It's Miller Time!

Wise: Howdy, Werth.  Have a piece of cake!  

Werth: Is it already birthday time again at Film Gab?  No wonder I can't fit into my Z. Cavaricci jeans.

Wise: Quit your bellyaching and put on these tap shoes.  It's Ann Miller's birthday.  

Werth: Why didn't you say so in the first place?  Make it a big piece of cake and I'll break out my dancing fan.  

Wise: Just be sure to leave some room for soup.  

Werth: All that's missing from that number is a giant saltine.

Wise: Miller's career really took off in the late 40's when she landed at MGM.  Her tough girl style and gorgeous gams injected a jolt of electricity into the sumptuous musicals produced by Arthur Freed, but few films take as full advantage of her talents as On the Town (1949).  The film follows three sailors on shore leave—Gene Kelly as Gabey, Frank Sinatra as Chip, and Jules Munshin as Ozzie—as they sing, dance and find sweethearts while exploring New York City.  

Miller plays Claire, an anthropologist with a penchant for prehistoric man, who eventually falls for Ozzie, while Chips falls for Hildy (Betty Garrett) and Gabey falls for the elusive Miss Turnstiles, Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen).  This was the first movie that Gene Kelly co-directed with Stanley Donen, and his signature, muscular style of dancing infuses the film with the kind of aggressive exuberance that was so much a part of his persona.  

Werth: You say aggressive exuberance, I say unrelenting ham.

Wise: At Kelly's insistence, a fair amount of the film was shot on location in New York—most notably the American Museum of Natural History, Rockefeller Center, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge—instead of recreating those landmarks in the studio, and, surprisingly, the juxtaposition of the real and the manufactured works incredibly well.  

Cinematographer Harold Rossen makes the city look like a picture postcard, transforming the streets and avenues into a fantasy landscape that blends seamlessly with the Hollywood sets.  


Werth: The one downside of shooting on location was the crowd of screaming fans that showed-up wherever Sinatra appeared.

Wise: The screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green is full of zest and wit while highlighting each member of the leading sextet.  Sinatra shares a duet with Betty Garrett that manages to be both funny and touching, and Kelly leads Vera-Ellen in one of the dream ballets that were rapidly becoming part of his movie signature.  

But it's Ann Miller who steals scene after scene, not just with her top notch dancing skills, but with the incredible force of her personality as it bursts from the screen.

Werth: Before Miller was known for tap-dancing her way through scenery, she appeared in 1938's Best Picture Oscar-winner, You Can't Take It with You. Based on the Pulitzer prize-winning George S. Kaufman play of the same name, You Can't stars Jean Arthur as Alice Sycamore, a secretary who has a yen for her young boss, Tony Kirby (a pre-Mr. Smith James Stewart.) Their romance is running hot and heavy until Tony tries to introduce his upper-crust mother and father to Alice's bohemian family.

Wise: This is beginning to sound like the plot to a Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell flick.

Werth: Besides the fact that the Sycamore clan is a bunch of artistic, anarchist goofballs led by the folksy Grandpa Vanderhof (a usually seated Lionel Barrymore), their home is the last holdout on the block that Tony's dad (Edward Arnold) is attempting to buy out before demolishing it to make way for his new munitions plant. 

This makes for an uncomfortable dinner, made even more uncomfortable by sister Essie's (Miller) clumsy attempts at ballet in the living room. According to her teacher, Kolenkhov, "Confidentially, it steenks."

Wise: I'm sure Ann Miller mostly smelled of Jean Naté and shoe polish.

Werth: Social stratum collide in a courtroom and love has to find a way to overcome the gap between the haves and the have-nots all while Essie twirls and falls on the carpet. The little man versus corporate greed story was one that director Frank Capra made his stock in trade. 

He'd already won two Oscars for Best Director (It Happened One Night (1934) and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), and the Academy would add another one to his mantle for You Can't. Capra had a knack for kooky characters, like the denizens of the Sycamore home, and created supportive, tough communities on screen that resembled his ideal of America.  

You Can't isn't as compelling as Mr. Deeds, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Meet John Doe (1941), or It's a Wonderful Life (1946), partly because it feels preachy in a way that those other films don't. But it's still a great example of the successful post-Depression/pre-WWII films that gave cinematic voice to the political struggle going on in America, all while audiences munched away on their popcorn.

Wise: And on that note, I think I'll try to hunt down a video of Ann Miller with Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies.

Werth: You're welcome. Tune-in next week for more fancy footwork here at Film Gab. 

 

 
 

Happy 100 Lew!

Wise: Welcome back, Werth!

Werth: Good to be back, Wise. I see you held down the fort with your in-depth review of the new Oz flick.

Wise: It had everything except Mila Kunis' viral BBC Radio interview.

Werth: Now that I'm back, I thought we could wish a happy 100th birthday to Hollywood agent icon Lew Wasserman.

Wise: He repped a Film Gab's who's who of stars: Bette Davis, Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Stewart, Judy Garland, Henry Fonda, Myrna Loy, Ginger Rogers, Gregory Peck, Billy Wilder and Gene Kelly

Werth: Wasserman became just as famous as many of his clients when, in the 1950's as head of MCA, he helped change the film industry through the practice of film packaging where Wasserman would gather a roster of talent across the spectrum of film specialties (actors, directors, writers, production designers, costumers, you name it!) and then pitch them out on projects as a whole. Not only did this make certain that MCA made a lot of money, but it also kept production teams together, ensuring that these hit-making artisans worked on more than one movie together. 

Wasserman's relationship with Alfred Hitchcock is a perfect example. With MCA since the early Fifties, Hitchcock had become a household commodity through his television show and hit movies, but in 1959, with Wasserman's help, he would make one of his most iconic and popular films, North by Northwest.

Wise: Spy capers were a lot more thrilling in the days before Google Maps.

Werth: From the Saul Bass opening with vivid animation and Bernard Herrmann's sprinting score, North by Northwest flies (pun intended.) Cary Grant is Roger Thornhill, a bachelor advertising exec who accidentally interrupts a page at the Oak Room in the old Plaza Hotel who is calling for George Kaplan. This one quirk of fate sets into motion a cross-country, mistaken identity, cat-and-mouse game between Thornhill and criminal mastermind Phillip Vandamm (James Mason). 

It's a literal planes, trains and automobiles adventure as Thornhill attempts to find the elusive George Kaplan and clear his name before Vandamm or his nefarious "secretary" Leonard (performed with gay, jilted-lover relish by Martin Landau) snuff him out.

Wise: Fey henchmen love to snuff. 

Werth: While riding the Twentieth Century train to Chicago, Thornhill winds up bunking with Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), a cold, mysterious Hitchcock blond if there ever was one. The chemistry between Grant and Marie Saint nearly burns the celluloid. 

Their dinner scene on the train and subsequent makeout session is one of the sexiest bits in classic film that just barely goes under the censors' radars. It's that type of energy that whisks this film through its twists and turns with only small moments to stop and catch our breath and appreciate Grant's Foster Brooks imitation.

Wise: That makes me thirsty for a bourbon, a sports car and a cap gun.
 

Werth: Hitchcock puts the Vistavision film format to its most spectacular use, creating horizons and heights that fill the widescreen with a desolate Indiana cornfield and the top of Mount Rushmore. 

The post-Vertigo use of technicolor is a shade less overt, but still the siennas, salmon pinks, blue greens, and reds punctuate settings and costumes, earning the film a Best Art Direction-Set Decoration Oscar nomination. Many of the sets start off as real exterior shots, but the cornfield, Mount Rushmore, and the U.N. all become meticulously crafted sets or dreamy matte paintings under Hitchcock's direction. 

At the beginning of the film Thornhill says in advertising, "there is no such thing as a lie." In a Hitchock film, everything, from the blonde to the Vandamm house set on top of Mount Rushmore is one thrilling, cinematic lie.
  

Wise: There may not be quite so many lies in The Band Wagon (1953), but it does involve some fancy footwork from another of Wasserman's clients, Fred Astaire.  Considered by many as one of the best musicals from old Hollywood, The Band Wagon casts Astaire as fading movie star Tony Hunter who absconds to New York where he hopes to revive his film career by starring in a Broadway show written by his old pals Lester and Lily Marton (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray).  Hoping to make a sensation, the trio convinces Broadway wunderkind Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan) to direct the show; instead he transforms the Martons's madcap musical into a grim update of Faust.  

Werth:  I know when I think of Faust, I think of tap numbers.

Wise: Buchanan's one brilliant coup is casting ballet star Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse) as the female lead despite the reservations of her manager/boyfriend Paul Byrd (Thomas Mitchell).  Beyond that, his grandiose ideas prove to be a flop, and the highly anticipated tryout in New Haven bombs so badly that all the financial backers flee the production.   To save the show, Tony sells his art collection to fund an overhaul and ends up with both a Broadway smash and the girl.  

Werth: The art market was very good in 1953. 

Wise: Screenwriting team Betty Comden and Adolph Green have obvious fun spoofing their own reputations—Fabray and Levant brilliantly capture the team's sophistication and its neuroses—as well as director Vincente Minnelli in the over-the-top campiness of Buchanan.  

Of course Minnelli brings his own signature use of color and deft camera moves to the mix, although he wisely allows Astaire's genius to take center stage.  The sparks never really fly between 

Astaire and Charisse, nevertheless Astaire's dancing is impossibly romantic whether with a shoeshine man (Leroy Daniels) in a Times Square penny arcade or with Charisse in a soundstage version of Central Park that's almost better than the real thing.  

Werth: It's all thanks to the late, great Lew Wasserman—who was better at picking movies than he was at picking eyewear.

Wise: Check back with Film Gab next week for more of our favorite picks.

Gabbing in the Rain!

Werth: Hi, Wise.

Wise: Hi, Werth. What's with the long puss?

Werth: I feel like we let our readers down last weekend.

Wise: We didn't mention Joan Crawford enough in the weekly post?

Werth: No. I just didn't realize how rainy the entire weekend was going to be. We could have dug into our "For a Rainy Day" movie vault. And now this weekend is going to be sunny.

Wise: I say we open the vault! It's got to be raining somewhere.

Werth: Yay!—'cause I watched the perfect rainy day movie last weekend—1986's Little Shop of Horrors. Frank Oz's off-Broadway to screen adaptation isn't just a great rainy day movie because it starts off with a thunderstorm, but it also combines two of the best rainy day film genres—horror and musicals.

Wise: Isn't that also why you like Marie's Crisis so much? 

Werth: Rick Moranis stars as nerdy Seymour Krelborn who is a self-confirmed "slob" working at a failing florist shop run by the gruff Mr. Mushnik (Vincent Gardenia). When Seymour brings in an exotic-looking, bulbous flower he found, miraculously, business picks up. He is soon getting lots of attention from the press, Mr. Mushnik, and comely store assistant, Audrey (Ellen Greene). But the rapidly growing celebrity plant begins to show its true colors and if Seymour wants to keep his new-found fame, fortune and arm-candy, he'll need to feed his plant much more than mulch.

Wise: There's a manure joke hiding in there somewhere...

Werth: The entire production is a fun '50's musical fantasy that reveres rather than lampoons the campy drive-in horror genre. Alan Menken and Howard Ashman received the first of many Oscar noms for their rollicking and soulful songs that elevate these stock characters (and a plant) to a higher performance level.  Greene is luminous as the fragile, stupid Audrey who dates a sadist but dreams of moving to someplace fancy, "not like Levittown." 

Steve Martin is hysterical as the aforementioned sadistic dentist and in a small scene with a masochistic dental patient (Bill Murray) both actors bring a classic SNL quality to the proceedings.

Wise: They're just two wild and crazy guys. 

Werth: And amazingly enough, the alien plant Audrey II (fashioned and operated by former members of Jim Henson's crew) grimaces, leers and chews his way into our hearts in a startlingly "human" fashion. Even though the original off-Broadway ending was changed to suit the less-theatre-y movie audience, Little Shop will leave you singing "Suddenly Seymour" no matter what the weather is doing.  

Wise: My favorite rainy day movie is Singing in the Rain (1952).  

Werth: Appropriately enough.  

Wise: One of the greatest movie musicals of all time, Singing in the Rain throbs with the top talent producer Arthur Freed could muster at the greatest of all the movie musical factories, MGM.  

Gene Kelly stars as Don Lockwood, a silent film star at the top of his game, whose career is suddenly threatened by the advent of sound.  With his hardscrabble beginnings as a Vaudeville song and dance man, Don seems to have the wherewithal to survive the transition from silents to talkies, although his beautiful but dim co-star Lina Lamont (in a hilarious and high-pitched performance from Jean Hagen) might not be so lucky.  

Along the way Don falls for scrappy, but sensitive chorus girl Kathy Selden, played by Debbie Reynolds in her star-making role.  

Werth: Long before she was a broad or a collector of Hollywood memorabilia.  

Wise: Like a lot of the big budget musicals of the time, Singing in the Rain is a portmanteau of greatest hits—in this case, the legendary Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrangled a script from the most memorable collaborations of producer Freed and composer Nacio Herb Brown.  Despite this patchwork past, the film plays as a seamless work of art, mostly because of the exuberant performances of the entire cast.  Gene Kelly—

Werth: Who was probably second only to Mickey Rooney in scenery chewing.  

Wise: —and uses that brashness to flesh out his role while Debbie Reynold's own hunger to be a star makes her Kathy all the more believable.  But it's not just the stars who make the film, it's all the character parts too: Mallard Mitchell's dour studio head, Cyd Charisse as Don's dance partner, and Madge Blake's delightful burlesque of Luella Parsons.  

Best of all, however, is Donald O'Connor's as Cosmo Brown, Don's former dance partner and current studio chum.  While technically a second banana role, O'Connor shines in the both the comedic and dramatic bits, but most spectacularly in the dance numbers where his head-spinning gymnastics provides the perfect compliment to Kelly's aggressive and athletic style.  

Werth: Sounds like we have our next rainy weekend already planned.  

Wise: I never need an excuse to indulge in a little musical film festival.  

Werth: Remember to bring your rain boots and check in next week for more film forecasts from Film Gab.