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.

Too Many Girls (George Abbott, 1940)

Hal Le Roy, Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Eddie Bracken, Desi Arnaz in Too Many Girls

Cast: Lucille Ball, Richard Carlson, Ann Miller, Eddie Bracken, Frances Langford, Desi Arnaz, Hal Le Roy, Libby Bennett, Harry Shannon, Douglas Walton, Chester Clute, Tiny Person, Ivy Scott, Byron Shores, Van Johnson. Screenplay: John Twist, based on a play by George Marion Jr. Cinematography: Frank Redman. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Carroll Clark. Film editing: William Hamilton. Songs: Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart.

When Desi met Lucy -- that's the most memorable thing about this silly college musical that was directed on stage by George Abbott, who brought over several members of the original cast when he was hired to make the film version at RKO. It was designed to be a vehicle for Lucille Ball, an RKO contract player who hadn't been in the stage production and whose singing voice wasn't up to the demands of the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart songs of the original show, so she was dubbed by Trudy Erwin. Among the cast hired out of the original were Eddie Bracken, Hal Le Roy, and Desi Arnaz, as well as a young chorus boy, Van Johnson, who has a couple of lines but goes uncredited. Although Arnaz is paired in most of the film with Ann Miller, he and Ball hit it off when they weren't on screen and married shortly after the movie wrapped. The story is nonsense about Connie Casey (Ball), a playgirl whose father wants her to settle down and go to college at his alma mater, Pottawatomie, in New Mexico. But he also hires some bodyguards, four young college football players, to keep her out of trouble. And so it goes, as the four bodyguards lead the Pottawatomie football team to a string of victories, and one of them, Clint Kelly (Richard Carlson), falls hard for Connie. It's very loose-jointed stuff, with some lively musical numbers spotlighting Arnaz, Miller, Frances Langford, and a large company of dancers directed by LeRoy Prinz, but a lot of dull filler in between. It's amusing to see Eddie Bracken before he got stereotyped as a doofus in Preston Sturges movies, and a crewcut Richard Carlson before he wound up as the very square star of such 1950s sci-fi movies as It Came From Outer Space (Jack Arnold, 1953) and Creature From the Black Lagoon (Arnold, 1954). 

You Can't Take It With You (Frank Capra, 1938)

Halliwell Hobbes, Spring Byington, Dub Taylor, Ann Miller, and Mischa Auer in You Can't Take It With You

Alice Sycamore: Jean Arthur
Martin Vanderhof: Lionel Barrymore
Tony Kirby: James Stewart
Anthony P. Kirby: Edward Arnold
Kolenkhov: Mischa Auer
Essie Carmichael: Ann Miller
Penny Sycamore: Spring Byington '
Paul Sycamore: Samuel S. Hinds
Poppins: Donald Meek
Ramsey: H.B. Warner
DePinna: Halliwell Hobbes
Ed Carmichael: Dub Taylor
Mrs. Kirby: Mary Forbes
Rheba: Lillian Yarbo
Donald: Eddie Anderson
Charles Lane: Henderson
Judge: Harry Davenport

Director: Frank Capra
Screenplay: Robert Riskin
Based on a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart
Cinematography: Joseph Walker
Art direction: Stephen Goosson
Film editing: Gene Havlick

"Opening up" a stage play when it's adapted for the movies is standard practice, and even a necessary one when the play takes place on a single set the way George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's Pulitzer Prize-winning You Can't Take It With You does. But director Frank Capra and screenwriter Robert Riskin have done more than open up the play, they have eviscerated it, scooping out much of its wisecracking satire on bourgeois conformity and red-scare jitters to replace them with Capra's characteristic sentimental populism, some high-minded speeches about Americanism, and a rather mushy romance. It unaccountably won the best picture Oscar and Capra's third directing award, in a year when the nominees included Jean Renoir's Grand Illusion. Capra and Riskin load on a kind of superplot: an attempt by the villain, Anthony P. Kirby, to corner the munitions market by buying up the property surrounding his rival's factory. The property includes the home of Grandpa Vanderhof and his family of Sycamores and Carmichaels, along with some others who turned up there at one time or another and just stayed on to pursue their various eccentric pastimes, which include making fireworks in the cellar. The goings-on in the household are enough to sustain the play, especially when Alice Sycamore brings home her boyfriend, Tony Kirby, and he invites his stuffy parents to come to dinner. (As in their play The Man Who Came to Dinner, the Kaufman-Hart formula punctures bourgeois stuffiness by putting the squares and the nonconformists into confining circumstances with one another.) The film puts more emphasis on the romance of Alice and Tony with scenes in which they are taught by a group of kids to dance the Big Apple and go to a high-toned restaurant where Alice is introduced to the Kirbys, resulting in some not very funny slapstick. Eventually, the Kirbys and the Vanderhof household wind up in jail and night court, where Capra musters his usual sentimental tribute to the people: As in Capra's 1934 Oscar-winner, It Happened One Night, in which a busload of the common folk join in singing "The Man on the Flying Trapeze," the inmates sharing the cell with Grandpa Vanderhof as well as the Kirbys père et fils join in a chorus or two of "Polly Wolly Doodle." (A cut to the other occupants of the cell reveals a throng of fresh-faced working men, not the thugs and drunks you'd expect to find.) And in the courtroom scene, Grandpa's neighbors gather to pay his fine, with even the judge tossing some money into the hat. All ends well, of course: Mr. Kirby decides not to buy the Vanderhof house after his defeated rival suffers a fatal heart attack. (The rival, Ramsey, is played by H.B. Warner, who as Jesus in Cecil B. DeMille's 1927 The King of Kings saved all of mankind with his death; here his death just saves Anthony P. Kirby's soul.) Kirby undergoes a wholly unconvincing change of heart, and we end with all of the Kirbys, Sycamores, Carmichaels, and hangers-on at the dinner table where Grandpa delivers a prayer of thanks. Capra never got cornier than this.

Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)

Mulholland Dr. defies exegesis like no other film I know. Sure, you can trace its origins: Car-crash amnesia is a soap-opera trope; the mysterious mobsters and other manipulators are film noir staples; the portrayal of Hollywood as a nightmare dreamland is straight from Sunset Blvd. (Billy Wilder, 1950), which the film even imitates by having its before-the-credits title appear on a street sign. But writer-director David Lynch isn't out to parody the sources -- not entirely, anyway. What he is up to is harder to pinpoint. There's a part of me that thinks Lynch just wants to have fun -- a nasty kind of fun -- manipulating our responses. At the beginning, we're on to him in that regard: We laugh at the minimal conversation between the two detectives (Robert Forster and Brent Briscoe) at the crash site. We recognize the naive awe on the face of Betty Elms (Naomi Watts), as she arrives in Los Angeles, as a throwback to the old Hollywood musicals in which choruses of hopefuls arrive at the L.A. train station singing "Hooray for Hollywood!" (Has anyone ever been inspired to sing and dance when arriving at LAX?) We're delighted by the appearance of Ann Miller as the landlady, just as later we identify Lee Grant, Chad Everett, and even Billy Ray Cyrus in their cameos. Even the seemingly disjointed scenes -- the director, Adam Kesher (Justin Theroux), is bullied by the Castiglianes (Dan Hedaya and the film's composer, Angelo Badalamenti), or a man (Patrick Fischler) recounts his nightmare at a restaurant called Winkie's, or a hit man (Mark Pellegrino) murders three people -- are standard thriller stuff, designed to keep us guessing -- though at that point, having seen this sort of thing in films by Quentin Tarantino and others, we feel confident that everything will fit together. And then, suddenly, it doesn't. Betty vanishes and Diane Selwyn (Watts), whom we have thought dead, is alive. The amnesia victim known as Rita (Laura Harring) is now Camilla Rhodes, the movie star that Betty wanted to be, and Diane, Camilla's former lover, wants to kill her. It's such a complete overthrow of conventional narrative that there are really only two basic responses, neither of them quite sufficient: One is to dismiss the film as a wacked-out experiment in playing with the audience -- "a load of moronic and incoherent garbage," in the words of Rex Reed -- or to try to assimilate it into some coherent and consistent scheme, like the theory that the first two-thirds of the film are the disillusioned Diane Selwyn's dream-fantasy of what her life might have been as the fresh and talented Betty. There is truth in both extremes: Lynch is playing with the audience, and he is portraying Los Angeles as a land of dreamers. But his film will never be forced into coherence, and it can't be entirely dismissed. I think it is some kind of great film -- the Sight & Sound critics poll in 2010 ranked it at No. 28 in the list of greatest films of all time -- but I also think it's self-indulgent and something of a dead end when it comes to narrative filmmaking. It has moments of sheer brilliance, including a performance by Watts that is superb, but they are moments in a somewhat annoying whole.