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.

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, 1964)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Byron Haskin, 1964)

Cast: Paul Mantell, Victor Lundin, Adam West. Screenplay: Ib Melchior, John C. Higgins, based on a story by Daniel Defoe. Cinematography: Winton C. Hoch. Art direction: Arthur Lonergan, Hal Pereira. Film editing: Terry O. Morse. Music: Van Cleave.

The average third-grader today can spot the scientific inaccuracies of Robinson Crusoe on Mars. Who doesn't cringe when Christopher Draper (Paul Mantell) tries to start a fire by feeding the flames with the oxygen from his supply tank, an attempt most likely to send him up in a large fireball? The special effects, too, are primitive: The attacking spaceships are two-dimensional, paintings on a black backdrop. But does any of this really matter? With older films, even science fiction, datedness often counts for less than style and substance. Byron Haskin's movie has both, largely because it's derived from a classic source, Daniel Defoe's 1719 tale of solitude and companionship. It plays on the primal fear of loneliness that makes solitary confinement the worst of punishments and is the backbone of many classic adventure stories, including such other great sci-fi films as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) and The Martian (Ridley Scott, 2015). Even though Draper has a companion on Mars, a small monkey, his inability to converse with another human drives him near to madness -- a hallucination of his dead companion, Col. McReady (Adam West) -- before he finally encounters his Friday (Victor Lundin). Even then the breakthrough is slow to come: The alien humanoid at first refuses to speak, causing Draper to fume that he's "an idiot" and "retarded." But finally the alien trusts Draper enough to speak and the rapport blooms into a kind of interplanetary bromance as they learn each other's language and culture. (The master-servant Crusoe-Friday relationship remains, however: Draper expects his Friday to learn English first. Colonialism dies hard.) So forget everything we've learned from the various NASA probes about Martian terrain -- the absence of flaming volcanoes or of anything resembling "canals," let alone abundance of water and subaqueous plant life -- and accept the movie's vision for what it is: more a fable about long-ingrained human character than about what the future may be like. Byron Haskin's direction keeps the action crisp and steady, and while the studio sets have a certain cheesy quality, the footage shot at Death Valley's Zabriskie Point is often strikingly real.

Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948)

Lizabeth Scott and Dick Powell in Pitfall

John Forbes: Dick Powell
Mona Stevens: Lizabeth Scott
Sue Forbes: Jane Wyatt
J.B. MacDonald: Raymond Burr
Bill Smiley: Byron Barr
District Attorney: John Litel
Tommy Forbes: Jimmy Hunt
Ed Brawley: Selmer Jackson

Director: André De Toth
Screenplay: Karl Kamb
Based on a novel by Jay Dratler
Cinematography: Harry J. Wild
Art direction: Arthur Lonergan
Film editing: Walter Thompson
Music: Louis Forbes

André De Toth's Pitfall is a noir-tinged cautionary fable about midlife ennui. Married to his childhood sweetheart, Sue, John Forbes is bored with his job at an insurance company and with his suburban life in general. But then he gets a case involving the recovery of the assets of Bill Smiley, who is doing time for embezzlement. The sleazy private eye Forbes has hired, J.B. MacDonald, has tracked down some of the loot to Smiley's mistress, Mona Stevens. Forbes decides to pay her a visit, but not before MacDonald, with a nudge-nudge, wink-wink, urges him to put in a good word with Mona about him. Forbes's visit to Mona will turn into an affair that earns the enmity of not only MacDonald, who is obsessed with her, but also Smiley, whose jail term is almost up. The whole thing ends with a couple of corpses and a badly damaged marriage. De Toth handles it with a minimum of sugarcoating on the life of the Forbeses, even though they have a cute little boy named Tommy, and with a great deal of suspense as the hulking MacDonald, well-played by Raymond Burr in his heaviest heavy mode, gets Forbes more deeply involved in his relationship with Mona -- despite the best efforts of both Forbes and Mona to put an end to it.