My Favorite Musicals

The 70 Best Musicals Countdown at Wonders in the Dark is complete. (Click here to see the results.) Taken together, the seventy reviews written for the countdown by a number of contributors are a great introduction to, and overview of, the genre. I didn't vote in the countdown, but I did contribute one post (on the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Top Hat, no. 11) and I did follow the countdown. Now that it's over, I thought I would present my own list of favorite musicals.

The classic Hollywood musical is one of my very favorite genres, and I'll watch just about any of them, even the lesser ones, with enjoyment. One of the quirks of the WitD countdown was that each of those who voted determined what constituted a musical film (although, to be fair, I don't see how the countdown could have been conducted any other way). Quite a few films that received votes would not have occurred to me as falling within my own definition of a musical film. This made me realize that my definition of "musical" is a fairly narrow one. If I had voted, I would not, for example, have included any operas, even though several made the final cut of the 70 Best Musicals. I love classical music, but I must confess that in general the experience of watching an entire opera from beginning to end is one that is beyond my endurance. Still, I have seen a few outstanding movies of operas that I thought worked as films, but not nearly enough to be able to pick among all the possibilities with any confidence. Moreover, I'm not sure that, strictly speaking, opera movies really strike me as musicals in the movie sense. Nor did I include any animated films, four of which placed in the countdown. Because I'm not a big fan of animated movies, I just don't watch them in the same way I watch live-action movies and don't feel able to judge them the same way I do live-action musicals.

A Hard Day's Night came in at no. 44. This is another film it would not have occurred to me to include, because I don't find that it really fits comfortably with musical movies as I see the genre. The same goes for the other rock-music movies I especially like: the wonderful Quadrophenia based on the album by the Who, those two hugely enjoyable Irish musicals The Commitments and Once (no. 57), and of course the other Richard Lester-Beatles movie, Help! Coming in at no. 28 was Yankee Doodle Dandy, the musical biography of James M. Cohan with James Cagney so memorable in the lead role. Again, this is a movie that before seeing the results of the poll would not have occurred to me to include. The same goes for other musical biographies that I find especially good: I'll Cry Tomorrow, Love Me or Leave Me, The Buddy Holly Story, Coal Miner's Daughter. When I think of musicals, I just don't think of movies like these, even though they're movies and music is performed in them.

So what did make my list? I was able to come up with a list of thirty movies that I consider either masterpieces of the genre or, falling short of masterpiece status, still excellent films. There are many more musicals that I can watch with pleasure, but because the qualitative differences between them are so slight, I didn't see any sense in ranking them in any kind of order. It should be clear from the list that I prefer the classics. The most recent movie on the list is Cabaret, released in 1972. I also seem to prefer the musicals from MGM over those of any other studio. Ten of the thirty films on my list came from that studio, including fully half of the top ten and all of the top three. It's also clear that I have a strong preference for original movie musicals over stage-to-film adaptations. I'm not sure why this is except possibly that adaptations of stage musicals so often emphasize faithfulness to the original version over cinematic values. Movie musicals conceived as movies from the beginning seem to me generally more successful as films.

Another thing I noticed when comparing my choices to those of the voters in the countdown poll is that some of those who voted seemed to place a higher value on their response to the music in the movie than I did. South Pacific, for instance, which placed no. 35, has one of the loveliest scores of all musicals, and I'll go along with the voters' and commenters' consensus that its score is the best of all those the great Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote. But as much as I love the songs from South Pacific, I could never find a place for it on a list of the best movie musicals because the film version has so many obvious faults. The same goes for the film version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Carousel (no. 42). It occurs to me that some voters might also have been swayed by memories of stage productions they'd seen of some of the musicals they voted for.

Before getting to my list of favorite musicals, I'm going to repeat part of what I wrote in the review of Top Hat for the countdown, in which I explain what for me are the defining characteristics of the musical film:

The musical film is an inherently artificial genre. . . . The basic aim of the musical film is to heighten reality through contrived and often frivolous plots, simplified characterization, and the combining of speech with song and movement with dance. Artifice, stylization, and exaggeration are the engines that drive musical films.

Anyway, here is my own list of the best musicals. For those that placed in the top 70 of the countdown, I've placed their WitD position in parentheses after the title.

MY 30 FAVORITE MUSICALS

1. Singin' in the Rain (#1)
2. On the Town (#16)
3. Meet Me in St. Louis (#5)
4. Love Me Tonight (#8)
5. Top Hat (#11)
6. Gold Diggers of 1933 (#3)
7. West Side Story (#4)
8 . Cabaret (#7)
9. The Wizard of Oz (#2)
10. The Band Wagon (#10)
11. A Star Is Born (#19)
12. Gigi (#22)
13. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (#12)
14. Swing Time (#6)
15. Funny Face (#45)
16. 42nd Street (#15)
17. Easter Parade (#33)
18. An American in Paris (#13)
19. My Fair Lady (#37)
20. The Music Man #(14)
21. The Pajama Game
22. The Merry Widow (1934) (#26)
23. Oklahoma! (#27)
24. Kiss Me Kate (#48)
25. Annie Get Your Gun
26. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (#56)
27. The King and I (#23)
28. Shall We Dance (1937)
29. The Gay Divorcée #(46)
30. French Cancan

I can't claim to have seen every musical ever made, so there are bound to be omissions for that reason. For one, I've never seen The Sound of Music, although I'm familiar with its score and plot, so it was not possible for me to include it. (Someday I'll have to write a post on the most shocking gaps in my film-viewing history.) There are three highly regarded musicals I've tried to watch, some more than once, but have never been able to watch for more than about twenty minutes before giving up: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Fiddler on the Roof, and Oliver! I can't say exactly what it was about these films that rubbed me the wrong way, but I do know that I couldn't face the prospect of another two or three hours of them.

If anyone has a favorite musical you think belongs in the company of the ones I did include, please mention it in a comment.

Top Hat (1935)

****
Country: US
Director: Mark Sandrich


"Every once in a while I suddenly find myself dancing," Jerry Travers (Fred Astaire) says to Dale Tremont (Ginger Rogers) when they meet cute at a London hotel at the beginning of Top Hat. Jerry, a song-and-dance man, has just arrived in London to star in a show for his producer pal Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton) and has been explaining to Horace his casual philosophy of romance. How else would Fred Astaire express his feelings in a musical film but through song and dance? Here the song is "No Strings (I'm Fancy Free)"—"No ties to my affections / I'm fancy free and free for anything fa-a-a-ncy"—and the dance is a raucous tap routine that has disturbed the sleep of the young woman in the room below, Dale. This is why Jerry feels the need to explain to her his occasional compulsion to sing and dance. At this first meeting, Dale responds to Jerry frostily. He responds to her with a level of interest that has him rethinking his no strings attitude to romance.

The rest of the movie might be described as Fred persists, Ginger resists, with complications. It's those complications that are wrung for every last drop of plot to sustain this light-as-air confection of a movie. The main complication is one of the oldest in the book—mistaken identity. Just when Dale is beginning to reconsider her opinion of Jerry, circumstances lead her to believe that Jerry is actually Horace, who happens to be the husband of her best friend Madge (Helen Broderick), and narrative coincidences conspire to perpetuate her error. Naturally, she finds her pursuer a cad and continues to reject his advances, while Jerry can't understand why she won't thaw in the face of his tenacity. Things definitely reach an impasse when Dale impulsively decides to marry a sexually ambiguous dress designer to avoid Jerry.

Besides the sublime team of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Top Hat has a great deal else to recommend it. For one thing, there's the delightful score by Irving Berlin. It might not have the number of standards found in Shall We Dance or Swing Time, but its five songs are all tuneful and lyrically catchy, and one, "Cheek to Cheek," not only provides the music for the most memorable dance routine in the film but became a much-recorded standard. The song was nominated for an Oscar but came in second behind "Lullaby of Broadway," a well-crafted song which, however, doesn't strike me as having the lasting appeal of "Cheek to Cheek." But who ever credited the Academy with foresight? And its chances were probably hurt by the fact that the winner was the centerpiece of a mind-blowing 14-minute long Busby Berkeley production number in a movie directed by the master himself (Gold Diggers of 1935) and also that the only other nominee, "Lovely to Look At," was from another Astaire-Rogers movie, Roberta.

The art direction in Top Hat, which also received an Oscar nomination, is by Carroll Clark and Van Nest Polglase, who was head of the art department at RKO from 1932 to 1943. (Among the 331 films Polglase is credited with are all nine of the Astaire-Rogers musicals made at RKO in the 1930s as well as Citizen Kane, also made at RKO.) The great film director Michael Powell wrote in his autobiography that "the most genuinely creative member of a film unit, if the author of the original story and screenplay is excluded, is the art director . . . the creator of those miraculous images up there on the big screen." Top Hat is a great illustration of the truth of that statement, for the art direction of this film is largely responsible for its considerable visual appeal.

The first half of Top Hat takes place in London, mostly in a swanky hotel, and the decor here is pure Art Deco, all angles and planes and architectonic silhouettes arrayed in open, spacious settings. When the action moves to Venice in the second half of the film, the decor becomes rococo frou-frou full of sensuous curves and ornamentation, a look that might have been inspired by the decoration on a wedding cake. Throughout, the color scheme is pale—white on white on white. Dark colors are restricted largely to the costumes, which helps the actors stand out amid all that pallid visual splendor. The set decoration reaches its zenith in the elaborate sound stage representation of a fantasy Venice, a set so vast that two sound stages were required to house it.

In the Greatest Musicals Countdown there has been some discussion of the use of the sound stage in musicals and whether this is a practice antithetical to the innate realism of the film medium. But let's face it—the musical film is an inherently artificial genre. In the traditional musical like Top Hat, the fundamental mode of expression is fantasy, not realism. This is due at least in part to its antecedents in opera and in the operettas, variety shows, and musical comedies of the stage. I'm not saying that real locations don't enhance outdoor scenes and the serious subjects of the modern social realist musical like West Side Story. But the basic aim of the musical film is to heighten reality through contrived and often frivolous plots, simplified characterization, and the combining of speech with song and movement with dance. Artifice, stylization, and exaggeration are the engines that drive musical films like Top Hat.

Now on to the great cast of Top Hat. Anyone reading this is likely well-acquainted with the talent and teamwork of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. But one thing that makes their films work so well is the support they get from the character actors cast in smaller roles, and none of their pictures has a better supporting cast than this one. Erik Rhodes plays the fashion designer Ginger marries (you'll have to watch the movie to see the clever ruse used to get around this so that Fred and Ginger can get together at the end of the movie), an excitable Italian named Beddini, essentially a reprise of his excitable Italian Tonetti from The Gay Divorcée. Helen Broderick plays Madge Hardwick, making wry moues and snapping out wisecracks as though it were second nature. Best of all are fussy Edward Everett Horton, firing off exclamations like "Oh, dear dear!" and "My word!" while doing double-takes, and Eric Blore, as Horton's sassy valet Bates. Horton and Blore make a wonderful comedy team, Horton feeding Blore straight lines and Blore rolling his eyes, pulling faces, and drawling back punch lines with hilariously over-precise diction. And I mustn't forget to mention a platinum blonde Lucille Ball in a tiny role as a florist's assistant. (She must have had fond memories of this picture. Horton later appeared with her in a memorable episode of I Love Lucy, and in another episode Desi Arnaz sang "Cheek to Cheek" to a pregnant Lucy.)

Finally, there are the dance numbers, choreographed by Astaire and the great Hermes Pan, who worked on all ten of the Astaire-Rogers movies. The five musical numbers here represent just about every style of dance then current in musical movies. "No Strings" begins as an energetic tap dance and ends as a hushed soft-shoe with Fred lulling Ginger to sleep by dancing on sand. "Isn't This a Lovely Day (to Be Caught in the Rain)?" starts off almost as a competition between the two, with Fred attempting to use his dance technique as a tactic for seduction. Ginger begins mimicking his moves to prove her dancing mettle but ends up dancing in unison with him, a choreographic strategy perhaps intended to show how close Fred came to succeeding. It's a good thing that thunderstorm passed before things went too far! "Top Hat, White Tie and Tails" is done as a stage number in Jerry and Horace's musical revue, in the style of the Warners backstage musicals, Astaire performing solo with a male chorus. The legendary "Cheek to Cheek" is the ultimate romantic dance, with Fred in tails and Ginger in that famous feathered dress, together gliding, swooping, and whirling with ethereal grace, like a pair of exotic birds performing a mating ritual. The film's final number, "The Piccolino," sung by Ginger and performed on that huge Venetian set, is a lavish production number on the grand scale, almost an homage to Busby Berkeley.

Top Hat, nominated for an Oscar as best picture, was the fifth of ten musicals Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made together and one of five directed by Mark Sandrich. It is in the opinion of just about everybody one of the two best of the lot, the other being Swing Time (1936). I'd go along with that opinion, but if pressed to choose one as the absolute best, I'd go for Top Hat over Swing Time, as much as I like that George Stevens-directed delight. Top Hat is a more comfortable fit with the airiness I consider typical of Astaire-Rogers vehicles, and of all the Astaire-Rogers movies, it's the funniest and the most risqué.

This post is part of the Greatest Musicals Countdown at Wonders in the Dark, where Top Hat came in at no. 11. Click here to catch up on the countdown. You might also be interested in my post on "The Best Fred Astaire Musicals Without Ginger Rogers." Click here to read it.

Love Me Tonight (1932)

****
Country: US
Director: Rouben Mamoulian

It's quiz time. Naming only one film and its director, answer all the following questions:

1. Name a director who used fast-motion, slow-motion, zooms, and split screens in a musical film. [Hint: The answer is not Richard Lester.]

2. Name a film in which all the following can be found: deep-focus photography, rooms with ceilings, extremely low and high camera placement, elaborately choreographed tracking and crane shots, and repeated shots in which the camera moves into and out of the windows of a palatial home. [Hint: The answer is not Citizen Kane.]

3. Name a film in which a well-known singing and dancing actor performs a musical number with his oversized shadow projected onto the wall behind him. [Hint: The answer is not Swing Time.]

4. Name the director of an early sound film set in France which integrated songs, sung dialogue, rhyming dialogue, natural and ambient sounds, ordinary speech, and overlapping sound. [Hint: The answer is not René Clair.]

5. Name a director who used a distinctively light, whimsical, and subtly erotic touch in a film starring Maurice Chevalier and Jeanette MacDonald. [Hint: The answer is not Ernst Lubitsch.]

As you've probably already guessed, the answer to all of the above questions is Love Me Tonight and its director, Rouben Mamoulian. The plot of the movie may be just a lighter-than-air bauble based on the mistaken identity/impersonation trope so common to the musical genre, but the cleverness with which that device is developed and the imaginative ways it is used for visual, verbal, and musical invention provide an hour and a half of non-stop enjoyment and awe. In the France that exists only in movies, a Parisian tailor named Maurice (Maurice Chevalier) follows an aristocratic client, the Viscount Gilbert (Charles Ruggles), who owes him a considerable amount of money, to the family château to collect on the debt. There he falls in love with Gilbert's cousin, an aloof widowed princess (it is strongly hinted that her marriage to a much older man was never consummated) named Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald) and for reasons too complicated to explain concisely, pretends to be an aristocrat himself as he redirects his pursuit of the money owed him to the pursuit of Jeanette.

Maurice Chevalier sizes up Jeanette MacDonald's bust

The film opens with two mind-boggling sequences which set the tone of startling originality that is maintained for the duration of the movie. The first thing we see are stock shots of early morning Paris with no sounds but the chiming of a lone church bell. Then we see a montage of Parisians beginning their day, with street sounds added one by one until the soundtrack becomes a percussive symphony of ambient sound, the rhythm of two cobblers hammering nails into the soles of boots emulating a heartbeat. Finally, on top of this intricate continuo of sound effects music is laid, and the camera moves through the open window of Maurice's room. As he dresses, he speaks the first line of dialogue in the film—"Lovely morning song of Paris, you are much too loud for me"—and immediately launches into the movie's first song, "That's the Song of Paree."

A bit later Mamoulian uses the song "Isn't It Romantic?" to unify a dazzling six and a half minute long sequence that gradually shifts the scene from Maurice's tailor shop in the morning to the country château in the evening. Chevalier begins singing the song to a customer, and the song then passes seamlessly from one person to another until it reaches Jeanette: from Maurice to the customer, to a taxi driver the customer encounters outside the shop, to a composer the driver picks up as a fare, to a group of soldiers on the train the composer transfers to, to a Gypsy boy the soldiers pass while marching through the countryside, who then carries it back to the Gypsy camp outside the château, and finally to Jeanette, who has come onto the terrace outside her room to take in the night air. To say that the sequence has to be seen to be fully appreciated is an understatement.

Bojangles of Montmartre?

In addition to its astounding cinematic creativity, Love Me Tonight has much else to recommend it. Chevalier has never been more charming, and it's easy to see why for a few years in the early 1930s he was such a big star in this kind of movie. Jeanette MacDonald is also at her peak—naïve but spirited, deadpan funny, and very sexy, a far cry from the image she later cultivated after moving from Paramount to MGM. As well as the ever-reliable Charlie Ruggles, the cast includes Myrna Loy as Jeanette's sex-mad young cousin and C. Aubrey Smith as the pompous family patriarch. Most unusual of all, the family includes three elderly aunts (one of whom is played by the delightful Elizabeth Patterson) who are presented at first like the three witches in Macbeth, mixing a potion and chanting a spell to summon up a Prince Charming for the sex-starved Jeanette (with the unexpected result of provoking Maurice's infatuation with her), and later like the three Fates, embroidering a needlework tapestry that directs the movie to a happy conclusion.

As a pre-Code production, Love Me Tonight is cheerfully risqué, and was apparently even more so in its original release version—about fifteen minutes longer and now lost—with things like see-through night gowns and repartee about visiting the "Virgin Springs." One of the film's biggest assets is its music score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart. Of all the great American songwriters of the twentieth century, I don't think anyone wrote lovelier melodies than Rodgers or wittier, better crafted lyrics than Hart. Love Me Tonight has two of their best, "Lover" (sung by MacDonald while driving a pony trap) and the lilting "Isn't It Romantic?" my own favorite Rodgers and Hart song. Paramount must have really liked "Isn't It Romantic?" because for years they used it in many other movies, often played in the background by the orchestra at a night club. Rudy Vallee sang it to Claudette Colbert in Preston Sturges's The Palm Beach Story (1942), and Billy Wilder used both it and "Lover" in Sabrina (1954).

The American musical film of the 1930s was dominated by the Astaire-Rogers movies, the Warner Bros. backstage musicals choreographed by Busby Berkeley, the Continental musical confections of Ernst Lubitsch, and in the last year of the decade by The Wizard of Oz. But to my mind the greatest American musical of this period is Love Me Tonight, and the significance of its innovations not just to musicals, but to cinema in general, cannot be overstated. As Arthur Knight put it in The Liveliest Art, compared to the musicals that preceded it, Love Me Tonight "is freer, lighter, more imaginative than ever before. Greater liberties are taken with reality, and . . . trick sound is combined with trick camera to create a world of gay illusion. . . . The experience of making such musicals provided directors with new insights into their craft which carried over into the more serious forms."

The Best Fred Astaire Musicals Without Ginger Rogers

Fred Astaire (1899-1987) has more than fifty acting credits in his résumé. A multi-talented man—actor, singer, choreographer, and above all dancer—he was notorious for his unyielding perfectionism: Johnny Mercer once called him "an impeccable workman." Astaire is a true Hollywood legend for his performances in musical movies, but he also turned in charming light comedy performances in non-musical movies like The Pleasure of His Company and The Notorious Landlady and the rare dramatic performance in movies like On the Beach and The Towering Inferno. The ten musicals he made with Ginger Rogers—nine at RKO in the 1930s and one more at MGM in 1949 (The Barkleys of Broadway, in which Ginger replaced Judy Garland)—are not only landmark films of the American cinema, but adored by fans of musicals and many non-fans alike. At least two of them—Top Hat (1935) and Swing Time (1936)—are among the very best American movies of the 1930s of any genre.

Of all the famous screen couples in the movies, Astaire and Rogers are probably the best known and loved—even more so than Tracy and Hepburn, Bogart and Bacall—and deservedly so. Their screen personalities seemed the perfect complement. As Pauline Kael once wrote, "She gave him sex, and he gave her class." After they stopped making movies together, Ginger concentrated on non-musical pictures while Fred made many more musical films. But reluctant to become identified again as one-half of a famous screen couple, he rarely made more than one or two musicals with any one actress-dancer as his partner. Some of those later musicals are run-of-the-mill, but several are excellent, rivaling the best movies he made with Ginger Rogers and surpassing the lesser ones.

Here are my five favorite musicals Fred Astaire made without Ginger Rogers:

• A Damsel in Distress (1937)
Directed by George Stevens, who also directed Swing Time, this movie takes place in England. Astaire plays Jerry Halliday, an American singer-dancer vacationing in London, who becomes involved in a matchmaking scheme hatched by the servants at the estate of a young noblewoman, Lady Alice Marshmorton (Joan Fontaine). People who write about this movie tend to emphasize what the movie doesn't have—namely, Ginger Rogers—and the blandness of the young Fontaine as a romantic interest for Astaire. While such complaints are justified, I prefer to think of what the movie does have.

The delightful script by P. G. Wodehouse (based on his novel and play) with its dimwitted nobles, crafty servants, and series of misunderstandings is absolutely typical of that writer, and anybody familiar with his comic stories and novels will recognize his usual bag of tricks. It also has the archetypal screwball comedy situation (think It Happened One Night) of a young woman infatuated with an ill-chosen suitor who must be won over by an unconventional suitor (in this case, Astaire) who offers her the opportunity to break out of her constrained existence. The movie has great songs by the Gershwins, including "Nice Work" and the much-recorded "A Foggy Day," the hilarious George Burns as Astaire's agent and Gracie Allen as George's dotty secretary, and the classic, Oscar-winning "Fun House" production number (above). Not only an excellent Fred Astaire musical, but an excellent musical, period.

• You Were Never Lovelier (1942)
When you see Rita Hayworth in this movie, you'll be tempted to agree with its title, even if you've seen Gilda. In this, the second of two films she made with Astaire, Rita plays Maria Acuña, the daughter of a rich Buenos Aires night club owner (Adolphe Menjou). Fred plays Robert Davis, a professional dancer who has just lost all his money at the racetrack and is desperate to get a job at Menjou's club to earn enough money to get back home. Menjou, in the meantime, is talked into a scheme to trick the eldest of his three daughters, played by Rita, into believing she has a mystery admirer by sending her orchids every day himself. In the mistaken identity device common to so many Astaire-Rogers movies, she erroneously believes Astaire is the mystery admirer. When Astaire gets a look at Rita, it's love at first sight and he immediately goes along with her assumption. It's never in doubt that despite Menjou's opposition and Rita's pique at being duped, the two will eventually get together.

The score is a bit short of memorable songs, although it does include "I'm Old-Fashioned" and the Oscar-nominated "Dearly Beloved" by Jerome Kern-Johnny Mercer. The real attraction here, though, is Astaire's dancing with the gorgeous Rita. Astaire never had a more able dance partner (although Cyd Charisse was a very close second). With Ginger, we were always aware of how hard she was working to keep up with Astaire, but Rita's dancing looks as effortless and lighter-than-air as Fred's. The most startling number is when the two dance "The Shorty George," an incredibly athletic, jitterbug-influenced swing number. The sight of Rita in a tight white blouse, white mini-skirt, white bobby socks, and two-tone saddle shoes tapping and swinging with Fred is not easily forgotten.

• Easter Parade (1948)
This movie, MGM's highest-grossing release of 1948, was originally set to be directed by Vincente Minnelli, but according to Hollywood lore MGM dancer-choreographer Charles Walters (he had choreographed Judy's "The Great Lady Gives an Interview" number in 1946's Ziegfeld Follies) replaced him at the last minute when Judy claimed her psychiatrist warned her that working with her husband would further strain her rocky marriage. Although Walters later became an accomplished director of light comedies, it's likely that the film was largely planned by Minnelli before he left the project.

In the movie Astaire plays Don Hewes, one-half of a famous song-and-dance team along with Nadine Hale (a delightfully bitchy Ann Miller), with whom he is also romantically involved. When the self-centered Nadine deserts Don for a solo career, Don makes an impulsive declaration that he could could replace Nadine by turning any ordinary showgirl into a star and begins looking for a new partner. After we see Miller's sizzling performance of "Shakin' the Blues Away," it's clear this is going to take some doing. (All the songs are by Irving Berlin and include "Steppin' Out with My Baby," performed by Astaire.) He finally settles on Hannah Brown (do you think the writers had ever heard Bessie Smith sing "Pigfoot"?), played with charming self-effacement by Judy Garland. It takes Astaire a year to do it, but he finally manages to fulfill his boast while shedding his feelings for Nadine and falling in love with the unpretentious Hannah.

Astaire was reportedly appalled by Judy's temperamental behavior during the filming, but onscreen he seems to bring out the best in her. She appears so genuinely relaxed and happy as she places Astaire's silk top hat on his head while singing "Put on your Easter bonnet" to him that this is the mood I always like to recall her in. The real musical high point of the film, though, is the comic novelty number "A Couple of Swells" (above). Judy might not have been in the same class as Astaire's more accomplished dance partners, but her skillful impersonation of a physical klutz in this number makes you realize she was a better dancer than she is given credit for. She also acquits herself well in a solo number, "Mr. Monotony," that was cut from the final film but can be seen in That's Entertainment! III. In it the svelte Judy wears the Trilby hat, man's tuxedo jacket, and black fishnet stockings she would later wear in the finale of the Walters-directed Summer Stock (1950).

• The Band Wagon (1953)
This movie has impeccable credentials: story and screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (with uncredited contributions by Alan Jay Lerner), production by Roger Edens and Arthur Freed, musical numbers staged by Michael Kidd, and direction by Vincente Minnelli. Some consider it the best musical ever made after Singin' in the Rain. (I don't quite agree, but it's certainly among the best ten ever made.) Astaire plays Tony Hunter, a musical star who is close to being a has-been (how's that for irony?) but who is offered a role in a Broadway musical by his friends Lester and Lily Martin (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray, clearly modeled on Comden and Green themselves). But Astaire regrets getting involved when he finds that the director of the play, Jeffrey Cordova (played by the British musical comedy artist Jack Buchanan), wants to stage it as a pretentious, deadly serious modern version of Faust. One thing he doesn't regret, however, is his costar, the ballerina Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse), with whom he begins to fall in love after a moonlight coach ride through Central Park, interrupted by a sensuous, sublimely romantic dance to "Dancing in the Dark" (above, and my own favorite number in the movie).

After a disastrous preview, Astaire takes the show in hand, tapping into the classic "Hey, boys and girls, let's put on a show!" spirit of backstage musicals, and creates a triumph. Like many of the musicals of the 30s, The Band Wagon is back-loaded with one fantastic musical number after another, including "Louisiana Hayride," the hilarious "Triplets" with Astaire, Fabray, and Buchanan as squabbling infants, and best of all the elaborate film noir spoof "Girl Hunt." The movie also contains Fred tap-dancing to "A Shine on Your Shoes" (according to Liza Minnelli, her father's favorite musical number he ever filmed) and the iconic "That's Entertainment." Charisse had limitations as an actress, but as a dancer she was easily a worthy match for Astaire.

• Funny Face (1957)
Fashion magazine editor Maggie Prescott (Kay Thompson, above left) wants to do an issue on "clothes for the woman who isn't interested in clothes" and commissions fashion photographer Dick Avery (Astaire, whose character is clearly based on Richard Avedon, who served as an advisor on the film) to photograph the issue. Deciding the studio isn't the right background for the shoot, the two hit upon the idea of using a real Greenwich Village bookstore to stage the photo session. It's here that Avery meets Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), a frumpy young intellectual working as a clerk in the store. He later devises a scheme for the three to travel to Paris, where Dick will photograph Jo modeling a special couture collection for Maggie's publication. All three will get something they want out of the trip: Maggie will get a special issue for the magazine, Dick will get a chance to court Jo, and Jo will get the opportunity to meet her idol, a famous French existentialist philosopher.

The French locations are ravishingly photographed by veteran cinematographer Ray June (who received an Oscar nomination), and the music, mostly by the Gershwins, is most appealing. All three stars are in fine form. Under the direction of Stanley Donen, Astaire creates one of his most unique and likable characters—a polished sophisticate rather than the wisecracking joker or showbiz workingman he usually played—and gives one of his greatest performances, in which acting, singing, and dancing are given equal emphasis. Hepburn gives another in her series of legendary performances of the 1950s. David Thomson calls Funny Face "the movie that embraced her different atmospheres—from blue stocking to a Vogue Ondine." She even gets to sing—solo and in her own voice—a wistful version of "How Long Has This Been Going On?"

The Astaire-Rogers movies were boosted by great supporting players like Edward Everett Horton and Helen Broderick, and Funny Face is too, for the flamboyant Thompson, who appeared in only four movies, steals every scene she's in. She gets her own solo number, "Think Pink," at the very beginning of the movie and has a hilarious number with Astaire where they disguise themselves as beatniks and perform "Clap Yo' Hands" in a bohemian coffee house. To call Thompson multi-talented would be an understatement: She was a lyricist, radio and night club performer, and for many years worked under Arthur Freed as a vocal coach, arranger, and composer at MGM, where she wrote and arranged Judy Garland's "The Great Lady Gives an Interview" number from Ziegfeld Follies (1946). She was also a published writer, the author of the Eloise series of children's books.

My favorite sequence in the film is when Astaire is photographing Hepburn in the Louvre and she runs repeatedly down the staircase where the Winged Victory of Samothrace is displayed on a landing, while Astaire tries to get the shot just right. Finally the frustrated Hepburn, wearing a flowing gown, shouts to Astaire, "Take the picture!" and he does. The resulting freeze-frame is a shot in which Audrey's pose and costume emulate those of the statue behind her. Two timeless icons together: one flesh-and-blood, the other marble. As the saying goes, that one shot is worth the price of admission.

Ren&#233 Clair: Breaking the Sound Barrier

"Perhaps the first director to appreciate fully the implications of sound was the Frenchman René Clair."

—Arthur Knight, The Liveliest Art

As any film enthusiast knows, the coming of sound to motion pictures in the late 1920's threw the film industry into a state of confusion. Filmmakers at first simply did not know what to do with the new invention. Recorded music scores were added to already filmed silent pictures, or newly filmed sound or musical sequences interpolated into them. The first all-talking pictures were merely brief newsreel segments or short recordings of novelty acts. Howard Hughes responded by re-shooting the entire movie Hell's Angels—already completed in 1928 as a silent—with sound, finally releasing it in 1930.

By this time, the studios had pretty much decided that sound was synonymous with dialogue. Talk replaced action, sound stages replaced plein air settings, and the addition of bulky sound recording apparatus severely limited the mobility of the camera. Both the concept of montage adulated by the Russians as the apogee of the art of cinema and the balletic aspects of silents—their artistic use of motion and movement—gave way to a static approach that reverted to the primitive notion of the movie as a filmed stage play prevalent before pioneers like D. W. Griffith showed the world a truly cinematic approach to filmmaking.

The French film director René Clair (1898-1981) refused to be limited by the addition of sound to image and became, along with Rouben Mamoulian and Ernst Lubitsch, one of the foremost innovators of ways to creatively combine the two. Having made several silent movies, he was a traditionalist (he once said that "nothing essential has been added to the art of the motion picture since D. W. Griffith") who was ambivalent about the coming of sound to movies. In two of his first sound films, Le Million and A Nous la Liberté (both 1931), he attempted to avoid obvious uses of sound and ended up creating two works that, even aside from being conspicuously novel in the ways they integrated sound with image, are just plain masterpieces.

Le Million is constructed on an elegantly simple premise. A penniless Parisian artist, Michel (Raymond Lefebvre), leaves his jacket with his girl friend, Béatrice (Annabella), a ballerina who lives across the hall from him, to be mended. Then he discovers that he has bought a winning lottery ticket and remembers that it is in the pocket of the jacket. There's only one problem: Béatrice has given the jacket to a petty thief called Le Père la Tulipe (Papa Tulip), who came through her skylight while being chased across the rooftops by the police. The rest of the movie involves the efforts of Michel to trace the missing jacket and retrieve the winning ticket.

Of course, the seemingly simple plot soon develops complications, and in the tradition of the great silent comedies, Clair keeps piling on the complications, each complication leading to yet more complications. First, Michel's friend, the sculptor Prosper (Jean-Louis Allibert)—miffed that his own ticket isn't the winning one and that Michel refuses to divide the winnings with him if he can find the ticket—decides to track it down himself, taking time out along the way to sabotage Michel's own efforts. Then the jacket ends up in a junk shop, where an eccentric Italian opera singer called Sopranelli, taken with the jacket's authentic shabbiness, buys it to use as part of his act ("The Bohemians"!). And Le Père la Tulipe turns out to be not a smalltime crook at all, but the sophisticated mastermind of a gang of professional thieves. When he becomes aware of all the interest in the jacket, he decides to get it back himself to see just what makes it so valuable to Michel and Prosper. Finally, Béatrice, feeling guilty over giving the jacket away, also gets involved in the pursuit by trying to find the mysterious Le Père la Tulipe in the hope that he will lead her to the missing jacket. So we soon have four individuals simultaneously chasing the elusive jacket, now in the hands of Sopranelli, who has developed a very possessive attitude toward it and refuses to part with it.

Clair makes use of sound in several unusual ways. Michel's neighbors and creditors, eagerly waiting to celebrate his good fortune, act as a sort of operetta chorus, singing comments on the characters and the action. Likewise, Le Père la Tulipe sings out his instructions to the gang of criminals he commands. When Michel and Béatrice get to the Opéra Lyrique, they hide onstage behind the scenery while Sopranelli and his female partner perform a duet between quarreling lovers all of whose words and emotions apply equally to the concealed Michel and Béatrice. When dialogue is unnecessary, the actors simply mime speech and use emphatic physical gestures as if they are in a silent movie, sometimes with music playing on the soundtrack much as it might have in a silent movie theater.

The similarity of Le Million to classic silent film comedy—the comedy of Chaplin, Lloyd, and especially Keaton—is obvious in the near impossibility of describing in any real detail the plot of the movie. The numerous, rapid plot complications I referred to don't seem to unfold in a deliberately scripted way but to evolve spontaneously and unpredictably. They are often played out much as they would be in a silent comedy, with movement and wordless sight gags substituting for explanatory dialogue.

If I could use one word to describe the style of Le Million, it would be kinetic. Once events are set in train, the film never stops moving, always proceeding forward . . . forward. It is for its entire 83 minutes a moving picture in the most literal way. And it is unbelievably entertaining, amusing, and unlike anything you are likely to have seen before. Strictly speaking, it isn't even a musical, even though it contains music and singing. If the movie's style can be summed up in one word, so can its effect on the viewer. That word is charming.

A Nous la Liberté, released a mere eight months later, takes the imaginative sound techniques of Le Million and adds to them stinging sociopolitical satire and irony. If the whimsy and kineticism of Le Million are akin to the spirit of Keaton, then the focused social and political criticism of A Nous la Liberté are closer in spirit to Chaplin, but without Chaplin's flirtation with sentimentality. (Indeed, Chaplin has been accused of cribbing ideas from Clair in Modern Times.) The result is that A Nous la Liberté is an even richer and more thematically challenging experience than its predecessor.

The movie opens in a prison, where prisoners are sitting on each side of a long table assembling toy horses. One of the men conceals a file in his sock, and when he and his cellmate return to their cell that evening, they saw through the bars of the window and escape. However, only one of them, Emile (Henri Marchand), makes it over the wall; the other, Louis (Raymond Cordy) is captured by the guards and returned to his cell. Within a few months, Emile has become an entrepreneur and captain of industry, the owner of a huge and successful factory that manufactures phonographs. He has left all vestiges of his former life behind, gaining everything material he might ever have wanted: a lavish mansion, a ritzy limousine, servants, a beautiful mistress, and a slew of high-society friends.

When Louis is released from prison, he hits the road and before long discovers his former cellmate, technically a prison escapee and wanted man, luxuriating in his new life. Not only does he receive a cold reception from Emile, but he finds Emile a changed man. He is now an uptight, status-obsessed capitalist with no desire to renew the easy camaraderie he previously enjoyed with his old cellmate. Louis, though, sees his chance and is determined to use his hold over Emile to his own advantage.

In particular, Louis has fallen in love with a pretty young secretary at the factory, Jeanne (Rolla France), and presses Emile to introduce him and arrange a marriage. This whole idea of Emile being able to procure Jeanne for his old cellmate provides Clair with the opportunity to present a harsh indictment of capitalism. He implicitly compares Emile to a feudal lord and his workers to serfs by having Emile coerce Jeanne's uncle, who also works at the factory and doesn't want to lose his job by alienating the boss, to hand over Jeanne to Louis. He doesn't explicitly threaten the uncle but after presenting his proposal merely asks, "Vous comprenez?" (You do understand?) The pandering uncle does indeed understand and happily complies, for not only will he protect his job, but he will curry favor with the boss by having a niece married to a man who appears to be the boss's best friend.

Another way Clair skewers capitalism and the dehumanizing effects of the modern industrial environment is in the way Emile's factory is depicted. To get in, the workers must first pass through gates as they punch their time cards, the gates first excluding and then confining them. When we first see the main building from the outside, the first impression is of a vast, ultra-modern, monochromatic expanse built on an inhuman scale. Everything is composed of severe, straight horizontal lines and right angles. This is a sterile, featureless, and soulless place, a place where regimentation of form and behavior are pervasive. The closest thing to it we have seen in the movie so far in both appearance and atmosphere is the prison that Emile and Louis were in at the beginning of the movie.

Once the action moves inside, the resemblance to the prison is even more pronounced. The factory floor with its production line—another severe and soulless place—is laid out in exactly the same way as the work room in the opening scene at the prison, with conveyor belts substituting for the work tables. And it is framed and photographed in exactly the same way. Instead of prison guards, we see supervisors overseeing the production line and urging the workers on just as the guards at the prison did. The parallels between the prison and the factory are unmistakable.

Clair combines sound with action in many of the same ways he did in Le Million, using sung dialogue, silent dialogue with musical accompaniment, and sound effects that originate outside the frame (the cinematic equivalent of "noises off" in a stage play), among other devices. He is constantly playing with sound. Even the fact that Emile's factory makes phonographs seems an in-joke. And Clair creates one of the first examples—possibly the very first example—of a sound gag in motion pictures.

When Louis first sees Jeanne, she is standing in the second-floor window of her apartment singing a love song. He is immediately captivated and finds himself falling in love, responding to the sentiments of the song. When she walks away from the window, he ambles over to the door to her building and waits for her at the bottom of the stairs. When she emerges, the song is still going, but Jeanne is not singing. Just at that moment the music begins to falter and slow to a stop, and we (and Louis) realize that Jeanne wasn't singing at all but simply mouthing the words on a disc playing on one of the phonographs that Emile manufactures.

As we learn more about Emile's life, it becomes clearer that it is not as idyllic as it appears. His snobbish friends make fun of him behind his back. His chic mistress is conducting an affair with a gigolo and ends up running off with him. Then another former prisoner spots Emile and is soon joined by other former prisoners, who proceed to blackmail him. And the authorities have also spotted him and are preparing to arrest him. Emile's ideal life, it seems, is about to crumble.

The climactic sequence occurs at the inaugural festivities of Emile's newest, totally automated factory. With the police on their way to arrest him, Emile dedicates the factory then immediately presents it to his employees. "The machines will now work for them!" he proclaims. The self-made capitalist has just placed the means of production in the hands of the workers. Just before the police arrive, Emile and Louis—the former worshiper of materialism and his friend the romantic anarchist—dressed again as tramps, hit the road and are last seen walking in fellowship on their contented way to . . . who knows where?

Taken together, Le Million and A Nous la Liberté are twin landmarks in the history of cinema. They are records of one of the great filmmakers working at a level of intensive inspiration that few directors ever achieve and that Clair himself never again quite equaled in his long career. But beyond their historical importance, these are very entertaining films that can still surprise viewers, encourage them to reconsider the conventions of combining sound and image in movies, and in the case of A Nous la Liberté compel them to re-examine the prevailing values of Western culture toward ambition and success and remind them of the enduring disparity between the powerful and the powerless, the haves and have-nots.

Brief Reviews

THE SET-UP (1949) ***½
The Set-Up recounts one crucial night in the life of a boxer, Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan). Although the film is steeped in the milieu of the world of professional boxing, that milieu is so deglamorized and so filtered through the film noir look and sensibility that the movie transcends the boxing genre to become one of the key examples of the noir genre of the late 1940's. At 72 minutes, The Set-Up is lean and concentrated. Every detail is selected by director Robert Wise and cinematographer Milton Krasner to create a focused noir ambiance. The film's harshly lit nocturnal underworld is bounded by the dilapidated Paradise City Arena (boxing Wednesdays, wrestling Fridays), the shabby Cozy Hotel where Thompson is staying, a tawdry penny arcade called The Fun Palace, and a seedy night club called Dreamland whose garish dance music can be heard every time the action moves outside or a door or window is opened.

Everyone in the movie is sleazy—the lowlife hustlers huddled in doorways or loitering on the sidewalks, the jaded, corrupt men who work at the arena, the vicious smalltime hoodlum who fixes fights, and especially the grotesques in the audience screaming for blood and mayhem. The boxers are portrayed as pathetic losers who start out as frightened kids and end up as punch-drunk burnouts. Somewhere near the end of this career arc is Stoker Thompson, who after twenty years in the ring is at the age of 35 considered over the hill. The one thing that keeps him going is the illusory belief that he is always just "one shot away" from a really important match that will make his dreams reality.

The climactic bout between Thompson and a much younger boxer that caps the movie—brilliantly staged, photographed by multiple cameras, and edited to emphasize its brutality and arduous physicality—was clearly an influence on Scorsese's Raging Bull. Robert Ryan, in one of his rare starring roles, is uncharacteristically sympathetic, a dreamer who refuses to admit that any chance of success faded long ago, a man who no matter how badly beaten always struggles back to keep on fighting. As he says, "If you're a fighter, you gotta fight." And he keeps right on fighting until the end of the movie, when the relentlessly bleak world he inhabits finally breaks and then discards him.

GOLD DIGGERS OF 1933 (1933) ****
In the early 1930's Warner Bros. produced a series of musicals that established their own unique style, a down-to-earth working-class view of show business in keeping with the gritty movies the studio produced in other genres. The typical Warners musical features a story about the practical and financial problems of mounting an elaborate revue-like stage production. The musical highlights are the outlandish and often surreal production numbers of Busby Berkeley set to the songs of Al Dubin and Harry Warren as performed by Ruby Keeler, Dick Powell, Joan Blondell, and Ginger Rogers.

The archetypal Warners musical is often considered to be 42nd Street (1933). But after seeing Gold Diggers of 1933 again recently, I would have to say that it is the better movie. The plot is constructed in such a way that rather than jamming all the production numbers into the last part of the movie as in 42nd Street and the similar Footlight Parade (1933), they are distributed throughout the movie, which opens with "We're in the Money" and concludes with "Forgotten Man," the latter perhaps the apotheosis of all Berkeley's production numbers. This results in a better balance, and more appealing mix, of music and plot. The plot itself adds new elements to the familiar "let's put on a show" story of other Warners musicals. It follows three showgirls as they pursue fame and romance—the innocent Polly (Ruby Keeler), the voluptuous and intelligent Carol (Joan Blondell), and the zany Trixie (a very funny Aline MacMahon, in a role reminiscent of Jack Lemmon's Daphne in Some Like It Hot). When these showgirls tangle with the members of a snobbish Boston family (Dick Powell, Warren William, and Guy Kibbee), it allows for the kind of pointed interaction between the working class and the privileged rich more typical of a Capra comedy.

The Great Depression is an integral part of the movie, both onstage and off, providing a more topical context than the standard Hollywood musical. And while other 1930's musicals are often suggestive, this one—made the year before the Production Code began to be enforced in earnest—is at times downright bawdy. Gold Diggers of 1933 has enough serious elements and enough depth of characterization to give it greater substance than one might expect, but it never forgets that it is primarily an entertainment, and a very lively and thoroughly enjoyable one. Also worth noting are the fluid camerawork of Warners house cinematographer Sol Polito and the eye-catching Art Deco sets of Anton Grot.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955) **½
In the 1950's the director Otto Preminger seemed deliberately to seek projects that challenged the Production Code. In The Moon Is Blue (1954) the offending subject was sex. In the courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder (1959), an allegation of rape—a crime not supposed to be mentioned by name—played a large part. Advise and Consent (1962) was one of the first mainstream American movies to deal openly with homosexuality. In between these movies, Preminger tackled the taboo subject of heroin addiction in this film, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Because of the film's notoriety and its source material, I anticipated a work of harsh realism and ground-breaking maturity. What I found instead was a subject daring for its time framed in strictly conventional Hollywood terms. The whole movie is filmed on a studio set that represents a city block of a down-and-out Chicago neighborhood. But as impressive as this set is, its resemblance to the real thing is superficial, its squalor relegated to a few suggestive touches.

Frank Sinatra plays Frankie Machine, who has just returned from a jail term and treatment for heroin addiction at the federal facility in Lexington, Kentucky. Faced with the stress of a neurotically possessive paraplegic wife (Eleanor Parker) who is obsessively jealous of a pretty downstairs neighbor (Kim Novak) and whom he doesn't love, and with constant inducements to return to his criminal cronies and resume his use of heroin, he must use all of his willpower to resist falling back into his former life. The casting of Arnold Stang as his best friend, Leonid Kinskey as a quack doctor, Robert Strauss as a petty hoodlum, and Darren McGavin as a heroin dealer makes the atmosphere closer to Damon Runyon than Nelson Algren. The details of his life seem a Hollywood version of sleaze, more imagined than observed. The restrained Novak is surprisingly good, while Parker gives a florid, old-style performance that seems anomalous given the modern subject matter. The melodramatic contrivances of the plot also seem curiously old-fashioned.

One definite plus is the cinematography of Sam Leavitt, whose camera glides elegantly around the set during Preminger's customary long, unedited takes, although in a sense that elegance seems incongruous with the grim nature of the story. Another plus is Elmer Bernstein's hard, brassy jazz score, although its jagged tone unintentionally emphasizes the flaccidity of other elements of the movie. The biggest plus is Frank Sinatra's earnest performance (which deservedly earned him an Oscar nomination), in which he convincingly portrays Frankie's desperation to be strong while battling his own inner weaknesses and external temptations. That performance alone makes the movie worth seeing, but aside from that, don't expect anything remotely resembling realism. This is a purely Hollywood approach to a social milieu the movie clearly doesn't have much understanding of.

PYGMALION (1938) ****
Anyone familiar with My Fair Lady (1964) should take a look at this film version of the play by George Bernard Shaw on which the later musical is based. It is an even better movie. The plot is essentially the same, as is much of the best dialogue—no great surprise, since the adaptation is by Shaw himself. Without interruptions for songs and with its brisker pacing, the wit of the dialogue and the social commentary of the plot are even more pronounced.

Leslie Howard, who co-directed the movie with Anthony Asquith, is splendid as Prof. Henry Higgins, not so effete as Rex Harrison but still a self-centered academic insensitive to the feelings of others. Howard, a trained stage actor, gave many fine dramatic movie performances (The Animal Kingdom, Of Human Bondage, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Petrified Forest, Intermezzo), but I've never seen a better one by him than his comic turn in Pygmalion. As Eliza Dolittle, Wendy Hiller, also a trained stage actress, demonstrates amazing range in an even more demanding role.

As Higgins attempts to transform Eliza from a coarse Cockney flower seller into the simulacrum of a lady, Hiller must show Eliza's innate intelligence and a growing awareness of the artificial nature of class distinction. In the scene where Eliza has tea with the mother of Prof. Higgins, Hiller, playing the scene absolutely deadpan, is riotously funny. When she tells off Higgins for his coldness and lack of response to her feelings, she does so with a fiery spirit reminiscent of the young Katharine Hepburn. And at the end she must show that the experience of a new lifestyle has so altered Eliza that she is riven with confusion and anxiety at no longer having any real identity. All this Hiller does wonderfully in a subtly nuanced performance that is the center of the movie. She expresses all the phases of her character's transformation without ever losing the continuity of the character, convincing us that all of this playing about with social identity and self-presentation is happening to a real person. It is simply an astounding piece of acting. Even if you are thoroughly familiar with My Fair Lady, Pygmalion—with its brilliant balance of entertainment and social satire—is a film not to be missed.