On the Town (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1949)

Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, and Gene Kelly in On the Town

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen, Florence Bates, Alice Pearce, George Meader. Screenplay: Adolph Green, Betty Comden, based on their book for a musical play. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Ralph E. Winters. Music: orchestrations by Conrad Salinger, songs by Leonard Bernstein, Roger Edens, Adolph Green, Betty Comden.

A funny thing happened after I watched On the Town: I found myself humming "Lucky to Be Me" and "Some Other Time," songs by Leonard Bernstein with lyrics by Adolph Green and Betty Comden that aren't in the movie. They were in the original Broadway production, but were cut by producer Roger Edens, along with several others, and replaced by his own songs, almost all of which are forgettable. Bernstein was pissed off, as he should have been: "Lucky to Be Me" was perfect for one of Gene Kelly's numbers, and "Some Other Time" almost begged to be sung by Frank Sinatra and the rest of the company. Those excisions, and the Breen Office's insistence that the song "New York, New York" had to describe the city as "a wonderful town," instead of the original "helluva town," weigh down this much-loved but overrated MGM musical, which at least managed to do some location filming in the city after Kelly and co-director Stanley Donen rebelled against shooting the entire musical in the New York sets of the studio's back lot. The location shots give some life to the movie, but it still looks cheap and stagy in comparison with later, more lavish productions like An American in Paris (1951). Kelly and Donen, along with Comden, Green, and cinematographer Harold Rosson, would redeem themselves with Singin' in the Rain (1952), which has the wit and buoyancy On the Town sadly lacks.

Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957)

Lana Turner and Diane Varsi in Peyton Place

Cast: Lana Turner, Lee Philips, Diane Varsi, Hope Lange, Arthur Kennedy, Lloyd Nolan, Russ Tamblyn, Terry Moore, David Nelson, Barry Coe, Betty Field, Mildred Dunnock, Leon Ames, Lorne Greene. Screenplay: John Michael Hayes, based on a novel by Grace Metalious. Cinematography: William C. Mellor. Art direction: Jack Martin Smith, Lyle R. Wheeler. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Franz Waxman.

Take the sex away from Grace Metalious's lurid novel Peyton Place and what you have left is a portrait of small-town narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy, very much in the tradition of fiction by much better writers, from Mark Twain to Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and William Faulkner. Squeezed by the strictures of the Production Code, the film version of the novel becomes a kind of reworking of Thornton Wilder's Our Town. There was narrow-mindedness and hypocrisy in Wilder's Grover's Corners, but only in the background. It bubbles to the surface in the adaptation of Metalious's novel, which replaces Wilder's heroine, the romantic Emily Webb, who loves her family and her town, with the embittered Allison MacKenzie (Diane Varsi), who hates not only the gossip-ridden town but also her mother, Constance (Lana Turner), for having withheld the information that Allison is the product of Constance's liaison with a married man. The film version of Peyton Place turns what in the novel was sexual molestation of a girl by her father into a rape by her stepfather, side-stepping the incest issue a bit, and converts an abortion into a miscarriage. The randy teenagers of the novel do nothing more shocking in the film than make out a bit and go skinny-dipping. The film hints a little that the shy mama's boy Norman Page (Russ Tamblyn) may be gay -- he refers to himself as a "sissy" once -- but relieves him of that stigma by having him join the paratroopers when war breaks out and come home bold and no longer shy. (It would never occur to Hollywood or its audiences of the day that a gay man could be bold and masculine.) In short, Peyton Place makes today's viewer do a lot of decoding. Which, aside from the fact that at 157 minutes it's overlong and a lot of the dialogue is heavy-handedly expository (and sometimes just banal), doesn't fatally undermine it as entertainment. There are some very good performances: Varsi, Turner, and Tamblyn received Oscar nominations, as did Arthur Kennedy as the slavering rapist stepfather, and Hope Lange as his victim-stepdaughter. Metalious, of course, hated it all the way to the bank.

Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950)

Summer Stock (Charles Walters, 1950)

Cast: Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Eddie Bracken, Gloria DeHaven, Marjorie Main, Phil Silvers, Ray Collins, Nita Bieber, Carleton Carpenter, Hans Conried. Screenplay: George Wells, Sy Gomberg. Cinematography: Robert H. Planck. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith. Film editing: Albert Akst. Music: Conrad Salinger; songs by Harry Warren, Mack Gordon, Saul Chaplin, Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler.

Summer Stock seems almost like a warmup for that string of great MGM musicals that followed: An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951), Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952), and The Band Wagon (Minnelli, 1953). It doesn't have as good a song score as they do, and its screenplay lacks the wit that Alan Jay Lerner, Betty Comden, and Adolph Green provided for them. It has two great numbers: Judy Garland's "Get Happy" and Gene Kelly's solo in which he does miraculous things with a squeaky floorboard and a sheet of newspaper. But mostly it seems to be remembered as Garland's last film for MGM as she descended into the emotional wilderness of her later years. She was returning to the screen after being fired from Annie Get Your Gun (George Sidney, 1950), but she asked to be let out of her contract with MGM after completing Summer Stock. Aside from Kelly and Garland, there's not much else to recommend about the film. Eddie Bracken plays his usual nebbish with a sinus condition -- a variation on the character he played in Hail the Conquering Hero (Preston Sturges, 1944), and Phil Silvers does some overstated clowning. The plot is nonsense about a Broadway tryout being staged in the barn on the farm owned by Garland's character, with the usual gags about city slickers trying to feed chickens and milk cows. Garland's character is engaged to Bracken's, and Kelly's is having a fling with Garland's sister, played by Gloria DeHaven. Naturally, by film's end the sisters have switched partners. But the film belongs to Garland and Kelly whenever they're on screen, and a thumb ready for the fast-forward button to those moments gets a good workout.