On 4K Warner Archive Blu-ray disc - David Hare unpacks NIGHT AND DAY (Michael Curtiz, USA, 1946)

Screens from Warner Archive’s new 4K to Blu-ray of the perplexing festival of illusion and pretence that is Michael Curtiz’ “biographical” movie of Cole Porter, NIGHT AND DAY from 1946.

The screen (above) of Cary Grant as Cole and Monty Woolley as himself is the first gesture of straightwashing that, given Code enforcement buries the homosexuality of either/or both personalities.

But this is only the beginning for this two hour excursion into artifice, illusion, denial, reinvention and massaging via screenplay and production design. The only thing Curtiz and the crew appear to render naturalistically is the presentation of the 23 Porter numbers that are beaded throughout the action of the picture in what can basically be called diegetic form. In other words, in situ. But even here the shots only show Cary/Cole playing the piano, while the full might of the giant brassy Warner Orchestra blasts away in synch, albeit nowhere to be seen.

The artifice keeps multiplying with the advent of new characters. In an early sequence set in France after the war (Great) the movie introduces a French chanteuse, “Gabrielle”, played by an almost unrecognizable Eve Arden. For the one and only time in her career, Eve opens her mouth and starts speaking with a broad French accent. Or is it? As she moves around the set gesticulating as only Arden could the accent seems, and in fact is, perfectly genuine and convincing. Arden finishes the sequence with a rendition of “I’m Unlucky at Gambling” sung perfectly in French. We never see her again.(More’s the pity.) 

The movie casts some still fresh actors in bits, like Dorothy Malone here in short bobbed hairstyle and a polished quietly spoken New England Patrician accent. Other performers include Jane Wyman in Auburn Blonde rinse, directed to shout her lines. At one point Cole/Cary is introduced to an up and coming vedette, played by Mary Martin, as “herself” as she takes on an ingenue bit. She’s the one and only “real” thing or characterization in the picture. Other delights include Paul Cavanaugh, a Warner second stringer sporting a blonde rinsed marcel wave. And Sig Ruman also playing himself, badly.

But by far the strangest and most intriguing aspect of the film’s quasi-realist-artifice is the color design. I cannot figure who determined it but the picture color codes major sequences with massed blocked single color. Thus in an early number an unnaturally acid Blue is sprayed to cover the entire background of the frame effectively creating a kind of geometric picture frame effect for the sequence. The wardrobe has been put together in a combination of drabs and secondary acids including that eye burning blue, morbid taupes, and dirty greens. Only when the show moves outdoors do we get a “natural” palettte. The duality seems rigorously enforced.

For the players, Curtiz manages to horsewhip almost everyone into brisk delivery, given the doggedly adulatory nature of the biographical screenplay and the downplaying of Cole’s wife, played by Alexis Smith with a gloomy resignation. The strangest performer in the show is Cary Grant who looks more often than not like he’s definitely not enjoying the job. Gossip records major clashes between Curtiz and Grant all through the shoot But so did Errol Flynn who loathed Curtiz’ dictatorial method. In Errol’s case the whip cracking paid off. With Cary it doesn’t always. But all this makes for compelling, sometimes hair raising viewing.

Nobody can call this movie in any way a success, but the presentation of 23 numbers is an unalloyed joy, and the sheer perversity that seem to cloak the picture in supernatural shade is frankly irresistible.

The new 4K master and disc is, as always with Warner Archive, flawless.

For much more comment and reaction scroll down to this item on David's Facebook Page where his thoughts were first posted.

Streaming on YouTube - Reminders of Donald O'Connor and Ethel Merman...and Vera-Ellen

Donald O'Connor had the misfortune to play second banana to Gene Kelly in the greatest musical of all.  He had his moments but it's Kelly's rain-soaked street solo that everyone remembers. O'Connor does a bit of best mate stuff and some zany dancing in the Make 'em laugh number  but it's Kelly and Debbie Reynolds to the forefront.

"What else has Donald O'Connor been in?" was the question and the immediate YouTube answer was Call Me Madam  and There's No Business Like Show Business. Superb copies including full Cinemascope for No Business which you can find if you click on each film's title. And at least when we watched, totally uninterrupted by other than a single advertisement before each film started. 

In each O'Connor gets to do a seriously good solo... and in each he has to deal with the greatest song belter of them all Ethel Merman. Cole Porter is reported to have said: "When you write lyrics for Ethel Merman they'd better be good because everyone's going to hear them.''

Both of the films originate from that period in the early 50s into the 60s when Fox made some big budget, somewhat bloated musicals. Merman had starred in Irving Berlin's Call Me Madam on Broadway. It was a huge success and Merman recreated her Broadway role. O'Connor was brought in to play the brash young press attache Kenneth Gibson.  O'Connor has two brilliant numbers, the first a solo song and dance  and the second a number with the gorgeous Vera-Ellen. (13 shots in 4'46" and 13 shots in 5'04" respectively, the economy in the filming is remarkable) and Vera-Ellen demonstrates once again what a phenomenal dancer she was. Her singing voice was however dubbed. More of the O'Connor/Vera-Ellen magic is on show in one of the various iterations of "It's A Lovely Day Today".

Fox had Merman and O'Connor back in harness within a year with There's No Business Like Show Business. The star ensemble was added to by Dan Dailey, Marilyn Monroe, Johnny Ray and Mitzi Gaynor, to make a backstage showbiz family story of ups and downs and  happy endings. Sixteen numbers ranging by Irving Berlin, with the title song lifted from another Merman/Irving Berlin show Annie Get Your Gun. And that was basically it for Merman's starring screen career. 

During this time O'Connor was saddled (pardon the pun) himself with a contract at Universal. Wikipedia comes to the rescue for a succinct summary. "In 1949, O'Connor played the lead role in Francis, the story of a soldier befriended by a talking mule. Directed by Arthur Lubin, the film was a huge success. As a consequence, his musical career was constantly interrupted by production of one Francis film per year until 1955. O'Connor later said the films "were fun to make. Actually, they were quite challenging. I had to play straight in order to convince the audience that the mule could talk.

"He did Francis Goes to the Races (1951), another big hit. In February 1951 he signed a new contract with Universal for one film a year for four years, enabling him to work outside the studio.

"He received excellent notices for Francis Joins the WACS (1954) and was scheduled to play Bing Crosby's partner in White Christmas (1954). O'Connor was forced to withdraw because he contracted an illness transmitted by the mule." That's showbiz.

...and for another sample of Vera-Ellen's magic here's her Miss Sadie Thompson number from Love Happy

...and dancing with Fred Astaire in Three Little Words

At CINEMA REBORN - CJ Johnson's introduction to the Sydney screening of ONE HOUR WITH YOU (Ernst Lubitsch, USA, 1932

Editor's Note: CJ Johnson has introduced a number of films at our Cinema Reborn seasons. CJ has been a resident critic on ABC radio since 2008 and lectures on cinema at the Art Gallery of NSW. In October he will be leading a tour presented by the AGNSW to the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon and participants will have the opportunity to discover the birthplace of cinema and attend one of the cinematic world’s most prestigious annual events. Experience highlights of the week-long Lumière Film Festival, one of the largest international festivals of classic cinema, in Lyon, home of the Cinematograph and where cinema was born. Wander through the Musée Lumière and learn about the Lumière brothers, the fathers of cinema and inventors of the revolutionary camera and projector. Enjoy day trips to the surrounding countryside, with its rolling vineyards and charming medieval villages.

• Attend the internationally renowned Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, the cradle of cinematic history.

• Visit the Musée Lumière and discover the various inventions of the Lumiere brothers, the fathers of cinema.

• Uncover the secrets of filmmaking at the Musée Cinéma et Miniature.

 Click here for more information  

Renaissance Tours 
Tel 1300 727 095 
info@renaissancetours.com.au

ONE HOUR WITH YOU has encore screenings at the Ritz Cinemas Randwick and the Lido Cinemas Hawthorn on Wednesday 13 May at 11.00 am. Tickets available at the door of both cinemas. Just click on the cinemas names to go through if you wish to book in advance.

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Two years ago I had the great pleasure of introducing Mitchell Leisen’s delightful screwball comedy Midnight, from 1939, for Cinema Reborn, and when I did I questioned, and attempted to answer, why Leisen was not remembered, watched and celebrated in the same way that Preston Sturges, Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch continue to be. Self-evidently, I don’t need to answer that question about Lubitsch. Lubitsch is the sex comedy OG. 

For those of you who weren’t into early 90s Gangsta Rap, ‘OG’ means “Original Gangster”, which you might translate as ‘first great pioneer.’ The OG doesn’t need to have invented the artistic form in question, but rather to have been the earliest pioneer of most defining impact. There is no doubt that, for sex comedy, and romantic and screwball comedy, worldwide, that was Lubitsch. Here’s the thing: with many art forms, once the OG has set the basic template, the artists in their wake tend first to imitate, then build upon, the OG style. Gangsta rap changed radically over the years, from an upbeat party sound to a grittier, more autobiographical, and ultimately brutally violent record of Black American urban life. It grew more radical. 

But the OG of sex and romantic and screwball comedy, Ernst Lubitsch, brought the radical from the get-go. Instead of future practitioners pushing the boundaries of the form, Lubitsch’s followers evolved towards the mainstream, to the point that, ultimately, screwball died off, and sex comedy absolutely died off, leaving the much more middle-of-the-road form of Romantic Comedy as the enduring legacy. Lubitsch’s work was both the pioneering and the radical forms of itself, and very few have managed to match it for its subversive, ground-breaking, rule-breaking joie de vivre. 

Lubitsch really went to town in 1932 and 1933, for he gave us today’s film in 1932, followed in 1933 by Design for Living, the greatest movie ever made about thrupples. Thrupples, for those who may not be aware, are romantic partnerships of three people. Design for Living is about a thrupple. It ends with Miriam Hopkins in the back of a limousine with her two loves, Frederick March and Gary Cooper. They’re heading off into their fabulous new life together. First, she deeply kisses March, then she turns her head and deeply kisses Cooper. Then they all smile and giggle before the screen fades to black. They’re off to have a good time. 

We can have a good time thinking about their good time, even though most of us would find it tricky to emulate in real life. Jack Thompson did, and not only that, he did it with two sisters, for fifteen years. Lubitsch would have loved that. He could have made a very funny film based on that. In Lubitschland, thrupples are funny! 

While Design for Living pushed sexual and societal norms, One Hour With You also pushed filmmaking ones. From the very first scene, which isn’t a song but is spoken in rhyme, this film stands out as radical. When a Parisian police chief instructs his officers in rhyme, something is up. There aren’t that many rules yet and Lubitsch is simultaneously creating and breaking them. The very next scene, he takes another rule - don’t look at the camera - and smashes it. He allows Maurice Chevalier to turn to camera and speak directly to us, the audience. In Chevalier’s hands it feels natural; indeed, he’d done it a few times before with Lubitsch, and it wouldn’t be the last time: famously, 26 years later, Chevalier opens Gigi the same way, extolling the virtues of grooming little girls so that when they come of age you can be ready to pounce. 

Chevalier has always been cast as the classy sleaze, and that’s his role here. His opening monologue to camera, broken down, is basically saying, “Can you believe how young and hot my wife is? My god, I have to tell you, I love sleeping with her and I do it as much as I can.” His wife is played by Jeanette McDonald, who was 29 to Chevalier’s 44, so you can appreciate his enthusiasm. It’s not the world’s biggest age difference, and  certainly not by Hollywood standards, but it’s enough for the policeman in the park scene to assume, and assume very confidently, that these two could not be husband and wife. 

So about that park scene, the second in the film, right after the police chief instructs his officers in rhyme: let’s decode it, let’s all get on the same page, which is to say, on Lubitsch’s page. The police chief, at the beginning of the film, after reminding his cops that the tourists who flock to Paris are coming for one thing and one thing only - sex - instructs them to basically let all the tourists get away with whatever they want, except for making love in the parks after dark. It seems the fabled Parisian cafés are losing customers once night falls, because they’re all going off to root in the bushes, and it’s up to the constabulary to root them out of the bushes and back into the cafés. So in the next scene, the cops do exactly that. 

The production code, that hideous studio agreement designed to appease the Catholic League of Decency and keep federal government censorship at bay, was created in 1930 but barely enforced until 1934. This self-muzzling set of restrictions is the reason that the rest of the world, watching American movies made between 1934 and about 1960, thought that American married couples slept in separate beds or even bedrooms, that there was no interracial romance, that there were no homosexuals except self-loathing or homicidal ones, that people didn’t bleed when they got shot, that nobody swore or blasphemed, that adults wore pyjamas, that all adultery ended in punishment, and that nobody went to the toilet. (It’s true - Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960 was the first American mainstream release to show a toilet bowl.) 

Films released in 1932, like One Hour With You, are considered ‘pre-code’, which allowed them a great degree of naughtiness but not, perhaps, some of the explicit imagery of the silent era. One Hour With You is pure pre-code; just as Design for Living is a celebration of the joy of threesomes, so too One Hour With You is a hearty endorsement of adultery. In this film, it doesn’t wreck your marriage, it makes it more fun. But that doesn’t mean that Lubitsch was able or willing to show a parkfull of grunting fornicators, so he encoded it. When the cops raid the park, what you’ll see on screen is a lot of couples making out on park benches. But what Lubitsch wants you to see in your mind’s eye is those same couples gleefully humping al fresco. So have that locked and loaded, and make it as filthy as you like. That’s what Lubitsch would want you to do. 

This is a film that is completely, unashamedly, joyously about one thing: sex. It’s about sex in the park and sex with your wife and sex with your wife’s best friend. Credits. Indeed, the key to having the most fun with Lubitsch is simply to remember this: every time you think you’re hearing a dirty double-entendre, you are hearing a dirty double-entendre, and in any given moment, vocal inflection, cutaway shot or simple gesture you can decipher a possible sexual metaphor: bang! You’re right on the money. Every possible lewd interpretation is the right interpretation. That’s part of the Lubitsch touch! 

Marurice Chevalier was all about sex. His persona was very clearly established in the public’s perception as ‘randy Frenchman’. In one of his previous collaborations with Lubitsch and leading lady Jeanette McDonald, The Love Parade - 1929 - his character is a diplomat who has to be reprimanded by The Queen because he’s been bonking everyone at the Embassy including the Ambassador’s wife. Then, right before One Hour With You, Lubitsch directed him in The Smiling Lieutenant, which may as well have been called The Horny Lieutenant. That film, full of Chevalier winking and raising his eyebrows before walking into ladies' bedrooms, was Paramount’s biggest hit in 1931, and Chevalier’s reputation as a lascivious continental was truly cemented. 

All of which is important to know to fully appreciate what’s going on in One Hour With You. Chevalier’s speech directly to the audience at the beginning of the film is a big in-joke. The subtext, which would have been clear to all audiences in 1932, was that Chevalier was a man who was always on the make, regardless of anyone’s marital status, so his declaration that he was married, deeply in love with his wife and enjoying plenty of monogamous sex with her, was risible, an ironic metatextual gag. “Chevalier? Married and monogamous? Pah! Pull the other one!” That’s the set-up. We know that’s not his true character and in a way, we’re now put into the position of waiting for him to be tested. It doesn’t take long. But in the early stages of the film, as he valiantly tries to resist the allures of the extremely eager Mitzi, the fact that this is Chevalier, the man who cannot resist the primal urge, raises the comedic stakes. It would be like opening a film with W.C. Fields claiming that he had gone sober and then locking him into an unattended liquor store overnight. 

Chevalier’s trademark was a straw boater hat and bow tie, and the fact that he wears these accoutrements in the film, as he did in most of his films, makes it even clearer that we’re meant to bring our Chevalier baggage with us into the movie. Like W.C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, the Marx Brothers and others, although Chevalier plays different characters in his different films, he is also always playing ‘Maurice Chevalier’, and ‘Maurice Chevalier’ is a lecherous horndog. That was his reputation in real life, too: Jeanette McDonald called him ‘the quickest derrière pincher in Hollywood’.  

Supposedly, and certainly to do with that derrière-pinching, Chevalier and McDonald did not get along too well, but you’d never know it from their four films together. They had fabulous on-screen chemistry, and that is integral to One Hour With You. We can believe that these two are enjoying a good marriage and are attracted to each other romantically and sexually, and that makes the dramatic and comic tension of Chevalier’s almost inevitable philandering all the stronger. That, and the fact that we don’t want to see McDonald get hurt. Her Colette is the most sympathetic, likeable character in One Hour With You, and McDonald gives perhaps her best performance among her four collaborations with Lubitsch. 

Lubitsch himself did not have a reputation as a groper, lech or adulterer; he was married twice but there is no existing evidence of the kind of sexual adventurism he celebrated in his films. There’s a great quote from critic Michael Wilmington: Lubitsch’s films “were directed by a man who was amused by sex rather than frightened of it – and who taught a whole culture to be amused by it as well.” And that is a huge part of what came to be known as ‘The Lubitsch Touch’. It was a light-hearted, joyful and hugely permissive approach to sex that allowed us to laugh along with things like adultery rather than be shocked or offended by it. In Lubitschland, sexual desire is omnipresent and unregulated: the Parisian cops encourage it, just not in the park. There are no priests tut-tutting, and certainly no children weeping as their parents engage in bitter custody disputes. Sex is free and easy and, most importantly, fun. It’s something to be looked forward to. 

In One Hour With You, the eager Mitzi, played very coquettishly by Genevieve Tobin, schemes to be visited by Chevalier’s Andre, and when her maid confirms he’s on his way over, she moans, falls back on her divan, kicks off her shoes and wiggles her feet in lustful anticipation. She can’t wait to knock Chevalier off this silly, sanctimonious ‘monogamy’ kick he’s on, and neither, quite frankly, can we. You can’t have a sex comedy without sex, and married sex, especially in Lubitschland, is just not very funny. Thrupples are funny. Adultery is funny. And if you can get on board with that, there’s nothing in One Hour With You to shock or offend or disgust or appall you. Lubitsch isn’t trying to provoke you. He just wants you to have a good time. 

Enjoy.

At the Hayes Theatre in Kings Cross - A terrific production of HOLIDAY INN (Irving Berlin, Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge)

The leads - Nigel Huckle,  Emma Feliciano, Mary McCorry (I'm presuming), 

Should I be just a bit ashamed to admit I’ve never seen Holiday Inn. It was made at Paramount  in 1942 by Mark Sandrich but the auteur was Irving Berlin who wrote the words and music.

Now I’ve just come at the film after seeing a wildly enthusiastic show on the tiny performing space of the Hayes Theatre up in Kings Cross where a five piece band sat around the back of the stage and ten young actors, singers and dancers knocked out their own version directed, for the first time, by choreographer Sally Dashwood. The new libretto is by Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge, with the same music and lyrics by Irving Berlin from this movie and others. The musical opened on Broadway in 2016 and I am assuming this is the first time it has been performed out here, in Sydney at least. 

It was fabulous and the talent on display quite remarkable. Most striking though were two features – the rapid fire costume changes of all ten cast members and the precision of the production. Entrances and exits were timed like a perfect version of Feydeau. The choreography, a huge amount of it involving large swathes of the cast working in some tiny spaces, was not to put too fine a point on it, absolutely brilliant.

It runs at the Hayes Theatre till December 22. Treat yourself to a great night out then find a copy of the movie somewhere, probably OK.ru if you are desperate, and watch Bing Crosby fighting off Fred Astaire for attention. That’s worth a look too even if just to note how smart Gordon Greenberg and Chad Hodge have been in getting this old show back front and centre.

On YouTube - Glimpses of THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (David Butler, USA, 1943) especially Errol Flynn singing and dancing

Thank Your Lucky Stars was made by Warner Bros as a WW2 fundraiser, with a slim plot involving two theatre producers played by Edward Everett Horton and S Z Sakall. The stars donated their salaries to the Hollywood Canteen founded by John Garfield and Bette Davis who appear in this film. The female who gets most attention is Dinah Shore who does four utterly anodyne numbers of forgettable songs.

The writing is credited to Norman Panama and Melvin Frank, later the authors of the comic masterpiece The Court Jester. They give Eddie Cantor far more and far better jokes than he deserves. Needless to say it's a film that has its moments. 

The numbers were written by Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser and one of them, sung in the film by Bette Davis, "They're Either Too Young or Too Old" was nominated for an Oscar, but lost. The best number features a slim and skinny legged Errol Flynn singing and dancing to a stage number set in an English tavern. Flynn enters and cadges drinks while singing and launches into "That's What You Jolly Well Get,''. His Australian accent occasionally pokes through.

And here's the Bette Davis number.

It appears that Warners has done a 4K restoration of the whole 2hour 7 minute show which you can find when you hunt round the channels

AT THE ART GALLERY OF NSW - CJ Johnson presents five lectures on the history of the Cinema - Commences 13 July

After presenting a sell-out series of three lectures at the Art Gallery of New South Wales earlier this year, friend of Cinema Reborn CJ Johnson returns with a new monthly series of five lectures, starting on 13 July and continuing through the end of the year. You can book the whole series or individual lectures, and you don’t need to be a member of the AGNSW to book. All details and booking information here:

https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/events/art-of-cinema-series/

CJ Johnson hosts the podcast Movieland. He is Head of Screen Storytelling at Sydney Film School, President of the Film Critics Circle of Australia, Film and TV Critic for ABC Radio's Nightlife, Lecturer in Cinema History at The Queen's Club and Sydney Actors School, and a screenwriter, playwright and script editor.

The Lectures:

Cyd Charisse, Fred Astaire, The Bandwagon

Weds 13 July

THE ART OF THE MUSICAL

Musicals are a fundamental, popular form of cinema. But when you think about them, they’re inherently ridiculous, or at least require a tremendous leap of imagination on the part of the audience. CJ examines the birth of the musical and how its early masters taught us to believe in people dropping everything to sing and dance.

Dennis O'Keefe, Ann Sheridan, Woman on the Run

Weds 24 August

THE ART OF FILM NOIR

Film noir is more than shadows, trench coats and femmes fatales. So what is it, exactly? How did it originate, develop, and what are its classic examples?

Humphey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Casablanca

Weds 14 September

UNDERSTANDING CASABLANCA

It’s one of the most beloved films of all time; one of the most quoted, referenced, revived, rewatched, parodied and pinched from. But what is really going on in this staggeringly entertaining 1942 Warner Bros. classic? CJ offers an eye-opening deep read of a film you think you know.

Orson Welles, Touch of Evil

Weds 5 October

THE CINEMA OF ORSON WELLES

Orson Welles has a claim to being the ultimate filmmaker as public figure, celebrity, star and auteur; his life was even more fabulous and dramatic than any of his unique films (including his masterpiece Citizen Kane). CJ offers an entertaining ride through an astonishing life and bumpy career.

Jean-Luc Godard

Weds 09 November

THE FRENCH NEW WAVE

What exactly constituted this major 1960s movement? Who drove it, what films did they make, and how - if at all - did it change cinema?

More info, bookings, times etc https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/events/art-of-cinema-series/

On the centenary of Judy Garland's birth - David Hare pays tribute to a great artist

 Given June is the birth month for La Gumm, why resist any longer.

Here’s one of my favorite challenge dances from Chuck Walters’ 1950 Summer Stock, with Gene Kelly partnering Judy.

 

If truth be told it was Kelly, along with Walters who rescued Garland from a final all-out ban of Garland by Mayer, Metro and even Freed, after the catastrophe of Annie Get Your Gun.

 

To get Summer Stock moving, Kelly and Walters engaged Joe Pasternak as producer and Kelly maintained the fight to keep Judy on target to finish the picture

 

In a sense Kelly was, with this enormous effort, returning a favor to Judy which she had granted him a mere eight years earlier when she eased him into his first part as “Harry” in his first picture, For Me and My Gal in 1942. Great artists never forget their mentors.

 

Here’s another tribute…

 

This is, I think Cole Porter’s most beautiful ballad, and it barely survived being cut from The Pirate after filming was completed in 1947.

 

Not only was it disliked by Mayer, after he’d also ordered the removal of the Voodoo number, but Kelly broke his ankle earlier in the week filming the Mack the Black number and would be laid up for weeks but, undaunted, Minnelli and Garland staged the number to one verse with Kelly here supine for a single take. 

 

In less than two minutes Garland’s range and incredible technique is in full, glorious display.

 

I just watched the film again, at 1 am when I couldn't sleep. Needless to say I saw the whole thing. I was amazed once again by the limpidity and sublimity of the Warner Archive Blu-ray. 

 

Every three strip disc of theirs that comes down the pike these days--THE PRIVATE LIVES OF ELIZABETH AND ESSEX, IVANHOE, CAPTAINS OF THE CLOUDS--I think, "this is far better than the one before". But THE PIRATE is by far the greatest three-strip the Warner Archive has released so far, and the quality of it necessitates a complete reappraisal of the film. 

 

Happy 100th Dorothy.

 

 

On Blu-ray - David Hare is enthralled all over again by Fred Astaire and Eleanor Powell in BROADWAY MELODY OF 1940

The screen above is from the opening of the six minute Cole Porter "Begin the Beguine" sequence, one of several breathtaking numbers in Broadway Melody of 1940. (Youtube links below).

Here Eleanor Powell heads the figurative mass blocking of white in the frame, with chorus and giant stage, until she dances backwards adagio tempo towards the dim figure of Fred Astaire, immersed in black, then the image shifts from white, to black, day to night, solo to duet. After the first three minutes of lyrics sung and tapped by Powell and chromatic tonality the number shifts from the giant sets into a dazzling tap duet from the two. It’s a great shame this was the only movie to pair Astaire with Powell.

In creative visual response to Porter's great tune, and the Alfred Newman scoring I think the principle genius behind the staging and imagination for all these amazing production numbers essentially goes to Metro Production Design king, Cedric Gibbons. There's really no credit for choreography, and one suspects the hand of Berkeley if only for the mass chorus, and hallucinatory travelling shots with cross cutting. But the only dance credit recorded is Bobby Connolly. The problem always arises in dissecting who's done what in any picture directed by a Metro hack like Norman Taurog. I suspect some credit for the shape and feel of these dance sequences might go to editor Blanche Sewell, and Adrian for possibly more than gowns, as well as Gibbons’ underling, Edwin Willis.

In any case the movie is all about the dances and their flights into delirium with a killer Cole Porter repertoire.

This is the sort of glory you get from an industry in which a nobody (in terms of talent) officially directs the picture but the machinery behind the credits (and sometimes on the credits as it was later with the Freed Unit) delivers these masterpieces. Cocteau surely pinched the mirrors and black/white duality of Orphee from this number which he would only have been able to see after the war and the occupation of course. Watch the second half in which Powell and Astaire riff a long duet including the most subtle "challenge tap" in the history of the musical. She was a flawless dancer on her own and with him she's his equal. Everything she is in worth watching.

The picture has been released from a new 4K scan of some parlous quality elements from Warner Archive Blu-ray. It looks and sounds glorious, once again. Jo Ruttenberg's glistening photography with crane and track is to die for.

 CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FIRST PART of this magnificent sequence.When Powell steps into the blackness with the camera floating up with her, you’re in a Cocteau Dream. Then Astaire comes towards her but it’s his reflection in another wall of mirrors, and he enters the frame from the left! It’s completely dazzling.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE SECOND PART

On Blu-ray - David Hare welcomes the new edition of Vincente Minnelli's masterpiece THE PIRATE (MGM, USA, 1948)

Gene Kelly, The Pirate

Minnelli's The Pirate was released in May 1948 after two years of gestation, and a history book's worth of gossip, trouble, tantrums, changes, disagreements, censorship, Garland’s latest breakdown, her divorce from the director and a cost overrun that left the picture floundering with more than 2 million (then a fortune) of debt for MGM. It’s never made its money back to this day.

 

Despite this, the movie is I am sure the most elegantly conceived, formally extended, most sophisticated and whimsical musical ever to come out of the Freed Unit. It’s perhaps the very greatest work of the highest imaginable aestheticism and design, casting, dance, performance, color and self-reflection, all carried by a minor narrative whimsy in the "once upon a time" mode from a very slight 1942 S.N. Behrman stage work, to a complete re-write which inverts the character impersonation theme totally by Goodrich and Hackett and a fully commissioned new score by Cole Porter, with the battery of the Freed Unit's peerless team of artists and crew, not least, Roger Edens, Robert Alton, Kay Thompson and, for the first time at Metro, costume designer Tom Keogh. His wardrobe broke the bank and every expectation for a conventional “period look” but instead complements the films seductively narcotic color design. If ever a film was made for the three strip negative, dye transfer positive printing process in 40s Technicolor, it’s The Pirate.

 

The picture begins after the credits with a red leather bound title cover page, followed without a cut by a series of exquisite water colored faux naif "storybook” illustrations (above) of the movie’s materials concerning the pirate, Mack the Black Macoco, and his fabulous exploits of pillage, swashbuckling and expressively direct masculinity, all read by a breathless Garland over the turning pages. Then without a cut, Minnelli pulls the camera slightly back from these gorgeous pictures (by Metro studio artist Doris Lee) and the amber tanned hand of Judy’s arm, playing Manuela (below) comes into shot, and then we track further back to group shot with even more hallucinatory imagery in three strip dye transfer Technicolor of the tale teller with her cohorts, as the driver of this great erotic fantasy. 

 

The film never leaves this hallucinatory realm of color, design, movement , costume and music. Each sequence to run the narrative opens with a reveal of the next persona in close or medium and the camera which by now has established its identity as another character, one of us, the audience adopts a life of activity with the most brilliant tracks, cranes and dollies seen in the forties. 

 

Kelly uses the film to pioneer his own ideas about male dance extending the three minute routines to ballets of solo male with chorus. The first musical number in the film comes just fifteen minutes in and introduces Kelly, and his travelling group of players. The sequence is set in what looks like an immense open air portside scene, and it certainly appears to be the film’s only exterior shot, but it’s simply the Metro backlot with a crane that stays with Kelly  for the first two minutes of the sequence from ground level to way on high (above) to the town and then a cut which begins the first verse of Cole Porter’s dazzling “Nina”. 

 

Kelly stages the song, an emblem of Porter’s wit and sophistication if ever there was one, with winks to the audience about psychiatry and unresolved passion. “Nina” all up is brief and funny but Kelly then stages a ballet up down through and over every corner of the set ending the first part of this six minute marathon with a completely debauched open mouth kiss with one girl (below), with the cigarette with whom he plays a tongue trick taking the cigarette into his own mouth and then swinging her over to kiss her, opens his mouth with the cigarette intact. This outrageously carnal gesture announces the second three minutes of this gob smacking sequence in which Freed’s and Metro’s greatest individual music arranger, Conrad Salinger now takes over Cole’s song and the score and orchestrates the next three minutes without lyrics totally for Kelly’s ballet as a solo with chorus into a tour de force of Bolero rhythm, complete with a blistering trumpet solo, all of which take the number into the stratosphere. 

 

I think “Nina” is my favorite musical number in Freed musicals. The camera becomes in effect Kelly’s dancing partner, moving through and back, away and forward, to observe the dance, which climaxes, literally with woman after woman after woman throwing themselves at Kelly on the town square “stage”, to be “used” with a quick footed spiral step and then spun off the stage as discarded bounty. The number ends with Kelly racing from the town square which has just hosted this past six minutes of pure sex, and travels with him up and into a close-up against his own image painted onto a poster for their travelling circus’ show (below). 

 

It’s one of those devastating bravura Minnelli sequences that fully embeds all the strands of the film into the imagery – performance, desire, impersonation, lust, rejection and theatre as performance of someone else’s “reality”. It clearly sets the page for Kelly’ big dance expansions into the ballet mode which were embedded into his and Minnelli’s An American in Paris  five years later. But I now find Nina superior formally to the relatively literal Gershwin ballet and even its fine choreography and ace DP John Alton’s Oscar winning Noir-esque color filtered photography on that picture.Thus a basic Porter number meets Salinger and Kelly and the full resources of the Freed unit and extends into a titanic major sequence to end the first act.

 

The movie lost at least two of Cole’s original songs during production, including one cut by the appalling Louis B Mayer as too “depraved”, “Voodoo”, which would have followed the first rendition of Mack the Black by Garland under hypnosis and chorus in the show tent. Other items were changed or shortened – the “Light of my Life” number survived only one verse, but its presentation as it stands now is flawless, preserved in a single one minute take with Garland singing to Kelly.

Indeed even Garland’s now visible amphetamine addiction is put to use in two sequences which Minnelli apparently directed again with a minimum of takes. Interestingly enough, although Judy was absent for over 100 days of shooting time, thanks to Mayer’s criminal regime of prescription addiction that was finally bringing her again to breakdown, she has never given a better performance in my opinion either physically or vocally. She can throw a tantrum and a room full of furniture at Kelly in the exposé sequence, but her vocal range keeps her performance bedded in control. And like Judy, Kelly, too has never been better nor more beautiful, never sexier, never more self-aware or more exhilarating. Certainly his part in the second “Mack the Black” routine in which he does the ballet wearing leather hot pants and a tea towel, with the body of a prime athlete in devastating peak condition, ends as always with the image of his face bursting with the sheer excitement of completing his number. 

 

There’s not a trace in The Pirate  of the overbearing egotism that cruels so many of the final closeups in Kelly’s numbers from Singin’ in the Rain. The material for The Pirateis so sharp, so sophisticated, so far ahead of its time, even for Freed, one of the joys of watching the movie is simply seeing the satisfaction the leads are taking in their parts, including I must add Walter Slezak, to whom Minnelli gives some of the most affecting and moving close-ups in the picture as Garland renounces him. Never has desire looked so bleak, even in this glorious phantasmagoria.

 

It’s very difficult to pin this movie down, either as a Freed canon work, an avant-garde musical avant-la-lettre, a Minnelli masterpiece of the purest formal beauty and mise-en-scene. I think it’s simply all three. There’s no more dazzling musical formally in the Hollywood pantheon, even Minnelli’s earlier 1944 Yolanda and the Thief which has several similar tropes, and a bobby dazzler of a central six minute choreographed sequence with Astaire and yet another bevy of menacing women in prime Technicolor wardrobe, “Will you Marry Me.’ 

 

At this point Yolanda is likely a personal expression of Minnelli’s own terror and/or ambivalence as a basically gay man about to marry Garland. The sheer panic of that dance and the movie’s very thin plot is very readily wiped out at the end of Yolanda with the superbly composed “Coffee Time”, choreographed by Astaire and Eugene Loring which runs the dancers in five/four time against a score written in four/four time. The number effectively overwhelms Yolanda’s narrative thread, and resolves the matter with such a perfectly refined musical trick for the end.

 

For the Finale of The Pirate  Freed and Minnelli obviously needed something that was both still hip but able to bring down the temperature from the astonishing 95 minutes that preceded it. So Cole wrote “Be A Clown” and that great number, itself a dedication to the world of show business, brings the two leads, and the Freed team of artists to a close of a perfect movie.

 

Warner Archive’s new Blu-ray of The Pirate was taken from new 4K scans of the original Tech nitrate three strip negatives. The image and sound (12 bit uncompressed mono) are in perfect service to the movie they restore. It looks and sounds, if it’s possible, better than it did in 1948.