Hollywood Musicals: The 101 Greatest Song-and-Dance Movies of All Time – Ken Bloom

The title Hollywood Musicals: The 101 Greatest Song-and-Dance Movies of All Time gives the wrong impression of this book. Although author Ken Bloom says he’s writing about the best movie musicals, I’m not sure that’s entirely what he’s doing. His selection is too idiosyncratic.The Muppet Movie? Beach Blanket Bingo? Sunny Side Up (1929)?

Many of the musicals he writes about do deserve to be considered the greatest, but he’s less interested in writing about what makes these musicals work and more interested in exploring the many facets of the movie musical and seems to have chosen his films to allow him to cover as many facets as possible. Dubbing. Adapting a successful Broadway show to the screen. Why studios interpolated songs from their own songwriters into already popular musicals. Disney musicals. Musical biopics. The differences between a slick MGM musical and an anarchic Paramount musical (think Judy Garland vehicles vs. Bing Crosby and Bob Hope movies). His coverage is far reaching: rock musicals, animated musicals, country musicals, even disco (Saturday Night Fever) and stop motion animated musicals (The Nightmare before Christmas).

If you are looking for plot synopses or behind-the scenes explanations about the making of musicals, this is not really the book to read. There are little bios of actors and also – a great strength – bios that highlight overlooked directors (Charles Walters), songwriters (Mack Gordon), musical arrangers (Kay Thompson) and choreographers (Michael Kidd). He also discusses the usual suspects, like Bob Fosse, Busby Berkeley and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

With each musical, Bloom takes the opportunity to discuss one topic. For example, for Pajama Game, he talks about when Hollywood replaces the stage actor who created the role  with a movie actor and the reasons behind this. One of the most notorious examples occurred when Ethel Merman was replaced with Rosalind Russell for Gypsy.  However, because Doris Day was a huge star – and a genuinely gifted musical star – no one complained when she replaced Janis Page. It seems to depend on how well it works out. Another example is Julie Andrews being replaced by Aubrey Hepburn (I’m not sure if people will ever get over that one).

The strength of the book (apart from the mini-bios and the fun behind-the-scenes pictures, often with actors making peculiar faces) are the little nuggets of observations about musicals (and other things) and what makes them work or not. Here are some that I found most intriguing.

Fantasy is not easy to do – this observation does not only pertain to musicals, but fantasy in general. He believes that one of the secrets of a good fantasy (like The Wizard of Oz and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) is that the people within the fantasy world must take their world absolutely seriously. There can be no winking at the audience, self-referential humor. The protagonist can find the world a little odd, but the people in it must notice nothing odd at all. Bloom actually believes the same thing about many comedy (he highlights farce).

He also believes that a good children’s fantasy (think Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz) needs to have genuinely frightening villains. Otherwise, there is nothing at stake (he’s not a fan of funny villains from Shrek) and there’s no genuine tension.

Broadway musicals should not necessarily be adapted to the screen too reverently – this is a big pet peeve of his. He finds My Fair Lady far too static and reverential, like a museum piece. I kind of know what he means. There’s a spark missing from the movie that evidently was present on the stage, a liveliness and sense of fun. The film feels a bit stodgy to me.

The Music Man is another example of a film that seems to him too lifeless. His problem with the film version of The Music Man is a little different, however, than that with My Fair Lady. The main trouble, he believes, was that the movie was filmed like a stage play, unimaginatively and statically, often with the camera simply facing the action. He believes that a film director like Stanley Donen (who helped direct The Pajama Game) should have been brought in to help with the camera work and making the film more cinematic.

Bloom also mentions several musicals that he believes were better on film than on the stage, such as The Sound of Music and West Side Story. Apparently in West Side Story, several songs were shifted around and one song – “America” – was changed so that instead of just the girls singing, the boys join in, too.

Academy Award for Best Original Song has seriously gone down the tubes – it used to be that the song nominated for Best Original Song came from a musical and there were plenty of musicals to choose from. In the fifties, that began to change and more and more songs were sung during the opening credits. Now, the songs that win are often sung during the closing credits! Ah well…apparently there have been thoughts that this category should be removed, though I would be mildly surprised if they did any time soon.

People actually got tired of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers! – this seems incredible. How could you ever get tired of those two? Nevertheless, it seems to have happened. Not just Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, but eventually of musicals. In What The Eye Hears: A History of Tap Dancing, Brian Seibert wonders the same thing about tap dancing. Could people have simply been over-saturated with tap dancing after the fifties? After all, it was everywhere: stage, movies, even TV. Now, as Bloom points out, even many B musicals (though certainly not all) seem like “mini masterpieces” because of the professional know-how and talent that went into them, but they seem to have eventually wearied people.

Though not my grandmother. She didn’t leave musicals in the 1950s; musicals left her. They were her favorite genre (along with Hitchcock), but gradually there were less to see.

Many racist films were not meant to be racist – Many movies that contain racist material were actually trying to be progressive. There were several all-black musicals made (Cabin in the Sky, Stormy Weather) and given an A musical budget, but lack of understanding prevented them from fully ridding themselves of stereotypical portrayals and even cemented some.

But for me it is a reminder not to condescend to people with “benighted” views. It’s easier today not to be racist because it is not considered socially acceptable to be racist and it’s easier to rid ourselves of stereotypes because people of different ethnicities and backgrounds are much less segregated. Through the internet and social media and even movies and shows, we are less isolated in our own respective cultures. As Bloom pointed out, in the 1930s, most black and white people did not intermix socially. Now, we are even more familiar with how people live in other countries.

It’s doesn’t mean there isn’t racism today, but that it is easier not to be racist. However, at least these people were trying, even if they didn’t fully succeed (though there are numerous examples in films were people didn’t even try).

Here is a quote from Hal Johnson, a black musician and director who was asked by Cabin in the Sky’s associate producer to review the script for possible offensive material.

At the moment, the dialect in your script is a weird but a priceless conglomeration of pre-Civil War constructions mixed with up-to-the minute Harlem slang and heavily sprinkled with a type of verb which Amos and Andy purloined from Miller and Lyles, the Negro comedians: all adding up to a lingo which has never been heard nor spoken on land or sea by any human being, and would most certainly be “more than Greek” to the ignorant Georgia Negroes in your play.

Musicals as spectacle – I’d like to end this post with a quote by Bloom that ticked my funny bone. He wrote this while discussing the seriously psychedelic The Gang’s All Here, with bananas, almost no plot, Carmen Miranda, Busby Berkeley and floating stars. Seriously, if you have not seen this one, you really should.

The great dramatic spectacles such as Ben-Hur, El Cid, and Lawrence of Arabia were astounding in their scope but they had to be, given their plot. Movies such as the 1997 Titanic may amaze us for their sheer scale but they do not provoke that perfect mixture of awe, astonishment, glee and guilty pleasure boasted by the spectacular movie musical of the past.

 

Pitfall (1948) and Raymond Burr

Two words to describe Raymond Burr in Pitfall are menace and ooze. He oozes menace, but he also just oozes. You almost shudder whenever you see him. When Lizabeth Scott’s Mona tells Dick Powell’s Johnny that she’s “seen some weird ones in [her] time, but that one frightened [her] half to death,” I believe her.

I grew up thinking of Raymond Burr as the upstanding Perry Mason, so I was mildly surprised to discover that before his career defining TV show, he often played villains in film noir. And not just villains, but nasty villains. Creepy, brutal, hulking, psycho villains. His MacDonald in Andre De Toth’s Pitfall is one of his nastiest.

Pitfall is something of a downer, even for film noirs. Johnny Forbes (Dick Powell) is an insurance agent who must reclaim for the insurance company all the items that a man named Smiley (Byron Barr) bought for his girlfriend using stolen money. Johnny is bored with his life, his wife (Jane Wyatt), but mostly it seems with himself. When he meets Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), the girlfriend of Smiley, she snaps him out of his funk by demanding he not just be an insurance automaton, but a human being with sympathy. They embark on a brief affair, until she discovers that he’s married. She’s deeply hurt, but is too nice a person to make a stink about it and all seems to be over.

Except there’s MacDonald (Burr). He’s a private detective who was hired by Johnny’s company to find out what Smiley did with the stolen money and he’s decided that he’s in love. Mona is not interested, but MacDonald is not put off. He stalks her and when she threatens to go to the police, he threatens to tell Johnny’s wife about the affair. Once again, Mona is simply too nice a person to want to ruin Johnny and asks Johnny what she should do. But instead of telling Mona to go to the police, he says he’ll take care of it. He’s too scared to tell his wife or own up to his own actions, even though his wife knows something is wrong. His continued refusal to admit what he’s done causes Mona’s life, as well as his own, to spiral out of control.

Amazingly, everyone’s gut instinct seems to be to cover up. Johnny tells a friend of his what he’s done and his friend advises Johnny not to tell his wife (never mind that keeping Johnny’s secret is giving MacDonald leverage over Mona). Even Johnny’s wife’s initial reaction when she finally finds out what is going on is to demand Johnny not tell the police. In a telling scene where Johnny’s son has a nightmare, Johnny thinks it’s caused by the comic books he reads and tells him the secret to not having bad dreams is to essentially only look at nice things (ignoring the fact that his son is probably picking up on the unspoken tension in the house).

this scene never actually occurs in the film

But MacDonald is a menace that cannot be ignored, covered up or dealt with by oneself. Johnny tries to play the tough guy and frighten MacDonald away, but MacDonald is not really deterred by that. He’s not deterred by anything. He honestly doesn’t seem to appreciate how repulsive he is to others, especially Mona. He really believes that if he can get rid of the men in Mona’s life then she would go away with him (as Princess Leia said, “I don’t know where you get your delusions, laser brain”). He’s a cunning man at exploiting people’s weaknesses, but in many ways he’s completely obtuse.

Of course, if everyone had simply gone to the police, the film would have been over halfway through and a lot of heartache, violence and betrayal could have been avoided. Dick Powell is possibly at his least sympathetic in this film, with his tendency to feel sorry for himself and his inability to deal with things squarely (like telling Mona he’s married, telling his wife what is going on – as his wife tells him, “either it’s a marriage or it isn’t” – and the way he tries to save his own skin and leaves Mona with few options in dealing with MacDonald). He covers one lie with another and betrays so many people, there’s no way he can ease his conscience by the end. He’s just going to have to live with himself. It’s an excellent performance.

I really like Lizabeth Scott in Pitfall, too. She’s often compared with Lauren Bacall, but in this film she is warmer, more vulnerable, and looks like a person who has been kicked around a lot by life and other men. But she’s also a thoroughly nice, sympathetic person and she ends up being the real victim of the film.

In the case of Raymond Burr, it’s hard to imagine anyone playing the role better, being sleazier, slimier, more sure of himself. When he visits Mona’s workplace where she models gowns and makes her model several for him, your skin crawls. There is no ambiguity about his character – he is pure evil. Ironically, he used to work with the police force and likes to position himself as being “in” with the police, but at the same time a simple call to the police probably would have solved everything. Is he meant to be symbolic? The dark side of the system (government, authority)? Moral rot? A presence that boredom, fear and insecurity allows to assert itself? Whatever he is, Raymond Burr makes him one of the creepiest villains in film noir.

This post is part of “The Great Villain Blogathon.” My thanks to Speakeasy, Shadows and Satin and Silver Screenings for hosting! Be sure to check out all the other villainous posts, here.

 

The Letter (1940) – Bette Davis and Her Unsympathetic Roles

Bette Davis liked playing unsympathetic roles; she actually preferred it. Her first one was in 1934, her breakout role, as Mildred Rogers in Of Human Bondage with Leslie Howard. She was so impressive that her name was written as an add-in on the ballot for Best Supporting Actress, though she lost. She went on to play so many of these roles that it was all I ever heard about  when I first began to watch her films. But in the first fifteen movies that I saw her in, she was thoroughly sympathetic in them all.

Of course, I even sympathized with her in Jezebel, so perhaps I just have the wrong perspective on things. I kept hearing about how bad her character was in that movie, but really, she just seems extremely proud, stubborn and willful – her own worst enemy – but not especially evil.

However, I am happy to say that I have finally seen a movie where she plays a genuine Jezebel type. The Letter, directed by William Wyler, is based on a short story by W. Somerset Maugham. Set in Malaya, it is about Leslie Crosbie (Bette Davis), wife of a rubber planter, who shoots gambler Geoff Hammond because he was drunk and assaulted her…or so she says. Her husband (Herbert Marshall) is devoted and protective and gets his lawyer (James Stephenson) to defend her at the trial- everybody thinking the trial will be a mere formality. Local opinion is strong against Hammond, especially when they find out that he had a Chinese wife (Gale Sondergaard).

Bette Davis with Herbert Marshall

However, it soon comes to Mr. Joyce’s attention that there is a letter, in the possession of Hammond’s wife, that she is willing to sell. A letter that indicates that perhaps Leslie’s relationship with Hammond was not what she said it was and might cast doubt on her story in court. Every instinct of professional ethics is against it, but friendship with Leslie’s extremely devoted and trusting husband convinces the lawyer to buy it.

This is one of the finest performances I have seen Bette Davis give. She plays Leslie Crosbie so demurely, so properly, ladylike, watchful, always working on her fine lacework, but still managing to convey the inner passion underneath it all that no one else can see, except the lawyer and only because the letter demonstrated to him that she is not as she appears.

I read a fascinating article on the blog The Hollywood Revue, called “The Significance of White Lace in The Letter (1940),” that talks about Leslie’s penchant for lace work. Leslie is always working on lace projects and at one point even goes out wearing a shawl of white lace when she goes with the lawyer to get the letter from Hammond’s wife.

Sen Yung, Bette Davis and James Stephenson

The Hollywood Revue points out that white symbolizes innocence and “it’s as though she’s trying to create a shroud of innocence for herself” with her constant wearing of white clothes and making white lace, as well as demonstrating her “attention to detail” in her lies. I think the lacework is also a symbol of irony. Lacework seems very domestic and tranquil, but highlights the difference between Leslie’s apparent employment and her secret life. Yet another possible meaning of the lacework is that Leslie uses lacework to channel all her pent-up energy into something that requires tremendous focus and concentration to create something highly intricate. Or is it “the tangled webs we weave?”

I could probably go on forever about the lacework, but it is a wonderful detail in the film, highlighted repeatedly by the camera and by comments made by other people.

Leslie’s husband is played by Herbert Marshall, who has one of the loveliest speaking voices in cinema. His love for Leslie is so strong, but curiously blind. He would forgive her anything and seems, as his lawyer notes, to have lived ten years with his wife and hardly known her at all. He doesn’t, apparently, love the real woman… or even know her. Joyce is played by James Stephenson, who was a relatively unknown actor at the time and did a marvelous job. He is torn by his conscious and utterly fascinated by the obscure depths of this woman he has to defend.

Bette Davis, lace in hand, with James Stephenson

Not only is the acting is good, but it is a beautiful film visually, and is full of memorable moments, most notably the opening scene, when the quiet night is broken with the sounds of gunfire, then we see a man stagger out of a house, with Bette Davis behind him, shooting repeatedly.

I do have one complaint, however, regarding this marvelous film, which is the ending. Sometimes censorship makes a movie better (like Double Indemnity), but in this case I think it weakened the film. In the play, Leslie Crosbie lives out the rest of her life without her husband. However, since crime could not go unpunished under the Hays Code, William Wyler had to change the ending. What happens instead is that Leslie is murdered by Hammond’s widow. The widow is seen by a guard (presumably so the audience is assured that she, too, will be identified later and pay for her crime – I must say that Hammond sure picked a murderous lot of women to love) and the camera pans over to Leslie’s lace, laying over her chair in her room.

My problem with this ending is that the film seemed to me to be building to something else. There is a dramatic scene near the end when Leslie admits to her husband – after he forgives her and asks if she loves him – that she still loves the man she killed. The very bleakness of this statement, however, is undercut by having her murdered very soon afterwards, a convenient out that saves her from having to live with what she did. I was expecting her to turn into the crazy lace lady, always doing her needlework, without soul, without thought, living her days out having killed her own heart. The actual ending of the film, I felt, is deflating and not consistent with what came before.

The ending does not, however, detract from a very good film. And I did still find it in my heart to feel for her, despite her evilness. Perhaps I’m just chronically in sympathy with her.