Fred Zinnemann | Oklahoma! / 1955

gene nelson, charlotte greenwood, and chorus

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sony Levien and William Ludwig (screenplay, adapted from the musical by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein and based on the play Lynn Riggs), Fred Zinnemann (director) Oklahoma! / 1955

 

One of my favorite childhood musical memories is the exuberant "Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City" early on in Oklahoma! What begins merely as a comic number, with Will Parker (Gene Nelson) recounting his small town hick reactions to the big city, Kansas City, gradually is transformed into a statement of joy, camaraderie, and community through Nelson's and Greenwood's great dancing and Agnes de Milles' skill as a choreographer.

     Much of the "action" of the scene lies dormant in its hunkering cowboys, Will among them to begin. But as he recounts the wonders of Kansas City, it is clear that he cannot for long remain still, particularly when they've built a building seven stories high and a dancing girl who has revealed that everything she had was absolutely real. The actual dance begins, innocently enough, with Will executing a two-step that has taken his world by surprise, supplanting the waltz! Although Eller (the long-legged, high-kicking Charlotte Greenwood) joins in for a few minutes, the cowboys don't like it.

     When a few minutes later, Will taps out the first few steps of Ragtime, they like it even less. But the women are smitten, particularly two younger girls, and before you know it, they are cautiously attempting to join in. His cowboy friends, however, are still not convinced, and Will, accordingly, returns to the hunker, before, one by one, the men pick up the rhythms and try out the dance. Suddenly everyone is up and dancing, moving forward and away, backs to the camera, as Aunt Eller holds out her hands, in an iconic DeMille movement, that suggests that the community sensibility has prevailed. Soon there is a whole chorus of rag-timing, tap-dancing cowboys, which so thrills Will that he takes out his lasso skillfully stepping in and out of the symbolic circle it creates. In his ecstasy of the shared experience, he leaps upon a railroad car just as the train takes off. As in any good western, his horse comes to his rescue whereupon he is returned to his comrades and friends.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2011 / Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2011).

 

H. C. Potter | Three for the Show / 1955

marge and gower champion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Edward Hope and Leonard Stern (screenplay, based on W. Somerset Maughm's Two Many Husbands, George Duning (music), H. C. Potter (director) Three for the Show / 1955

 

Only musical fanatics like myself would ever remember this mediocre musical, a film made to bring Betty Grable, through the choreography of Jack Cole, more into the musical mainstream, hoping to give her the kind of boost Cole did by teaching Marilyn Monroe her moves in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot. I'm not, however, convinced of Grable's dancing skills.

     Far more interesting to me is Marge and Gower Champion’s more ballroom dancing style in the lovely, almost non-musical performance of George and Ira Gershwin's, "Someone to Watch Over Me." It begins as a practice session, in which Marge is talking about a date she has that night, and wondering what color of a dress to wear. The two patter back and forth as they make the notable spins, parallel parts, and lifts that might be said to define the Champions' dancing style.

    One lift, however, seems to be different, as the couple’s lips come close to each other, and, still talking up a blue-storm, they try it again. Gower proclaims "It is different!" as we perceive that, for the first time he has noticed her as someone more than just a dancing partner.

     Marge continues the conversation and the two carry out the requisite turns, lifts, and balletic runs—that is until suddenly they reach the staircase, the song which has quietly begun in the background, crescendoing while the two take off in a beautifully realized dance that basically defines their work. Evidently Jack Cole choreographed the number, even though Gower would serve that position in most of their pieces before and after.

     I might have also chosen their wonderful, jazzier, "Casbah" piece in Everything I Have Is Yours of 1952, if it weren't that the movie is so awful that I wouldn't dare send anyone to see it just for the sake of that dance, even if they could find it.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2011).

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly | It's Always Fair Weather / 1955 [dance only]

gene kelly, dan dailey, and michael kidd

by Douglas Messerli

 

Betty Comden and Adolph Green (screenplay, music and lyrics), André Previn (music), Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly (directors) It's Always Fair Weather / 1955

 

One of the most under estimated film musicals of all time, It's Always Fair Weather concerns the return home of three soldiers, their last night on the town in New York, and their reunion ten years later in the same city. Predictably they have grown apart in the interim, having taken on vastly different careers, with Ted (Gene Kelly) ending up as a down-on-his-luck boxing promoter, Doug (Dan Dailey) as an ulcer-ridden advertising man, and Angie (Michael Kidd) as the owner of a hamburger stand. Like Sondheim's Follies' showgirls they now all seem to live diminished lives from what they had imagined might be facing them that joyous night a decade earlier.

      When Ted meets a girl, Jackie (Cyd Charisse), he falls in love, and behind his back she arranges for the three to appear on a television show together.

       Audiences of 1955, many then fixated each night on their television sets, also did not like the bleak message of the script. But today the film seems to have a depth of meaning that many successes of the era do not. The film is also helped by several great song and dance numbers, two of which I believe are among the best of film dances.

      The first, "The Binge," danced by Kelly, the often overlooked Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd (known best as a choreographer, in films of Guys and Dolls and The Band Wagon) is an explosion of athletic movement, as the three soldiers, having left a bar drunk, take to the street. At first they are all so drunk they can hardly stand, as Dailey, in particular, manipulates his legs into a series of positions that makes him look more like a rubber Gumby than a man with ball-sockets. Kelly kicks Dailey, Dailey momentarily steps upon Kelly's ass, before Kidd is swept up upon Dailey's shoulders as Dailey-Kidd dance a quick rumba with Kelly and take to the street.

     Stopping a taxi, the three move in an out, through doors, windows, and ceiling, joining up each time before returning to the endless intricacies of taxi hopping. No sooner do they finish that breathless scenario than they leap down the street, each attaching a trash can lid to his left foot, the three performing a seemingly impossible tap with metal lid, a stunning terpsichorean feat! 

     Finally, the three dance off down the street once more, reentering the dive to dance across tables and onto the bar itself before ordering up two more drinks.

     Later, discovering that his new girlfriend, Jackie, likes him, Ted decides that he "likes himself" ("I Like Myself"), and decked out with a pair of roller skates (he has just exited a skating parlor), he skates through the streets as he croons the song. Before long, a crowd has gathered, as he begins to tap, gradually with greater and greater ferocity, alternating between curb and gutter, before closing with higher leaps in the center of the street until posing with Kelly's usual smiling face, hands out for the cheers of the audience. Pure hokum, brilliantly done.

 

Los Angeles, April 14, 2011

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2011).

Valentin Merz | Rêver comme lui (Dream On) aka Dreaming Like Louis / 2020

the complications of paradise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Valentin Merz and Claude Muret (screenplay), Valentin Merz (director) Rêver comme lui (Dream On) aka Dreaming Like Louis / 2020 [19 minutes]

 

Paul (Leon Dave Salazar), whose family has a beautiful chateau in the country, invites Louis (Simon Frenay) to spend the summer with him since his sister, their mother having recently died, is determined to soon sell it so that they buy another house in Brittany.

   The beautiful lovers are pretty much alone, except for their neighbors Sabine and her husband Pierre (Catherine Babier and Jean-Charles de Quillacq) who visit them twice and another time in Louis’ dreams. Paul is a pianist and occasionally plays the out-of-tune piano, but mostly during the long hot summer days, they sleep, have sex in various manifestations, take walks in the magnificent countryside, and play tennis. It seems nearly idyllic.

   But there is a deep tension between the two. Paul seems tired and nervous, and Louis begins to have surreal hyper-real dreams, some of which involve S&M-like control—in one such dream Sabine and Pierre appear in uniform, Pierre demanding Paul strip and perform fellatio, when Sabine scolds him for it, replacing him with Louis and in another Louis dressing up as a woman who Paul rims but in the process truly hurts him. In fact, after a while we cannot tell what is real and what is a dream. Paul goes into town to get his medicine but ends up fucking the druggist. Louis kills Paul with a chimney poker.

    Is there something malevolent in the chateau itself or is their relationship simply falling apart. It is impossible to know in this lush paradise where the dreams stem from and why they’re plaguing both men. But it finally ends up with Paul madly digging with his bare hands into the earth, with Sabine comforting him. When Paul declares everything’s going wrong, her answer perhaps expresses the calm clarity of older age: “It’ normal. Life is complicated.”

    Perhaps it is the fact that nearby stands a cemetery in which are buried all of his previous family members. Are his fears being transferred to Louis? And what is the medicine that Paul has obtained from the druggist. Is death the specter that is destroying their relationship?

     It ends with Louis’ strange question that seems to be haunting both of these beauties: “I was wondering. If you killed me how long you would be able to hide it from the others.” Paul asks, “Why are you thinking about that?” “Well…since we’re alone.”

     Paul reassures him, “Everything’s going to be alright my love….”

     And so the film ends, with laundry hung out to dry.

    This odd little love story is always on the verge of becoming a horror tale, but pulls away from the genre as it returns to the perfection of everything surrounding the inner terror both face. Sometimes our dreams are far worse than our lives.

     Swiss director Valentin Merz has created an intriguing angst-filled film.

 

Los Angeles, December 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).

 

Jason Bradbury | My Sweet Prince / 2019

the hook-up

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jason Bradbury (screenwriter and director) My Sweet Prince / 2019 [12 minutes]

 

15-year-old Tommy (Yoni Roodner) is in love with best friend’s friend, but in the many videos and real-time scenes that entail his and his friends (Jacob Avery, Rio Thake, Oliver Bickers and their girls, Sophie Oliver and Aoife Checkland) British boy and girl hooliganism and drug parties, Tommy sits alone watching the boy of his dreams make out with the girls. He’s furious for his own infatuation, and for the frustration of not having any of his feelings returned.

    But this is 2003, a time as British director Jason Bradbury reminds us of alcopops (a sweet mixed alcoholic drink that is made to imitate a soft drink), VHS tapes (many of which we are shown), endless cigarettes, boys, MSN Messenger, and Placebo. When his mother isn’t around, Tommy escapes to his computer in an attempt to hook up with a figure whose moniker is “My Sweet Prince.”

     Yet the computer, sitting in an open hall of the house, certainly doesn’t provide him much privacy to discover his gay identity, let alone to live out his fantasies in mutual masturbation. Interrupted again by his mother, evidently a hospital worker, he makes an appointment for 1:00 to meet on line.

     Sneaking back to the computer late at night, he has to cover the connecting noisy link up with a pillow so his mother might not hear the phone rings and clunky hookup noises. But finally, the image of a young boy, looking to be about his age, appears on the screen. “Can you see me?” Tommy asks, looking up to see his Sweet Prince (Harry Saward) at the very same moment. We are sure these boys will get on just fine.

 

Los Angeles, December 18, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).