On Blu-ray - David Hare looks over the 'staggering three strip restoration' of WORDS AND MUSIC (Norman Taurog, USA, 1948)

The screens are from Warner Archive's new Blu-ray of the Norman Taurog 1948 Words and Music.

ThIs is a very late entry in the Musical composer and lyricist bio pic sub genre from the Freed Unit although it has the impossible task of carrying as big a story as RIchard Rodgers and Larry Hart.

While Mickey Rooney's drunk scenes (above) give us a pretty blunt feel for Hart's alcoholism, the screenplay can do no more than barely blink at Larry's deeply closeted queerness, thanks to the Breen Office. And the momma's boy presentation is frankly confounded by too sympathetic an Oedipal figure in the form of Jeanette Nolan, fresh from her Lady Macbeth for Orson Welles, but now niced-up for la Hart mére..

So Taurog, ever the faithful Metro hack delivers relatively static and proscenium based iterations of some of the great Rogers and Hart numbers, even a knockout Lena Horne in "Lady is a Tramp" in which he actually resorts to a crane shot to give the number some basic animation. But the movie is a slog, for all that and for the many, many artists paraded through it

Finally, the movie is rescued by two completely unexpected and extraordinary sequences which knock your socks off: One the staging of "Slaughter on Tenth Avenue" with Gene Kelly and Vera Ellen (above) which rocks with Kelly's very obviously self-imposed staging and mise-en-scene. Not to mention the big brass arrangements by orchestrator Conrad Salinger.

And the second, most intriguing of all is a sequence after a big party has ended and Larry, now drunk and morose, asks Mel Torme (below) to sing him "Blue Moon.". I don't know how the gods of intervention suddenly stepped in on behalf of the ever-turgid Taurog but the sequence fixes itself into two setups, one tight CU of Torme, apparently singing the number to Hart, and a reverse medium with a track into medium close to a completely floored Hart who seems to be lapping up the moment at the most intense personal level. The number plays like a breakthrough scene for putting Harts homosexuality out there, and I for one lapped it up, like who knows how many young queer kids in the audience sitting in the dark when the movie first played who felt the same way. 

There we were, Mickey Rooney of all people playing Larry Hart, of all people, and staging the sequence to play as a love song from one man to the other. God only knows this could not in a million years have come out of the mind of Norman Taurog, but somehow it did.

If you need another reason to check it out, the three strip restoration is, once again staggering.