Kiss Me Kate (George Sidney, 1953)

Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel in Kiss Me Kate

Cast: Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, Ann Miller, Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, Bob Fosse, Keenan Wynn, James Whitmore, Kurt Kasznar, Ann Codee, Willard Parker, Ron Randell, Carol Haney, Jeanne Coyne. Screenplay: Dorothy Kingsley, based on a musical play by Sam Spewack and Bella Spewack, and on a play by William Shakespeare. Cinematography: Charles Rosher. Art direction: Urie McCleary, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: musical direction by Saul Chaplin, André Previn, songs by Cole Porter.

Censorship has erased some of the bawdiness from Cole Porter's lyrics but his music still remains. Howard Keel is swaggeringly handsome as Fred Graham/Petruchio and Ann Miller is thoroughly vivacious as Lois Lane/Bianca. She is accompanied by a trio of terrific dancers, Tommy Rall, Bobby Van, and Bob Fosse, in numbers choreographed by Hermes Pan (with some uncredited assistance from Fosse in the "From This Moment On" number, where he gets an extended duo with an almost unbilled Carol Haney). The adaptation of the Broadway hit stumbles a little in Dorothy Kingsley's screenplay, but rights itself in most of the musical numbers. George Sidney was never as skillful a director as his MGM contemporaries Vincente Minnelli and Stanley Donen, but the stretches between the story parts and the song and dance parts aren't overlong. The only major drawback to this version of Kiss Me Kate is Kathryn Grayson, who pouts a lot as Lilli Vanessi/Katherine, but doesn't have much chemistry with Keel and fails to make the character someone we care about. Her voice, too, has that vinegary edge to it that even careful miking can't hide. Nor do Keenan Wynn and James Whitmore succeed in their attempts at clowning as the goofy gangsters with their supposedly show-stopping number, "Brush Up Your Shakespeare." (How, by the way, did the line "Kick her right in the Coriolanus" get past the censors?) Still, this is a solid B-plus MGM musical, and an honorable attempt at remaking a stage version. It was made in 3-D, during the brief period in the 1950s when the studios were trying to win audiences back away from their televisions, which explains some of the exaggerated perspective of the stage sets and the occasional instances of things being tossed at the camera.

Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan, 1965)

Natalie Wood and Robert Redford in Inside Daisy Clover

Cast: Natalie Wood, Christopher Plummer, Robert Redford, Ruth Gordon, Roddy McDowall, Katharine Bard, Peter Helm, Betty Harford, John Hale, Harold Gould, Ottola Nesmith, Edna Holland. Screenplay: Gavin Lambert, based on his novel. Cinematography: Charles Lang. Production design: Robert Clatworthy. Film editing: Aaron Stell. Music: André Previn.

As a satire on Hollywood and the star system, Inside Daisy Clover occasionally feels slack and uncertain. That may be because it was adapted by Gavin Lambert from his own novel, and authors are sometimes not the best judges of which parts of their books to transfer to film. There seem to be characters in the movie who haven't been given as much to do as their prominence suggests, such as Daisy's sister Gloria (Betty Harford), or Baines (Roddy McDowall), the assistant to the studio head, a role more generously cast than the function of the character in the story deserves. But I think a major problem stems from when the movie was made: in the mid-1960s, when the Production Code was on its last legs, and before films like Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969) showed filmmakers what they could get away with. So although Inside Daisy Clover shook free of the Code's strictures against homosexuality and let Robert Redford's character, Wade Lewis, be revealed as gay (or, in a departure from the book, bisexual), you can still feel that people in the film aren't using the kind of verboten language that they would have in real life. Once, for example, Daisy (Natalie Wood) says "damn" and is reproved by her mother (Ruth Gordon) for using "those four letter words." When Daisy scrawls in anger on a wall, you expect stronger language than her graffiti contains. Lambert and director Robert Mulligan are chafing at the restrictions but haven't been given the go-ahead to take the film as far as it wants to go, so there's a kind of tonal dithering -- lunges in the direction of black comedy, as in Daisy's suicide attempt, that fall short of the mark.

It's Always Fair Weather (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1955)

It's Always Fair Weather (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1955)

Cast: Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse, Dolores Gray, Michael Kidd, David Burns, Jay C. Flippen. Screenplay: Betty Comden, Adolph Green. Cinematography: Robert J. Bronner. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Arthur Lonergan. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: André Previn, songs by André Previn, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.

Since they satirized (albeit mildly) Hollywood and Broadway in their screenplays for Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952) and The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953), it seems almost inevitable that Betty Comden and Adolph Green should set their sights on television, and particularly TV advertising, in the screenplay for It's Always Fair Weather. Maybe it's just that television was seen as the enemy in Hollywood, but the last in their triad of MGM musicals of the 1950s seems a little sharper in tone than than the other two. The movie scores some nice hits on TV tearjerker shows like Ralph Edwards's This Is Your Life and on absurd commercials: The row of dancing soapboxes is a hit at the actual commercial in which a dancer wore a giant Old Gold cigarette pack. The unsentimental tone is there from the very beginning, when after a trio of just-demobilized GIs vows to reunite and celebrate their friendship ten years later, the film jumps ahead to a sour and disillusioning revelation of their midlife failures. Ted Riley (Gene Kelly) has become something of a lowlife, the manager of a boxer he won in a crap game; Angie Valentine (Michael Kidd) had wanted to become a famous chef, but runs a hamburger joint in Schenectady that he calls the Cordon Bleu; and Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), once an aspiring artist, is now an advertising executive with a sour stomach and an impending divorce. It all ends well, of course, with the help of a brainy TV producer played by Cyd Charisse and her feather-brained star played by Dolores Gray. Although André Previn's song score is only passable, it supports some fine production numbers staged by Kelly and Donen that take full advantage of the CinemaScope screen, like the trio in which Kelly, Dailey, and Kidd dance with garbage can lids on their feet, or the split-screen effect in which they perform a perfectly synchronized number with each in a different setting. Kelly gets one of his big solo numbers, a kind of echo of the celebrated "Singin' in the Rain" routine, but this time on roller skates, and Dailey, Charisse, and Gray also have good solos. (Kidd, better known as choreographer than performer, got shorted.) I think one reason that It's Always Fair Weather may not have the reputation of the other MGM musicals of the period is that when it came time to release it on television, the big numbers had to be chopped up, panned-and-scanned for small TV screens. Fortunately, it works well letterboxed on today's bigger, wider screens.