By Scott Ross
There is a belief, now tiresomely accepted as fact even by people who should know better, that an enjoyment of musicals, either theatrical or on film, is somehow an especial provenance (if not a genetic imprimatur) of gay men. That there was once a time when musicals were part of the broader popular culture, consumed and enjoyed by millions, is never considered. I’ll get to my thoughts on that in a moment, but I am reminded by the current artificial divide of something Alan Jay Lerner observed in his “Lyrics and Lyricists” evening at the 92nd Street YMHA anent a similar late 1960s/early 1970s shibboleth suggesting that the young did not attend live theatrical productions and that the old were subsidizing them: “Theatre isn’t for the young. It isn’t for the old. It’s for people who like the theatre.” Musicals aren’t for any particular segment of the population; they’re only “for” people who like musicals. And while that includes many (but by no means all) gay men this, as with any demographic, is not monolithic. Some gay men like theatre, and hate musicals. Some hate theatre but like movie musicals. Some love both musicals and theatre generally, and some have no use for either.
That, beginning in the ‘70s, the larger American culture had turned its back on musicals as a form of entertainment which had once been ubiquitous in American life, and the font for much of popular music, is attributable to a number of things: The rise of rock and the concurrent decline of Broadway and Hollywood as a source of pop hits, the much- (if not over-) commented upon gap between generations and the concomitant over-extension (and overselling) of budget-busting movie musicals. Rather than legitimizing the spurious “Gay = Musical Aficionado” equation, let’s first acknowledge the obvious fact that many gay men are drawn to the performing arts, largely I would say due to a heightened sense of appreciation for the qualities traditionally associated with them. This was especially true in more socially repressive times than ours, when a desire to perform on stage may have been related to a need to break out of constrictive social or familial norms, or to a yearning by homosexual adolescents to act out freer scenarios than those they were forced to accept as their own. And although I don’t think this is especially true of young gay men in the 21st century — you’ve only to look at the garbage so many of them embrace to know that they are not arbiters of higher culture for anyone any longer — gay men were and are often taken with physical beauty and grace (dance generally and ballet specifically), color and form (set and costume design and photography), the creation of narrative alternatives (writing and direction), harmonic craft and expression (music and songs) and, of course, imaginative fantasy and interpretation (acting and singing). And when those avenues of creativity became less central to the culture young gay men, no strangers in the past to marginalization, may have been drawn even more fiercely to them, as practitioners and as curators.
I bring this up because I’ve never known what makes me partial to musicals any more than I know what draws me to physical comedy, or fully hand-drawn animation, or ’30s comedies, or newspaper movies, nor do I care. I suspect my appetite for screen musicals is related to my early exposure to them (my initial movie memories involve seeing, first Mary Poppins and later The Sound of Music, and one of the most influential movies I saw in early adolescence was the film of 1776) but I do know what drew me to stage musicals: Appearing in one. Playing Linus in a youth theatre production of Clark Gesner’s You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown at 12 made me seek out original cast recordings of other shows at the public library. I watched a number of adaptations of stage musicals on television in those years (The Music Man, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, Sweet Charity, My Fair Lady, Hello Dolly!, Oliver!, Funny Girl, How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, West Side Story, Fiddler on the Roof), a few screen originals (White Christmas, An American in Paris) and, on an especially memorable birthday weekend, the musical play Cabaret and, the next day, a theatrical reissue of the movie. But I also saw dozens of other types of movies then, and there is no pattern I can discern in my TV viewing or moviegoing of the time. I saw what appealed to me, and it didn’t really matter what the genre was; I certainly don’t see how my nascent or emergent sexuality had a thing to do with my early love for Irma La Douce, The Great Race, Pinocchio, What’s Up Doc?, Dumbo, The Gold Rush, Lady and the Tramp, The Glass Bottom Boat, Gone with the Wind, Around the World in 80 Days, Planet of the Apes, Goldfinger or The Man with the Golden Gun.
If there is a seminal event during that time that whetted my appetite for movie musicals, I suppose it must be our mother taking my sister and me to see the celebration of MGM musicals That’s Entertainment! during its original release in the summer of 1974. I was a bit surprised, seeing it again recently on Blu-ray, how vividly I recalled many of the excerpts — and how equally vividly I now recall how it felt seeing them then: How derisively amused I was by Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald bellowing the “Indian Love Call” at each other (those absurd, repeated “oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo”s) in the Rose Marie clip, by Eleanor Powell spinning and twirling her way through the outrageously over-populated title number from Rosalie (not to mention all that cellophane), and by the determinedly opulent (and seemingly endless) “A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody” from The Great Ziegfeld, which made me leery of Irving Berlin for years afterward. I also remembered the anonymous moviegoer down front who applauded at the end of every single clip throughout the two-hour-and-fourteen-minute running time and how my heart sank as I realized that she (I strongly suspected it was a she, and someone’s grandmother) was not going to recognize her social faux pas, or be corrected by her companions, and was going to annoy us without surcease. (She did.)
On balance, though, there was much more to love in That’s Entertainment! than there was to deride, and that’s still the case. Indeed, I think some of the clunkier early talkie bits are more enjoyable now than they were 48 years ago when they were greeted largely as bits of unintentional camp and now seem more like amusing artifacts rescued from the cultural dustbin. I knew Fred Astaire at that time almost solely from talk-show appearances, or as the stop-motion narrator of the Rankin-Bass “Santa Claus is Coming to Town,” and seeing him in his natural métier, on a big screen, was as revelatory as the bliss with which we regarded Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain and dancing with Jerry Mouse, Donald O’Connor making ‘em laugh,* Frank Sinatra looking young and beautiful (I’d only ever encountered him before on contemporary television, where he was older and considerably more well-padded), William Warfield’s thrilling bass-baritone rendition of “Ol’ Man River” and Judy Garland, whom I had seen only as Dorothy Gale every spring on TV, getting happy with Harold Arlen’s music in that marvelous fedora and upper half of a tux. There did indeed seem to be, as Howard Dietz’s lyric had it, a world of entertainment and I wondered if, or how, I could ever catch up to it.†
Some of the editorial decisions made by Jack Haley Jr., who wrote, produced and directed That’s Entertainment!, are baffling. The extended tribute to Ester Williams’… what shall we call it? narcissistic athleticism?… makes my eyes glaze over, and I would be equally happy without all that footage of Eleanor Powell, whose popularity and reputation utterly stymie me. As much as her love of masculine attire annoys me, in a dress (as in her challenge dance with Astaire to “Begin the Beguine”) she somehow seems like an imposter. Whenever I see her, grinning at the audience and stamping away I am reminded of Roy Scheider in All That Jazz admonishing Deborah Geffner that she’s not dancing in the high school play. I know a lot of people love Powell’s dancing, including other dancers, but I can’t fathom why they do; you can’t fault her technically, but she’s as impersonal as a dancing automaton. With a little less of Powell and Williams (and the young Judy Garland singing that cloying “Dear Mr. Gable” number, which Gable also hated) Haley might have made room in his movie for more than six minutes of the 17-minute American in Paris ballet.
Just as the tottering edifices of MGM, already sold to developers before the movie opened, carried the nostalgia of decay in 1974, it’s moving now to see the movie’s rotating gallery of hosts since, with the exception of Liza Minnelli (who was then many decades their junior), all of them are dead now: Sinatra, Kelly, Astaire, Peter Lawford, Debbie Reynolds, Bing Crosby, James Stewart, Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney and Donald O’Connor. The narrative segments were variable, and occasionally embarrassing, even then, and those that were embarrassing are still embarrassing, especially Taylor trying to look demure and humble and Reynolds twittering away with her particular patented air of wholesome chirping phoniness. What’s moving is not the ageing flesh of movie idols whose youth and pulchritude were fixed in the amber of film but the fact that we can no longer see Sinatra and Astaire and James Stewart at all except in their old movies. In 1974 they were, even if not working much (Sinatra always excepted) still around, and familiar.
Crosby: You must be one of the newer fellas.
Sinatra comes off extremely well in his clips, where he shows off his remarkable skills as a show business adept. Like Judy Garland, who was said to have needed to be shown a step, or a dance, only once before she got it, he is exceptionally game — relaxed and accomplished, even when dancing with a trained hoofer like Gene Kelly. He has a charming duet with Jimmy Durante in which he sings his lines in imitation of his co-star, a spirited tap dance with Kelly to “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” and, best of all, trades musical quips with Bing Crosby in the deliciously arch Cole Porter number “Well, Did You Evah.” Ever since my mother passed along her 45, 78 and EP collection to me when I was eight and I began to listen to him I’d been a fan of Sinatra’s voice. Seeing at 13 what a splendid all-around entertainer he had once been made me that much fonder of him.
Nearly 49 years after seeing That’s Entertainment! I’m struck both by what I underrated then and what bugs me now. In the former category: June Allyson, Jane Powell, Kathryn Grayson, and James Stewart singing Porter’s “Easy to Love” in a slightly tremulous but curiously endearing high tenor. In the latter (and aside from Eleanor Powell and Esther Williams) Ann Miller, especially in the gruesomely conceived Busby Berkeley number “I Gotta Hear That Beat” with its disembodied limbs sprouting from the floor and “playing” a variety of musical instruments while she grins like a moron and taps her little heart out around them. (The chiefest condescending laugh of 1974 is still the movie’s best bit of unintentional hilarity: Joan Crawford clodhopping her way through “Got a Feelin’ for You” in 1929. I’m amazed she had a career at all after that.) As I indicated above, the worst decision made by Haley was to pare the exhilarating American in Paris ballet down to a third of its original length. If you’re going to disembowel a classic production number like that, why include it at all, let alone as your grand finale?
I missed That’s Entertainment, Part 2 (1976) when it opened largely because, unlike That’s Entertainment! it was a flop at the box-office (it made a sixth of what its predecessor raked in) and played a single week in a single theater in Raleigh, NC, to which our bedroom-community town was adjacent. The people behind this aesthetic mess (Saul Chaplin and Daniel Melnick were the producers) made two major mistakes that sunk it. The first was trying to include too much, and too many mediocre second-and-third tier musical numbers. The second was hiring Gene Kelly to co-star in and direct it.
Having the movie narrated by only two hosts this time could be considered a come-down from the starry aggregation of the first picture but the fact that these hosts are Kelly and Fred Astaire mitigates the loss. (It was allegedly Astaire’s idea that the two dance together in it, for the first time since their “Babbitt and the Bromide” number 30 years earlier in Ziegfeld Follies.) Or it might have, if Leonard Gershe’s wan screenplay didn’t constantly make the pair alternatively sarcastic, gushing or fake-humble. You could always tell when Astaire was embarrassed; his voice took on a chuckling, aw-shucks quality completely at odds with his usual demonstrative mien. Gershe also misidentifies the dance to Kiss Me, Kate‘s “From This Moment On” as being choreographed by Hermes Pan when Bob Fosse not only appears in it (along with Tommy Rall, Ann Miller, Bobby Van, Carol Haney and Jeanne Coyne) but famously staged his and Haney’s portion of the number. You’ve only to watch what he and Haney do for a few seconds to recognize the moves as quintessential Fosse. Sadly, Howard Dietz’s new variations on his original “That’s Entertainment” lyrics, while occasionally clever, are more often TV-special obvious and irritating — a thing no one ever had cause to say about Dietz’s best work.
Worse, having celebrated MGM musicals in the first movie, the producers of this one celebrate MGM itself, expanding the picture’s running time by cramming in comic and dramatic sequences from 20 years of the studio’s product. And while it’s always a pleasure to see Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers, or Marie Dressler doing a double-take, what their clips are doing in a compilation of musical numbers is anyone’s guess, as is the sheer clunkiness of John De Cuir’s modular production design. All I could think of while gazing at those lousy sets as Kelly and Astaire cavorted over them was the Julie Andrews “Polly Wolly Doodle” number at the beginning of Blake Edwards’ 1981 Hollywood satire S.O.B., deliberately ugly and simultaneously both spare and overproduced.
A perfect example of the ennui that sets in early with this largely unnecessary compilation is the extended clip of Kelly’s “Sinbad the Sailor” sequence from his ill-advised 1956 fiasco Invitation to the Dance, with sub-par Hanna-Barbera-animated Arabian guards and which goes on, each dismally unfunny sight gag leading to another, for what feels like an hour. Both Kelly and Hanna-Barbera did finer work a dozen years earlier when Gene danced with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh; “Sinbad” is a giant leap backwards, in CinemaScope. The brightest element of That’s Entertainment, Part 2 is Saul Bass’ main title sequence, in which the names of dozens of stars are yoked together, wittily; the note in a bottle on the beach, for example, announces Esther Williams, Johnny Weissmuller, Ethel Waters and W.C. Fields.
As with That’s Entertainment!, too many numbers are butchered unnecessarily. Even Kelly’s “I Got Rhythm,” charmingly performed with a gaggle of delighted French children, is cut by half, as are his trio with O’Connor and Reynolds to “Good Morning,” Bing Crosby’s “Now You Has Jazz” number with Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars, the “Triplets” trio from The Band Wagon, Astaire’s “I Wanna Be a Dancin’ Man” and Waters’ exuberant “Taking a Chance on Love.” Yet we do get the full versions of the idiotic “Tales from the Vienna Woods” sequence from The Great Waltz, the gimmicky Astaire “Steppin’ Out with My Baby,” the ludicrous Bobby Van hopping number “Take Me to Broadway” (one of those overdone specialties that illustrate just how limited a “choreographer” Busby Berkeley really was) and the equally mind-numbing Esther Williams specialty “Cypress Gardens Water Spectacular.”
There are some nice compensations, however, not the least is watching the 76-year old Astaire doing his last bits of screen dancing; Robert Taylor, of all people, performing a more than creditable version of “I’ve Got a Feelin’ You’re Foolin'” with June Knight in Broadway Melody of 1936; Crosby’s searing rendition of “Temptation,” which reminds those who may have known him only as a relaxed, pipe-smoking middle-aged crooner that he was the first popular American male singer in the 1930s to exude sex; Doris Day’s impassioned “Ten Cents a Dance” is fascinating if only to hear the Production Code being flouted — she has to substitute “dandies” for “pansies,” but somehow they let her get away with “Sometimes I think/I’ve found my hero/But it’s a queer romance…”; Georges Guétary’s exhilarating “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise” with its imaginative Vincente Minnelli-inspired design is presented in full; there are two clips from the 1934 Ernest Lubitsch-directed The Merry Window that whet one’s desire to see the full movie; and we get a nice long look at Gwen Verdon doing the can-can in the 1952 remake.
Although Kelly introduces the sequel’s Astaire clips while Astaire returns the favor for Kelly, it was probably not a wise idea, for appearances’ sake, to have either of them also direct the picture. Whether it was merely a matter of perception or one of inside intelligence, Kelly was seen as a narcissist by the movie’s critics: One contemporary magazine review, I remember, called the inclusion of a Kelly roller-skating number from It’s Always Fair Weather called “I Like Myself” too true to be good, and Pauline Kael got off one of her best contemporary lines when she referred to That’s Entertainment, Part 2 as “The Gene Kelly Memorial Service, conducted by Gene Kelly.”
After the debacle of Part 2, we felt reasonably certain the series was over — that is, if we thought about it all. But a funny thing happened on the way to Time-Warner gobbling up everything in its path: A narcissist billionaire named Ted Turner purchased the MGM, RKO and pre-1948 Warner Bros. libraries and began to exploit them, first on his Atlanta cable channel TBS (and on his subsequent movie station TNT), then on video cassette and finally as part of a premium service he called (with characteristic modesty) Turner Classic Movies. Much as I loathe having to credit that creepy eugenicist with anything, Turner, once mad for the barbarity of “colorizing” classic black-and-white titles, somehow became a film preservationist. Granted the films in question belonged to him, but aside from showcasing them on TCM his company worked to salvage many (the necessarily incomplete restoration of Greed was a Turner project… one Time-Warner has never deigned to release on DVD or Blu-Ray). He also produced, through his Rhino/Turner Classic Movies Music record label, a series of marvelous compact disc releases, the soundtrack albums those of us who had long been frustrated by the truncated old MGM records had long been waiting for, and had begun to despair of ever hearing.‡ (Singin’ in the Rain and North by Northwest by themselves would have justified the label’s existence.) As Turner branched out into the occasional theatrical release (Gettysburg and Gods and Generals) his people revisited That’s Entertainment! as well. In doing so the producers of the third installment in the series nearly obliterated the bad taste left by the second and, in emphasizing outtakes and returning to the multiple host format of the initial movie, gave themselves reasons for people to watch their movie.
Put together by the directors Bud Friedgen and Michael J. Sheridan and intelligently written by them, That’s Entertainment! III includes as co-hosts Kelly, June Allyson, Cyd Charisse, Lena Horne, Howard Keel, Ann Miller, Reynolds, Rooney and (alas) Esther Williams, insuring yet another brace of her (to quote Fanny Brice) “wet she’s a star, dry she ain’t” movie clips… but not, almost shockingly, the best song she ever got; Frank Loesser’s beguiling “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” — now stupidly deemed “rapey” by the easily offended among the younger generations. There is also (again, alas) more Eleanor Powell here than can be reasonably well digested, at least by me, and one Ann Miller routine (“Shakin’ the Blues Away”) is one too many. The only thing more disturbing than the young Ann Miller is seeing the old Ann Miller with her jet-black dye-job seemingly plastered to that big head of hers. Fortunately, her memory is obliterated later in the movie by Doris Day’s rendition of the same song, from Love Me or Leave Me. The same cannot be said for Betty Hutton’s caterwauling her part of the “Anything You Can Do” duet with Howard Keel from Annie Get Your Gun, and the inclusion, even truncated, of Debbie Reynolds’ version of “You Are My Lucky Star,” sung to Gene Kelly’s image, gives a good indication why it was cut from Singin’ in the Rain. It’s not a comment on her rendition to imagine that, left in, the number would have stopped the movie cold, although seeing it does explain both why Kelly sings it to her at the end of the movie and why that picture ends with the two of them in front of a billboard. A contortionist routine performed by a group called the Ross Sisters (no relation!) is the most gruesome display since Harriet Hoctor’s ballet to “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” in the Astaire/Rogers Shall We Dance. And if the producers had to include something from the incredibly overrated movie of On the Town, did it have to be that rotten title song by Comden and Green and Roger Edens? This brash, strutting number, shot on MGM’s patently phony city street sets, exemplifies everything I hate about the cheerful artificiality of 1940s movie musicals and the cavalier manner with which the studios so often threw out the scores of the Broadway shows they were allegedly honoring and replaced them with pap. (That Comden and Green were the original lyricists for On the Town just makes the terrible songs they wrote with Edens for the movie more dispiriting.)
Most of That’s Entertainment! III, however, is joyous. We not only get June Allyson’s “Cleopatterer” from ‘Till the Clouds Roll By but Allyson, Gloria De Haven and the young Nancy Walker’s hard-charging “The Three B’s,”§ Joan McCracken doing “Pass That Peace Pipe” with Ray MacDonald, Dolores Gray’s “Thanks a Lot But No Thanks” and even Elvis Presley’s “Jailhouse Rock,” one of the most weirdly if inadvertently homoerotic songs of the early rock ‘n’ roll era. (What — you expected they had co-ed prisons in those days?) Among the previously uncollected gems are batches of numbers by Kelly (“Slaughter on Tenth Avenue” with Vera-Ellen and the delightful “Newspaper Dance” from Summer Stock), Astaire (“Stereophonic Sound” with Janis Paige, Easter Parade‘s “Drum Crazy” and the famous, hot pas de deux with Cyd Charisse from The Band Wagon, although the last is too brief and “Drum Crazy” stupidly edited), Lena Horne (a lovely “Where or When” and a sexy, soignée “Just One of Those Things”) and a veritable clutch of Judy Garland.¶ Her duet with Mickey Rooney on “How About You?” is splendid but “I Wish I Were in Love Again” from the specious Rodgers and Hart “biopic” Words and Music, with the exuberantly heterosexual Rooney an absurd choice for the dour homosexual Hart, is execrable; the idea that Lorenz Hart would perform his own songs in a manic fashion is absurd, and insulting enough to the poor man’s memory. But that Hart could, in the 1920s, sing a duet with “guest star” Judy Garland, as herself, is utterly risible. Also on the debit side is the weird “Minnie from Trinidad” number from Ziegfeld Girl in which Garland wears Light Egyptian and is lifted by what looks like the proverbial 10-foot poles, and the lachrymose, self-pitying “In Between” from Love Finds Andy Hardy. Much better is “Swing Mr Mendelssohn” and a lovely rendition of the Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein ”Who?”
Garland comes in as well for the lion’s (Leo the Lion’s?) share of the outtake material that chiefly differentiates That’s Entertainment! III from its predecessors. Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer’s “March of the Doagies,” filmed for The Harvey Girls but cut from the release print, is lively and rather beautifully filmed, and there’s an interesting juxtaposition of her later “Get Happy” with the previously unseen “Mr. Monotony,” both with identical costumes. (Trivia note: After it was cut from Easter Parade, Irving Berlin attempted to place it in his stage musical Miss Liberty. It was cut a second time. He made a third attempt with Call Me Madam. It was removed again. Berlin gave up after that.) Garland was famously fired out of MGM during the production of the movie of Annie Get Your Gun, and the two numbers she completed (“I’m an Indian Too” and “Doin’ What Comes Natur’lly”) are here, for better or worse. Decades ago, DRG Records released her pre-recorded vocal tracks from Annie on an LP, and Rhino/Turner later issued them on a Garland anthology CD, and while her voice is a little thin her musicality is intact as it always was. What we see in the clips is that she was overly thin, and strained-looking, as she also was in Easter Parade, and clearly not well. But when you hear her replacement, Betty Hutton, trying to compensate for her lack of vocal range (and on a score, don’t forget, that was written for and made famous by Ethel Merman) you understand what was lost to the picture when Garland was not allowed to complete it.
The best of the outtakes in That’s Entertainment! III is Lena Horne’s reprise of Harold Arlen and “Yip” Harburg’s delicious “Ain’t it the Truth”, cut from Cabin in the Sky allegedly (according anyway to its singer, who asserts it as absolute truth) because it depicted a black woman in a bubble-bath. Since the movie, cast entirely with black performers, was one many white audiences — especially in the South — were unlikely to see, I’m not sure I buy this interpretation of the removal of a single scene in it. Had the Hays Office objected to the bath sequence as written, it wouldn’t have been shot in the first place. Not that the history of the Production Code Administration isn’t rife with inconsistencies, but it should be noted that an earlier version of “Ain’t it the Truth?” performed by Louis Armstrong as one of Lucifer’s imps in Hell was also excised from the movie, leaving his non-musical presence in the picture as it stands a puzzler and leading the viewer who doesn’t know of this outtake (the production number is on the Turner Classic Movies Music Cabin in the Sky soundtrack and on the Armstrong compilation CD Now You Has Jazz) to ask why MGM hired Louis Armstrong for a musical and then didn’t let him sing or play his horn. I suspect that the producer, Arthur Freed, saw that these somewhat extraneous numbers were slowing down the story, and deleted them accordingly. More illustrative, perhaps, of period racial tensions are the clips of Horne performing “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” in Till the Clouds Roll By, which she considered her audition for the role of Julie in Show Boat, and the Ava Gardner vocal outtakes from the subsequent 1951 movie, for which the actress’ voice was eventually removed. Again, I take some issue with Horne’s assertions. Her belief that she must play Julie seemed almost designed to be thwarted since the point of Julie in Show Boat is that her skin is so light her mixed-race status is known only to her and her husband Steve. The problem with casting light-skinned black actresses as Julie (Cleo Laine in London, Lonette McKee twice in major U.S. revivals) is that it gives the game away immediately and causes an intelligent audience member (always assuming such an animal exists now) to wonder how on earth anyone employed with the Cotton Blossom could not know Julie is at least mulatto. But that’s the way of logic in the “post-racial” world of American musical theatre, where as everyone knows Alexander Hamilton was Latino and John Adams a black woman.
There are several other interesting juxtapositions in That’s Entertainment! III: A cut sequence from The Band Wagon showing Cyd Charisse lip-synching to India Adams’ recording of the Schwartz and Deitz “Two Faced Woman” with Joan Crawford doing the same for a later number in Torch Song, a low-rent affair featuring a glowering Crawford in dark tropical make-up (it’s not “black-face,” despite what the usual gang of online idiots aver — if you want actual blackface, take a look at Garland singing “FDR Jones” in Babes on Broadway sometime) and, for some reason, ripping off her ethnic wig at the end and staring daggers at the audience like an angry Victor/Victoria avant la lettre. Despite my aversion to her, a “backstage look” at Eleanor Powell’s tap routine to “Fascinating Rhythm” as the stage crew shifts the scenery for the moving camera is instructive, as are the clips of Fred Astaire in two different costumes for his “I Wanna be a Dancin’ Man” number in The Belle of New York; Astaire’s dancing is so precisely worked out that the only thing different about him in either clip is the clothing. The producers of this compilation also had the happy notion of removing the opening credits from The Barkleys of Broadway so that we can actually see Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing the “Swing Trot.” If nothing else, their routine serves as a reminder of what Ginger sacrificed when she embraced tennis in the 1940s: Her once enviably thin, supple body had become more muscular, especially in her arms and shoulders, and in her backless gowns she almost resembles a linebacker in drag. Calling Roberta Muldoon!
My final word on these movies comes in the nature of a personal plea. While working on this piece I ran across, on Google, something which purported to be a transcription of Howard Dietz’s lyrics for the song “That’s Entertainment!” in The Band Wagon. Everything was going fine until near the end of it I hit this couplet, which stopped me the way a brick wall ends an automotive suicide:
The gag might be waving the flag
That began with a mystical hand…
It’s discouraging enough that the person who transcribed this lyric had never heard of George M. Cohan, the “Mr. Cohan” Dietz invoked in his original lyric. Did he or she have also to make up an idiot phrase like that one? Just what the hell did they think “a mystical hand” was?
People — please! If you can’t figure out what a lyric is on hearing it… look it up. Take your mystical hand to a goddamned library if you have to and use it to pull down an actual book. Stop making up utter codswallop out of sheer ignorance and then passing it along for other ignoramuses to replicate.
Those who forget the past are not only doomed to repeat it, they’re doomed to misspell it.
*If you know Cole Porter’s “Be a Clown” number from The Pirate you will recognize, as Irving Berlin did when he heard it, that “Make ’em Laugh” was a direct plagiarism by the MGM musical producer (and one-time lyricist) Arthur Freed, who when called on it stammered that it was just a little something “the kids” came up with. He meant the screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, neither of whom had a thing to do with the song but onto whom he was trying to shift the blame. Ironically, except for Porter aficionados, “Be a Clown” is now almost completely forgotten while for millions of Singin’ in the Rain acolytes “Make ’em Laugh” is evergreen.
†I couldn’t, in 1974, have anticipated the home video revolution, or premium cable, nor how each was going to make filling in the gaps of the movie past so much easier than the catch-as-catch-can experience of seeking out old movies on commercial television, even as it also killed the theatrical revival of old movies. Video tape was certainly being employed then, largely in America on news programming (sharp eyes also recognized its use on television comedy shows like “All in the Family”; in Britain at the time nearly all series were in the video format) and old issues of magazines such as Film Comment and American Film contain both feature articles about the coming home-video boom and advertisements for the (then wildly expensive) studio titles just then beginning to be sold. But the concept was largely unknown to most Americans, at least until the late 1970s, and if we thought about the commercial availability of old movies at all it was only as related to the relatively rarefied film collectors world of 8-and-16mm.
‡Although my own library is stuffed with such Turner Classic Movies Music wonders as The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (lushly-produced 2-disc sets) as well as Singin’ in the Rain, Meet Me in St. Louis, Easter Parade, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Royal Wedding, The Bad and the Beautiful, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, Lust for Life, It’s Always Fair Weather, Gigi, North by Northwest, King of Kings, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and Victor/Victoria, compilations of scores (by Korngold, Morricone and Rózsa) and of songs (Harry Warren and Al Dubin’s output for Busby Berkeley, George and Ira Gershwin, Fred Astaire, Astaire and Rogers, Doris Day, Judy Garland, Lena Horne, Mel Tormé, Louis Armstrong) I have my small quarrels with some of them. Occasionally these TCMM CDs contain a little too much fealty to their sources to make for satisfying listening. In their zeal for completeness, the otherwise estimable producers often include long instrumental introductions to the songs which ought ideally to have been on tracks separated from the songs themselves, and if in the movie the vocal was abruptly halted in mid-verse (Astaire’s “By Myself” is a good example) the CD replicates that screeching halt as well. Completeness is nice, if you can achieve it, and faithfulness has its virtues, but there’s something to be said for records produced with the listener’s pleasure in mind. There is a science, or at least a craft, to good listening presentation, and the TCMM disc producers didn’t always acknowledge or work toward it. When they issued their six-disc boxed set of That’s Entertainment!, for example, they did not include, even as a bonus CD, the original MCA double-LP soundtrack from 1974, which largely contains the songs as heard in that movie and is a model of a well-crafted listening experience. Since no previous CD reissue of that record set exists the best you can do is haul out your old LPs and if they happen to be in decent enough condition, digitize them. (Naturally, the original set was made available on CD in Japan but not in America, where the music originated…) As soon as Time-Warner took control of the Turner empire, of course, it disbanded the Turner Classic Movies Music label. The more money an entertainment corporation has, the less it will spend to maintain, much less restore, its library.
§Among other things, seeing Walker as a young woman explains why it took her so long to become photogenic; despite the obvious talent she evinced, hers was not only a face she had to age into but one which, in her 20s, was almost militantly unattractive, especially when coupled with her aggressive performance style.
¶Friedgen and Sheridan were luckier than the people who put together the 1992 Turner documentary series When the Lion Roars, which completely elided any mention, or clips, of Astaire. This utterly flabbergasting omission was later explained as being entirely due to the usurious (and for documentary and film festival producers, often ruinous) financial compensation demanded by Astaire’s widow Robin for any use of his image. What was okay with Mrs. Astaire? Clips from Fred’s musical numbers in which various props such as the coatrack he danced with in Royal Wedding were digitally altered into representations of Dirt Devil vacuum cleaners. Not since the similarly misguided “protection” of Tennessee Williams’ estate by his executor Maria St. Juste has such a major American cultural figure’s legacy been so badly served, or so needlessly damaged. Where St. Juste was simply over-protective of Williams’ legacy, Astaire was in danger of becoming entirely forgotten for purely mercenary reasons. Fortunately, the Widow Astaire eventually relaxed her inflexibility, but her manipulative control over her late husband’s very image is illustrative of how utterly irrational American copyright laws, dictated by corporations and directed by the grasping heirs and sub-heirs of creative talent, have become.
Text copyright 2023 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 