On YouTube - David Hare excavates the title song and dance of LES GIRLS (George Cukor, USA, 1957)

In advance of attempting a critique of Cukor’s 1960 HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS here’s the “Les Girls” number from LES GIRLS three years prior.

The choreography isn’t really choreography, it’s movement around and up and over a set designed to articulate the cinemascope frame, while the camera barely ceases moving. Genius that he was, George Hoyningen-Huene does the entire wardrobe in black and white defiantly challenging color to make a return. It does, only later in the reds of the lining from the three principal actress's gowns who sing and dance what is in essence the title song.

The movie abounds in sequences like these, pure mise-en scène both punctuating the narrative action and continually looking back on the three disparate directions of Kelly’s attention. It’s a miraculous film of many parts, and in a sense defiantly NOT a musical.

So indeed is HELLER IN PINK TIGHTS, a movie I’ve always asociated in concert with Renoir’s 1953 THE GOLDEN COACH in which art and performance and life and action and comedy and tragedy are knitted together defiantly in a purely cinematic form. I cannot help but cite Cukor as Renoir’s equal in so many ways when they both come to directing the theatre as life. And life as performance.