Harvest the Corn or Put On a Show

Farm work is important, sometimes desperate, hard work, and so is show business, as we see in 1950's Summer Stock. Gene Kelly and Judy Garland star in this musical, not one of the greatest musicals of all time but one with some very strong components.

I'm more of a Gene Kelly fan than a Judy Garland fan but I like how this movie starts with her character's point of view. She belongs to an old family, the Falburys who can trace their lineage back to the 17th century. An old man, Roy Collins, from another old family, the Wingaits, wants her to marry his timid son, Orville (Eddie Bracken). It's partly for this reason he gives her a tractor on credit when her farm is failing. Matters are complicated when her sister comes home with a theatre troupe looking to put on a show in their barn.

Gene Kelly plays the leader of the troupe. Just like Garland's character, he's in the middle of his last ditch effort to save his dreams.

The musical numbers don't quite flow smoothly with the story but some of them are great. Kelly dancing with a newspaper is a particular highlight, as is the final big number, "Get Happy". I like Garland early in the film but it was a mistake to have her perform part of her first number naked.

She was a great actress and singer but she was never sexy. She's no Kajol. However, I can't overstate how brilliant Garland's take on "Get Happy" is at the end of the film. Her legs do look terrific.

The costumes are nice. I also like this beautiful stove that makes exactly one appearance in the film.

Summer Stock is available on The Criterion Channel.

Give Us the Old Village

Wandering an old forest or heath, the sense of timelessness in the environment may inspire fantasies of travelling back in time. I'd sure like to wander into a happy, 18th century Scottish village like the two modern hunters in 1954's Brigadoon. A musical starring Gene Kelly and directed by Vincente Minnelli, it lacks the fast paced wit that distinguishes most of the best musicals, instead aiming for a sleepier, dreamier vibe. The few jokes in the simplistic dialogue land like lead and the lyrics to the songs are often anaemic, fundamentally unsatisfying in their attempts at wit. But how gorgeous this movie is. Filmed entirely on sound stages, Minnelli, his art directer, and his cinematographer create a wonder in lighting, backdrops, and flora arrangements.

I love the precise use of patches of false sunlight contrasted with muted tones of heather behind mist. Sometimes the footage looks like Caspar David Friedrich paintings.

Although the stage musical comes from the late 1940s, I suspect the influence of The Quiet Man was behind the motivation to make this film. But while the slightly kitschy idealism of rural Ireland in The Quiet Man exists alongside genuinely well drawn characters and layers of motive, the quaint and garishly garbed inhabitants of Brigadoon seem to pose and make faces without genuine human feeling. Like when an old man affects anger when he leaves a family bible outside the window for his daughter's fiance to sign with a frozen, stupid smile.

There's no sense of authentic feeling behind the scene at all.

Kelly's chemistry with Cyd Charisse isn't much better. The former's natural warmth is always engaging and Charisse is a terrific dancer but the dialogue continually fails them both. Nevertheless, a scene featuring the two in dreamily choreographed, balletic dance on a hill is astounding, the gorgeous backdrops filling up sweeping Cinemascope shots and blending seamlessly with the artfully arranged prop plants.

This movie is worth watching just for these incredible images. Brigadoon is available on The Criterion Channel.

Three Out of Three

In love and relationships, passions run so high and people have so much pride on the line, each party in a dispute may be fully committed to a different version of reality. Many comedies and dramas have been written from this premise, including the charming 1957 musical Les Girls. Featuring songs by Cole Porter that don't rank among his best they're adequate for the film because lovely visuals and a great cast more than pick up the slack. The screenplay isn't Rashomon but it's not bad, either, and director George Cukor exercises his formidable storytelling instincts.

The man with the sandwich board wanders a crowded street outside a courtroom in which the sensational trial everyone's talking about forms the film's framing story. A wealthy society woman named Sybil (Kay Kendall) has written a scandalous memoir and she's been taken to court for it by Angele (Taina Elg), with whom Sybil once worked as a dancer on stage in Paris. The film's divided into three parts for three versions of events and in the first one Sybil tells us about Angele's torrid affair with their manager and co-star, Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly).

This was my favourite part of the movie as we're introduced to the three flatmates who banter engagingly about life in Paris and devotion to work. In this, Sybil's version of events, Sybil is a composed, sensible woman; Angele is reckless and romantic; and rounding out the trio is the ever chipper but somehow unobtrusive Joy (Mitzi Gaynor). Despite their misgivings, Sybil and Joy help conceal Angele's affair with Barry even when they're not supposed to know about it themselves. Angele and Barry go through a thin pantomime of greeting each other for the neighbours' benefit and then take off together in a car around the corner.

This sequence has the best song, "Ca C'est L'amour", in a really lovely scene where Angele and Barry relax in a row boat.

Angele's fiance is incensed by Sybil's account so Angele takes the stand to tell the story of an extravagantly alcoholic Sybil torn between Barry and a wealthy Englishman--Sybil's present day husband. Finally, Barry himself takes the stand to set things straight--it was Joy he'd been going with the whole time. But as Joy herself remarks, there's too much in Sybil and Angele's stories they couldn't have made up so by the end of the film there's a reasonable argument for the veracity of any one of the stories.

Supposedly the alternate points of view are motivated by Sybil and Angele each believing that the other had tried to commit suicide over the impossibility of being with Barry. Barry's story offers an explanation for the confusion but really doesn't clear things up.

There's a terrific dance sequence at the end seemingly modelled on The Wild One--minus the emotionally authentic portrayal of misfit youth but with a great heat of its own. It follows a tradition in musicals of the 50s and late 40s wherein there's at least one big dance sequence that has nothing at all to do with the plot. The movie resolves on a nicely uncertain note, allowing the audience to contemplate the insoluble puzzle of tangled romance.