with MGM studio boss Louis B. Mayer and Mayer had an unshakable faith in Freed's judgment, which allowed Freed extraordinary freedom of action within his designated sphere. It was only with Mayer's ouster from MGM that succeeding studio heads began to interfere drastically with Freed's films, but even then only on his non-musical efforts.
Other prominent producers of the studio era achieved great power and prestige, but none of them communicated a clear authorial voice in their work. The films Hitchcock made for legendary producer David O. Selznick are best read as Hitchcock films, and even Gone With the Wind, Selznick's greatest triumph, owes its voice more to the artists who actually made it than to Selznick's vision as its producer. (Duel In the Sun, which may be the best expression of Selznick's "vision" as an artist, is a sprawling, unwieldy mess -- the vision at the core of it is in fact a vacuum.)
John Houseman, another legendary producer with a reputation for independence and good taste, was capable of producing both Citizen Kane and The Bad and the Beautiful, a film that consciously evokes Kane -- but the two films couldn't be more different in sensibility, in political and moral orientation. They better reflect the visions of their directors, Orson Welles and Vincente Minnelli, than the authorial voice of Houseman. (James Naremore, in The Films Of Vincente Minnelli, has written a brilliant analysis of the fundamental ways in which these two films differ.)
Of course no one person is ever the sole author of anything as complex and collaborative as a Hollywood studio film, on which many hands leave their mark. One can discover themes in Selznick's work, consistent from film to film, and a level of taste in Houseman's films which characterize all of them. But most great films are organized around a single vision, a single sensibility, despite some remarkable exceptions to the rule -- like Casablanca, for example.
That single vision may in fact be the result of a harmonious meeting of two or more minds -- between Toland and Welles, say, or, Freed and Minnelli -- but it remains singular all the same. Toland never worked on another film like Kane and Minnelli made different kinds of films when he worked apart from Freed.
Most great producers in the studio system functioned as editors function in the literary world. Editors in both realms can exert enormous influence, for good or bad, on the work they edit -- proposing subjects, making crucial artistic suggestions, cutting superfluous material or asking for additional work. But we don't confuse even the most brilliant and creative literary editors, like Maxwell Perkins (above), with the authors of the books they edited -- and by the same token we shouldn't confuse even the most powerful and celebrated Hollywood producers, like Thalberg, Selznick, Zanuck and Houseman, with the authors of the films they supervised.
But I would argue that Freed, like Disney and Lewton, was more than an editor, more than a supervisor.
Disney's freedom of action flowed from his ownership of his studio -- Lewton's and Freed's flowed flowed from other conditions, which were quite unusual. As I've said, both worked in conventional genres. They were specialists who were presumed to know as much about their specialties as anyone above or below them in the chain of command. As long as their films reached and pleased their intended markets, their bosses had no incentive to second-guess them, even when they indulged in radical innovations, as both did.
RKO market-tested titles and handed the most popular of them over to Lewton, who was expected to come up with films that matched them. In fact, he came up with very strange takes on these titles, films that were unlike any other horror films ever made, but they performed well at the box office and that was all RKO cared about.
Freed, as I've noted, had the friendship and the strong personal backing of his top boss in Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer -- but even that went only so far in terms of corporate support. It was the four films Freed produced at the start of his career starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney that ensured his independence. These films were made at relatively low cost (for musicals) and earned a fortune. From then on he rarely faltered in terms of profitability for the studio. He had only a few flops and a few films that broke even -- the rest made good money. Mayer was inclined to let Freed do what he wanted -- the bottom line on Freed's films allowed him to justify this to his corporate overlords in New York.
It's instructive to note, however, that when the public lost interest in Lewton's type of horror film, almost no one in Hollywood had much interest in working with him -- and he himself didn't quite seem to know what to do with himself. And when Mayer was ousted as MGM's studio head, Freed's position grew more and more precarious. He was still given his head on musical productions, but his non-musical films were interfered with and sometimes mutilated beyond recognition. He had no inherent prestige or power as a filmmaker. When it was felt that audiences were losing interest in musicals, or more precisely that their costs made them too risky a gamble, Freed stopped being able to get projects off the ground altogether. He left MGM heartbroken over his failure to make a bio-pic about Irving Berlin, which he felt would be the culmination of his whole life's work.
Disney, Lewton and Freed were also artists in their own right. Disney may not have been a great animator but he could do it. Lewton was a writer who contributed not only ideas and stories to his films but also co-wrote some of them, under a pseudonym. Freed was a very successful lyricist who had contributed songs to many different kinds of musical theater. The direct contributions all three made to their films were not as significant as the fact that each knew how to talk to the artists who made them as peers. They conducted their editorial and supervisory business in the language of artists, not the language of corporate production.
The point to be made by all this is that producers in the Hollywood system needed very special personal qualities and very special circumstances in which to create an authorial voice, and so it's no wonder that there weren't more of them who did.
Walt Disney has received an enormous amount of critical attention, and there are numerous studies of Lewton's films, but Freed's films, as a body of work, have been covered in only one book -- The World Of Entertainment by Hugh Fordin, from 1973. Fordin's study is largely anecdotal, and while it draws on a great deal of documentary evidence, much of it apparently supplied by Freed himself, and on extensive interviews with some of Freed's collaborators, it is hardly a scholarly work. Nor does it offer much critical insight into the films as artistic achievements.
The neglect of Freed can be partly attributed to the fact that many of his greatest films were directed by Minnelli. There are lots of critical studies of Minnelli, and these seem to "cover" Freed's contributions to the Hollywood musical by treating him as little more than an enabler of the auteur director. But, as I say, the films Minnelli made for other producers are very different from the films he made for Freed, and the films made by other directors in Freed's unit at MGM have many crucial things in common with the Freed-Minnelli collaborations.
Freed's body of work has a coherence, a distinctive and unifying sensibility, which deserves examination on its own. His artistic vision developed in a systematic way -- its progress is comprehensible and illuminating, as are its roots.
I think a case can be made that Freed was just as much an "author" as Disney or Lewton and that his films, taken as a whole, are just as important as theirs -- which makes them very important indeed.
Friday, June 20
SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Three, ARTHUR FREED
by
Lloydville
on Fri 20 Jun 2008 01:21 AM PDT
In some ways, Arthur Freed was perfectly placed to carry the Hollywood musical into the future. A product of the vaudeville era, he became a very successful lyricist, supplying songs, mostly in collaboration with Nacio Herb Brown, to every kind of musical entertainment offered on American stages.
He had a deep sentimental attachment to the traditions of American show business, especially vaudeville, but he was also a visionary, who knew that the traditions he loved could only survive in new forms that appealed to a new generation.
The key to his vision was Judy Garland, a kid but also a second-generation vaudevillian. Five of the first seven musicals he produced were vehicles for Garland, and in three of these she starred with Mickey Rooney, another kid with roots in vaudeville. All of Freed's Garland-Rooney musicals -- there were four all told -- were backstage ("Hey, kids, let's put on a show!") stories, and they each paid conscious tribute to the vaudeville tradition, but somehow Garland and Rooney made it all seem new. Partly this was because of their own youthful personae and partly because they made their bows to the past with an affectionate irony.
But Freed was just getting going. I don't know how consciously Freed was inspired by the art of Fred Astaire, whose sublimely expressive dancing suggested a whole new range of expression for musicals, showing how a down-home American sensibility could be conveyed in a supremely elegant form. However direct the influence, Freed got the message somehow.
The Garland-Rooney musicals have a down-home flavor. Garland and Rooney may play aspiring show business performers, with a virtuosity far beyond their years, but they are also icons of the American boy and girl next door. The musical films they did together combine melodrama with the more traditional elements of romantic comedy, as had the non-musical Andy Hardy films they made before they worked with Freed. There was corn-pone sentiment, about teen love and the family, mixed up with the nostalgia for vaudeville and the newfangled Hollywood razzmatazz.
Astaire and Rogers, in most of their films, play ordinary Americans slumming amongst the very rich in café society. In the Garland-Rooney musicals, home is the defining environment. Freed was feeling his way towards a new kind of domestic musical, which would reach its apotheosis in Meet Me In St. Louis.
Parallel with this new development, Freed remained true to the variety format, in films such as Ziegfeld Follies (above), a revue directed by Minnelli, who was also the director of Meet Me In St. Louis. And he continued to make backstage musicals like The Band Wagon and Singing In the Rain (actually a backlot musical), though even these had a more naturalistic tone than the surreal spectacles of Busby Berkeley in the 1930s.
Yet for all their relative naturalism, these films were highly stylized on a cinematic level. Freed hired Berkeley to direct the Garland-Rooney musicals, in a somewhat more muted style than he was known for, and in Minnelli he found an even more elegant and subtle cinematic magician. Freed realized that old-fashioned show-biz exaggeration, a dash of sublime hokum, had to be applied to the visual style of a musical, even as it explored the simpler virtues of life.
Freed created something new under the sun out of bits and pieces of things recovered from the attic of his fondest show-biz memories. He realized that the more show business changes, the more it remains the same, and he negotiated the paradox with impeccable flair.
Wednesday, June 18
CREATURE
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jun 2008 01:21 AM PDT
Cyd Charisse died on Tuesday at the age of 86. She was a powerful, elegant dancer in many of the great Hollywood musicals, with a technique grounded in her early ballet training.
She had an odd screen persona -- distant but also intimidating. She didn't have great range as an actress, but she also seemed to hold herself in reserve in front of a camera by choice, except when she was dancing -- and even when she was dancing, there was something held back. When she was at her sexiest she still seemed to be saying, "This is naughty, isn't it? But it's not for you."
She had the quality of a mythological creature, a female spirit incarnated, with a mystery that was never up for grabs -- not for sale at any price.
One of her greatest moments was a dance she did in It's Always Fair Weather -- in a boxing gym with tough-looking fighters for a supporting chorus line. The only tribute she would accept from the all-male crowd was abject worship. She looked tougher than all of them put together.
SUBLIME HOKUM: Part Two - THE AMERICAN MUSICAL
by
Lloydville
on Wed 18 Jun 2008 12:30 AM PDT
As I wrote in my first post on this subject, American show business has a surreal, incoherent quality which reflects the surreal, incoherent quality of American culture as a whole. It wants to synthesize elements which resist synthesis.
In some ways, vaudeville was the quintessential form of American show business, simply because its format allowed for incoherence. Dance, both high and low, ballet and tap, sentimental and comic songs, excerpts from classical plays, recitations of poems, acrobatics, juggling, animal acts, broad slapstick sketches, sing-along slide shows, rope and magic tricks, even, at the end of the line, movies, could all share the stage on a bill.
When something resembling the book musical appeared on Broadway, the vaudeville influence was great. Not only did vaudeville serve as a proving ground for the talents that created the modern musical theater -- musicians, songwriters and performers -- but it lent musical theater some of its grab-bag attitude.
The American book musical, a musical with songs interwoven into an overarching plot, was a kind of hybrid between European operetta and the vaudeville spirit. European operetta was very popular in America at the turn of the last century, but showmen intuited that a more American style, with pop songs and jazzier dancing would sell, too.
The books of book musicals still owed a lot to European traditions -- their plots tended to resemble drawing-room farces from the Continent, given a wise-cracking American twist.&n |
