Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 12/27/23

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

Wednesday, December 27, 2023

The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948)

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in The Pirate

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Walter Slezak, Gladys Cooper, Reginald Owen, George Zucco, Fayard Nicholas, Harold Nicholas, Lester Allen, Lola Albright, Ellen Ross. Screenplay: Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich, based on a play by S.N. Behrman. Cinematography: Harry Stradling Sr. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Blanche Sewell. Music: Lennie Hayton, Conrad Salinger, Cole Porter (songs).

Props to Walter Slezak, who is the only person in the cast of The Pirate who knows how to pronounce the name of the heroine. Everyone else refers to Manuela (Judy Garland) as "Man-you-ella." Manuela is a young woman in the Caribbean village of Calvados who is engaged to the town's portly, middle-aged mayor, Don Pedro Vargas (Slezak). Her head is full of tales of the dashing pirate Macocco, aka "Mack the Black," and she fantasizes about him taking her away from the village for a life of adventure. Don Pedro, however, likes the village perfectly well and never wants to leave. Visiting the city of Port Sebastian to have her wedding gown fitted, Manuela encounters a traveling player named Serafin (Gene Kelly), who falls for her, and during his act he hypnotizes her, hoping she'll fall in love with him. Instead, she reveals her passion for Mack the Black. Serafin follows her with his troupe to Calvados, where he recognizes Manuela's fiancé as the real Macocco, retired from piracy and hiding his secret past. From there, the plot thickens into a series of complications as Serafin decides to win Manuela away from Don Pedro by pretending that he's the real Macocco. It's not a bad premise to hang a series of songs and production numbers on, and there's some spectacularly athletic dancing by Kelly and Garland is in fine voice. The songs by Cole Porter are not his best work, however. The lyrics are sometimes silly: "Niña," for example, rhymes the name Niña with "neurasthenia" and "schizophrenia." Only "Be a Clown," which Kelly dances to first with the Nicholas Brothers and then with Garland, has had any life outside the film, and that mostly because producer and songwriter Arthur Freed notoriously copied it for Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" number in Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952). Garland's increasing emotional problems, which worsened after she experienced postpartum depression following the birth of Liza Minnelli in 1946, also affected the production. The film feels a little disjointed and the ending is perfunctory, a reflection of some script problems and cost overruns. It wasn't a box office success. Still, it has moments that are as good as any of the more successful Freed Unit productions.