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.

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.

Coco (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017)

Coco (Lee Unkrich, Adrian Molina, 2017)

Cast: voices of Anthony Gonzalez, Gael García Bernal, Benjamin Bratt, Alanna Ubach, Renee Victor, Jaime Camil, Alfonso Arau, Natalia Cordova-Buckley, Edward James Olmos, Luis Valdez, Cheech Marin. Screenplay: Lee Unkrich, Jason Katz, Matthew Aldrich, Adrian Molina. Cinematography: Matt Aspbury, Danielle Feinberg. Production design: Harley Jessup. Film editing: Steve Bloom, Lee Unkrich. Music: Michael Giacchino.

When Coco was being made, there was no thought that the film's vibrant evocation of Mexican culture might be seen as a nose-thumbing directed at a xenophobic POTUS. If anything, the concern ran the other way, especially after a bone-headed attempt by Disney Pixar to trademark the phrase "Día de los Muertos" was met with outrage and charges that it was "cultural appropriation and exploitation at its worst." The Disney people backed off, explaining that they were only hoping to protect what was then one of the working titles of the film. Today, after three years of talk about building walls and fighting off invasions, Coco can probably be seen as a vehicle for understanding rather than co-opting another culture. Or what is better, it can be enjoyed for vivid color, imaginative design, and engaging characterization, and for its crowd-pleasing accomplishment of what Pixar and Disney have always done best: blend jokes and scares and music in a wholly satisfying way.