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.

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates. Screenplay: John Patrick, Arthur Sheekman, based on a novel by James Jones. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: William A. Horning, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Like Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli had a special touch with the movie melodrama, taking its often objectively silly elements seriously enough that you can actually believe in them. The James Jones novel on which the screenplay for Some Came Running was based is one of those semi-autobiographical books that writers seem to need to get out of their systems, but adapting it meant challenging the Production Code strictures, particularly on sex, at almost every turn. So the characters in the film are only as believable as the actors can make them. There's a lot of shorthand in the film about the relationships between Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) and the two women in his life, the "schoolteacher" Gwen French (Martha Hyer) and the "floozie" Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). It's not immediately clear why Dave falls in love so swiftly with Gwen, who seems to want to mentor him as a writer more than she does to sleep with him, or why he stays connected with the illiterate and rattle-brained Ginnie, to the extent of marrying her on the rebound from Gwen. Fortunately, all three actors are adept at pulling characters out of the script, where they don't seem to have been fully written. Dean Martin was just beginning to show that he could act -- Howard Hawks would complete the process the following year with Rio Bravo -- and Minnelli helped give his career a boost by casting him as the alcoholic gambler Bama Dillert. And Arthur Kennedy completes the ensemble as Dave's go-getter older brother, Frank. Minnelli makes the most of these colorful performers, to the extent that MacLaine, Kennedy, and Hyer all received Oscar nominations. But he's also adept, as he would show in 1960 with Home From the Hill, at taking a real small town location and bringing it to full life, especially in the climactic scene that takes place in the carnival celebrating the town's centennial. The location gives the film a substance and reality that the script never quite supplies.

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

The Hucksters (Jack Conway, 1947)

Cast: Clark Gable, Deborah Kerr, Sydney Greenstreet, Adolphe Menjou, Ava Gardner, Keenan Wynn, Edward Arnold, Aubrey Mather, Richard Gaines. Screenplay: Luther Davis, Edward Chodorov, George Wells, based on a novel by Frederic Wakeman. Cinematography: Harold Rosson. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Frank Sullivan. Music: Lennie Hayton.

The Hucksters was made in the era depicted in Mad Men, when men who had served in World War II were returning to their civilian jobs. In the advertising business, that included men like Don Draper in the TV series and Victor Norman in the movie, men whose wartime experience had toughened them and given them a fresh angle on the business of selling to the postwar clientele. If Mad Men seems to us to have a more reliable point of view than The Hucksters on that business, it's partly because hindsight is keener than the contemporary view, but also because popular entertainment is less tight-assed now. Frederic Wakeman's novel was a bestseller in part because it was frank about the sex lives of its characters, which movies in the Production Code era couldn't be. So Gable's Victor Norman is turned into a more buttoned-up character than Jon Hamm's Don Draper, but censorship especially worked to a disadvantage for Deborah Kerr, in her first American film. Kerr is forced to be chaste and prim -- characteristics that would type her in the movies until 1953, when Fred Zinnemann finally allowed her to have a sex life in From Here to Eternity.  Kerr's character may agree to go away for a weekend with Vic, but only after she's assured that they will have separate rooms at opposite ends of the hotel. And when she discovers that they instead have adjoining rooms with a connecting door, she bolts. The effect on the movie is to sap any chemistry that MGM might have hoped Gable and Kerr would have. In contrast, Gable and Ava Gardner, as one of Vic's old girlfriends, strike fire immediately, which makes the ending of the movie, in which Gable's and Kerr's characters wind up together, feel phony. The Hucksters, coming a year after her breakthrough performance in Robert Siodmak's The Killers, helped make Gardner a star. Kerr had to muddle through in costume parts in movies like Quo Vadis (Mervyn LeRoy, 1951) and The Prisoner of Zenda (Richard Thorpe, 1952) before finally getting a chance to be sexy. There is some zippy dialogue in the movie, and the hits on the advertising business are often funny, but the only real reason to see The Hucksters today is to watch some skillful old character actors like Adolphe Menjou and especially Sydney Greenstreet do their thing. Greenstreet plays an imperious soap manufacturer sponsor with non-negotiable ideas about what his commercials should be, and likes to intimidate his advertising clients by doing things like hocking a loogie on the conference table to get their attention. If the film had stuck with the ad biz and not strayed off into tiresomely predictable romance, it might have been a classic, or at least a lot better.