Reviews: Musicals
TOO LONG. Too long.
Look, I think Julie Andrews is legitimately wonderful. I watched Mary Poppins about a thousand times as a kid. I may have even sat through one of the Princess Diaries movies just to see how a class act maintains her dignity throughout the Disney cheese. (The answer to that one seems to be, by having a British accent and by looking approximately twenty years younger than she actually is.)
This movie was too long, though, for the amount of actual plot that it had. The problem is (bear with me, I know how this sounds) they just kept breaking into these pointless, story-stalling songs. I remember at least two songs which seemed to be primarily about birds that went “Cu-ckooo, cu-ckoooo.” Giving up three hours of your afternoon, being forced to watch a bunch of perky children singing about cuckoo birds just begs the question…what’s the point? (It might also have been just one song, but sung twice.)
OK, I know what the point is. They’re juxtaposing the innocence of the children with the evil of the Nazis. I get it. I just find it really boring—and I feel better admitting that since I read the Wikipedia entry of the movie, which reveals that legendary film critic Pauline Kael panned the movie so bad she was ultimately fired from the magazine that was employing her at the time. Pauline Kael rocks!
Click ahead for Jimmy Cagney, Fred and Ginger, and more musical bashing!
The plot of The Sound of Music was too thin; Swing Time's plot was too random and contrived. See if you can follow me here: The movie begins as Fred Astaire’s buddies on some kind of male chorus line are trying to keep him from getting married, intercepting phone calls from his waiting bride, tricking him into giving up his pants in service to some falsehood about them needing to be tailored immediately. When the bride’s father declares he is revoking his permission—i.e., Fred can’t marry the girl anymore—all the guys smirk in satisfaction. It’s never exactly explained why these guys would do something so awful so casually.
There’s some further nonsense with a quarter, through which Fred meets Ginger. For reasons I couldn’t quite fathom, he follows her to the dancing school where she’s an instructor. He pretends to be hopeless to the point that she gets FIRED, then he calls her boss into the room and says actually, she’s the greatest, look what he’s learned, and does this lengthy choreographed routine, which Ginger quickly jumps into, because that’s how musicals are.
He and Ginger enter into some kind of contract where they dance together because Fred is ostensibly trying to make money to win back his original lady. The audience forgets this, the movie forgets this, Fred forgets this, until the original girl comes back. Ginger gets upset, Fred sings a schmalzy song, they dance beautifully together. I check the run time on the movie and go, “Whew. Almost done.”
I had DVR’d the movie, and within twenty minutes I was wishing that I could fast forward through the non-singing, non-dancing moments. If it wasn’t a list movie, I would have. Or, you know, turned it off. That’s the problem with these cookie-cutter musicals—their plotlines really are just sort of platforms for Fred and Ginger to dance on. And lots of people are A-OK with that state of affairs, but I just need a better story to hold on to.
A far superior Fred and Ginger movie (if such is what you're craving) is Top Hat. The story is just as fluffy (the entire mistaken identity plot hinges on none of the characters ever saying, “Wait a minute—wait a minute—just so I’m clear—are you pointing at the skinny guy or the guy with the cigar?”) but it still makes a bit more sense. Also the secondary actors are superior (Edward Everett Horton!)—and in Top Hat, Astaire doesn’t dance in blackface, which is just a gross reminder of what the 1930s were actually like in terms of mainstream racism.
Or, better yet, watch Vivacious Lady, which replaces boring old Fred with Jimmy Stewart, and gives you all the Ginger you could want, including this awesome scene in which Ginger beats up Jimmy’s bitchy ex-fiancee.
Last but not least...
The story of George M. Cohan, one of the first Broadway stars, and the composer of numerous patriotic bandstand tunes, including “Over There” and the eponymous “Yankee Doodle Dandy.” Cohan is played by James Cagney, who made a dozen gangster pictures in the 30s and 40s and then decided to play against type as a singin’ and dancin’ man. He did exceedingly well at both and won an Oscar for the performance.
Still, the movie didn’t really grab me. As musicals go, the story was tighter than most—they had a man’s entire biography to cover, after all—but the scenes in which stuff actually happened in Cohan’s life were very short, and they were always followed up by a 5 to 10 minute musical number depicting his latest stage hit. “You’re a Grand Old Flag”—do I want to hear anybody singing and dancing to “You’re a Grand Old Flag” for ten minutes? TCM aired the movie on the fourth of July, of course, and the movie came out smack in the middle of World War II, so all of the patriotism has context. Just not my favorite music, or my favorite cinematic experience.
The weirdest thing about the movie is the end—Cohan, an old man long retired from stage, is recruited by a producer friend to act in a musical about a U.S. president. Cohan, as the president, wears small, round glasses, refers to his wife as “Mrs. R.” and stirs the audience in rebellion against the Axis powers. Then he dances down a staircase and across a table. Roosevelt—he’s Roosevelt—and he’s dancing? I know that there was an unspoken agreement in the 30s and 40s that Roosevelt’s disability would be not be referred to by the media…that average people didn’t even necessarily know about it…but did nobody find this musical—which really existed—a bit unseemly?
Oh! And more blackface! Sigh.
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