Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 06/22/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Monday, June 22, 2020

Strike Up the Band (Busby Berkeley, 1940)

Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in Strike Up the Band

Cast: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Paul Whiteman, June Preisser, William Tracy, Larry Nunn, Ann Shoemaker, Margaret Early, Francis Pierlot, Virginia Brissac, George Lessey, Enid Bennett, Howard Hickman, Sarah Edwards, Milton Kibbee, Helen Jerome Eddy. Screenplay: John Monks Jr., Fred F. Finkelhoffe. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, John S. Detlie. Film editing: Ben Lewis. Music: Leo Arnau, George Stoll.

At one point in Strike Up the Band, the kids put on a show that's a burlesque of a "Gay Nineties" melodrama. Which might remind us that 1890 and 1940 were not so remote from each other as 2020 is from 1940. We might even look at a film like High School Musical (Kenny Ortega, 2006) or a TV series like Glee (2009-2015) as a burlesque of Strike Up the Band, except they took the subject matter more seriously than the kids in the 1940 movie did the material of old-time melodrama. Strike Up the Band is a still-honored subgenre, the "hey, kids, let's put on a show" musical. It has all the caricaturable excesses of its kind: big musical numbers that would never fit on an actual stage; the struggle to raise money for the show; the setback when one kid gets sick; the protagonist struggling with whether to become a musician or a physician; the teen romance that isn't quite gelling; the kindly, understanding mother; and even a rousing finale that actually waves the flag. Unfortunately, it's also something of a dud, especially considering the talent involved: Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, and direction by Busby Berkeley. But this is the Berkeley of the MGM years, not the unfettered "choreographer of space" of the Warner Bros. musicals of the early 1930s -- or even the Berkeley who snuck over to 20th Century Fox in 1943 and gave Carmen Miranda a tutti-frutti hat in one of the craziest moments in The Gang's All Here. At MGM he was reined in too much, though you can sense him yearning to break free in numbers like the title sequence and "Do the La Conga." Garland sings some mostly unmemorable songs well -- though MGM bought the rights to the 1927 stage musical by George and Ira Gershwin, it retained only the title song; the rest are by Roger Edens and the film's producer, Arthur Freed, along with some period oldies for the melodrama sequence. And Rooney is as manic as he ever got on film: dancing, mugging, and frenetically playing the drums. Still, at 120 minutes, Strike Up the Band sags a little too often, especially in a stop-motion puppetry sequence in which Rooney imagines conducting an orchestra made up of fruit -- an idea that Vincente Minnelli came up with and producer Freed enthusiastically adapted. Better songs and a brighter supporting cast might have helped, and the 40-year-old hairlines on some of the supposed high school students are too much in evidence.