Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, 1954)

Van Johnson, Barry Jones, Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse in Brigadoon

Cast: Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Van Johnson, Elaine Stewart, Barry Jones, Hugh Laing, Albert Sharpe, Virginia Bosler, Jimmy Thompson, Tudor Owen, Owen McGiveney, Dee Turnell, Dodie Heath, Eddie Quillan. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner, based on his book for a stage musical. Cinematography: Joseph Ruttenberg. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. 

Three years after Brigadoon, MGM's biggest musical star wasn't Gene Kelly or Judy Garland, it was Elvis Presley, who made Jailhouse Rock (Richard Thorpe, 1957) and eleven more movies for the studio. Arthur Freed, Brigadoon's producer, made six more musicals for the studio before leaving it in 1961, but Brigadoon is often regarded as a sign that MGM's golden age was ending. It's not an original movie musical like An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) or Singin' in the Rain (Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952), the most highly regarded of the films produced by the Freed Unit, but an adaptation of a Broadway hit. It's also filmed in Ansco Color, widely regarded as inferior to classic Technicolor. It was originally intended to be shot on location in the Scottish Highlands, but the studio decided the weather was too uncertain there. After considering another location in California near Big Sur, the decision was made to film it entirely on a soundstage in Culver City. The expensive set earned an Oscar nomination for art direction, even though the decision to make the film in CinemaScope only magnified the artificiality of the artificial turf and painted sky. Brigadoon is not just stagey -- there are pauses at the end of musical numbers where the Broadway audience would have applauded -- it's soundstagey.  Kelly, who also choreographed, is in good voice and Cyd Charisse (whose singing voice was dubbed by Carol Richards) dancers beautifully, The song score by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe is one of their best, including hummable tunes like "The Heather on the Hill" and "Almost Like Being in Love." (Although some of the songs from the stage version, including "Come to Me, Bend to Me" and "There But for You Go I," were cut.) Yet there's something lifeless about the movie. Van Johnson, who was cast in the role of Kelly's sidekick after Donald O'Connor was considered, seems a little bored with his part. The cutesiness of the village that outwitted time and space is a little too thick: There's something almost refreshing about the scenes satirizing life in New York near the end of the film, which are supposed to indicate that Kelly's character made a big mistake in not staying in Brigadoon. Vincente Minnelli directs these scenes with a sharpness and vigor that's absent from the rest of the movie.