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. 

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.

Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952)

Egotism is accounted a sin, or at best a character flaw, but what would art, at least since the Renaissance, be without it? Imagine the history of motion pictures without the egotism of John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock, or Orson Welles, not to mention countless movie stars. So it comes as a bit of a shock to find David Thomson, in his essay on Singin' in the Rain in Have You Seen ...?, making reference to "[Gene] Kelly's rather frantic ego." I do know what he means: I've always found the "Broadway Melody/Broadway Rhythm" number overlong and overdone, suggesting Kelly's attempt at being regarded as "serious" dancer, especially in the pas de quatre with Cyd Charisse, her train, and a wind machine. And its ending, with the zoom-in-close of Kelly's face, does seem a bit de trop. Thomson also hints that producer Arthur Freed may have been indulging his ego by loading the film with his and Nacio Herb Brown's catalog of songs, instead of those of better songwriters. Freed, as the head of the legendary "Freed Unit" at MGM, had won a best picture Oscar for another Gene Kelly musical based on a songwriter's catalog, An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), which was wall-to-wall George Gershwin. And even though Singin' in the Rain is a better movie, it might have been nicer if it had songs by Harold Arlen or Cole Porter or Rodgers and Hart. Porter at least gets plagiarized in Donald O'Connor's "Make 'em Laugh" number, the tune for which is virtually identical to that of "Be a Clown," which Porter wrote for the Freed-produced The Pirate (Vincente Minnelli, 1948). That said, the Freed-Brown songs are entirely appropriate to the era depicted: They date from such 1929 MGM musicals as The Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont) and The Hollywood Revue of 1929 (Charles Reisner), exactly the ones parodied in Singin' in the Rain's montage of early movie musicals. My point is that egos are not enough to spoil the wonder that is Singin' in the Rain, widely regarded as one of the greatest movie musicals, and in my opinion just plain one of the great movies. Much credit goes to the expert comedy writing of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and to Harold Rosson's cinematography. Kelly and Stanley Donen wisely did what directors of movie musicals so often fail to do: rely on long takes and full-body shots during dance numbers. As for the performers, no one in the film, and that includes Kelly and O'Connor, ever reached this peak again. Debbie Reynolds was too often betrayed into perkiness, but she is human and appealing here. Jean Hagen stole scenes from everyone and received one of the movie's two Oscar nominations -- the other was to Lennie Hayton for scoring -- but her movie career stalled and she wound up doing TV guest appearances. As for egotism, it pains me to remember that Singin' in the Rain was not nominated for the best picture Oscar winner for 1952. The winner was The Greatest Show on Earth, directed by one of the great egotists, Cecil B. DeMille. Some egotists are geniuses; others are hacks.