Fair Weather Friends

Our friends over at Turner Classic Movies are offering a treasure trove of Gene Kelly classics right now. Kelly is their Star of the Month, which means within the span of thirty days you can catch up on a bundle of his movies, not to mention the American Masters documentary as well as Robert Osborne’s visit with a charming Stanley Donen.

For someone like me, a longtime Kelly fan and wide-eyed enthusiast for anything that came out of MGM’s fabled Freed Unit, this retrospective is heavenly.

Last night I settled in for a near six-hour marathon and saw two old favorites and one that I have never seen until now, It’s Always Fair Weather. I know, I know: in some circles this is like saying that I never saw Seven Samurai or The Tree of Wooden Clogs. What can I say? Only that it’s nice to still be discovering a few treats from yesteryear. Lately, I’ll pop in a DVD to watch a favorite scene, listen to new commentary, or watch the extras. Sometimes watching on TV, with Robert Osborne’s dependably masterful and loving introductions, is actually more satisfying.

I don’t know how often I have seen On the Town (which along with Seven Brides for Seven Brothers remains my favorite from the MGM library. That’s right: I even prefer it to Singin’ in the Rain. I prefer An American in Paris, too. Call me crazy. Anyway, as always, On the Town is as brash and buoyant as always. It might just be the happiest movie ever made.

Roaring onto the screen in 1949, and one of the first musicals to actually shoot part of its story on location, the now familiar tale of three sailors (Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin) on 24-hour shore leave in New York City remains thoroughly engaging and even a little poignant. Ann Miller, Betty Garrett, and Vera-Ellen are on hand as the boys’ all-singing, all-dancing love interests. Alice Pearce, the only veteran of the original Broadway cast, is also on hands for additional comic relief. Ann Miller, hot off the set Easter Parade, is my favorite here, especially as she leads the gang through the frenzied “Prehistoric Man” number.

The only disappointment here is the second-rate “second version” of the musical score. The Broadway original (music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green) is brilliant. Rooted in Bernstein’s great work “Fancy Free” for Ballet Theatre, the Broadway version, which opened in 1944, has a modern day urgency that is both jazzy and symphonic. In my mind, it’s an instant classic and one of Broadway’s best mid-century compositions, pointing ahead to Candide and West Side Story. For the movie version, Comden and Green signed on and penned several new lyrics to songs by composer (and associate producer) Roger Edens. The new songs aren’t particularly bad; they just pale in comparison to the originals. Only three of Bernstein’s songs remain, plus some ballet music. (Ironically, Edens and Lennie Hayton won the movie’s only Oscar, for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture.)

Cover Girl (1944) finds Kelly freelancing over at Columbia in between Thousands Cheer and Anchors Aweigh at MGM. Directed by Charles Vidor, this was probably Columbia’s most successful musical until Funny Girl and Oliver! came along forty odd years later. The studio was never a real contender when it came to big screen song-and-dance fantasias, but it did have something to offer in the 1940’s that MGM and Paramount could not: Rita Hayworth. All these years later, it is still so easy to see what all the fuss was about. She was the ultimate movie star and, in my book, the most beautiful and enchanting creation of Hollywood’s dream machine.

The story follows Rusty Warren (Hayworth) from her hoofing at a Brooklyn nightclub with boyfriend Kelly and sidekick Phil Silvers to fast fame as a fashion model and, naturally, Broadway star. Romance troubles quickly develop, but with a happy ending guaranteed. Cover Girl, even with its creaky, farfetched plot and a couple of over-the-top musical numbers destined for camp classic status, remains a real pleasure thanks to Hayworth’s performance (and, boy, can she dance). Her Rusty Parker has been one of my favorite screen characters for as long as I can remember.

Kelly, although like everyone else, politely eclipsed by the leading lady, has some sparkling sequences. His most memorable moment is “The Alter Ego Dance” in which he dances with, well, his alter ego (just see it, don’t make me explain); it’s a clever number conceived with his cohort-in-choreography and future co-director Stanley Donen. Eve Arden is also on hand to play, who else?, Eve Arden. She’s marvelous. Phil Silvers, on the other hand, is not. I never cared much for his on-camera mugging. It was as if he never understood he was playing to a camera lens and not standing room only at the Winter Garden. There’s a wonderful Jerome Kern – Ira Gershwin score that includes one of my top-ten desert island standards, “Long Ago and Far Away.” (which was Oscar nom’d for Best Song but lost out to “Swingin’ on a Star” from that year’s Academy champ, Going My Way).

By the way, there was only one film in Hayworth’s career separating Cover Girl from her even bigger, some would say iconic, Gilda. That movie was Tonight and Every Night. Dismissed by most critics and fans, it does have songs by Jules Styne and Sammy Cahn, as well as Janet Blair and Marc Platt in supporting roles. Platt was a member of the Ballets Russes (and was one of the Pontipee brothers in Seven Brides...). Anyone who saw terrific documentary on the Ballet Russes last year will remember Platt from that. Tonight and Every Night was his movie debut. And I’ve never seen it. Until now. Happily, TCM has it on the roster for later this week.

Finally, It’s Always Fair Weather is a real treat. Watching it, you know that MGM’s musical heyday is about to come to its crashing demise. This is 1955. Big-budget Brigadoon has opened by this point and was not a hit. Les Girls, Silk Stockings and The Opposite Sex would follow (and stumble) with only Gigi left to make any real money (and gobble up the Oscars for 1958).

There’s a bitterness that hangs over this movie like a shroud.

It was first conceived as a sequel to On the Town, but that was scrapped when Sinatra and Munshin were not available. So the three happy-go-lucky Navy buddies are now three happy-go-lucky Army buddies: Kelly, Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd. Home from World War II, they toast to a lifelong friendship and vow to reunite ten years later. They do, but they’re not particularly happy and realize they have nothing left in common except a shared disillusionment. Dreams have faded, self-loathing is creeping in to stay, and the man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit cynicism of the Eisenhower years is everywhere. This is one of the darkest screenplays (by Oscar nominated Comden and Green) to ever try and dovetail with an MGM musical. It doesn’t always work but the resulting grumpiness is fascinating. The movie is obsessive in its critique of advertising and television. Given that TV was, at this time, Tinsel Town’s newly feared and hated adversary, the lampoon is pretty timely.
One question you have to ask: for whom was this Best Years of Our Lives Meets On the Town intended? Kelly and Cyd Charisse are reunited again but they never dance together (a duet was filmed, but cut, as was a lengthy solo number for Michael Kidd). There's no romance and no real laugh-out loud moments except for a couple of set pieces with Dolores Gray (see below). Other moves of the era like On the Waterfront and Marty could get away with being gloomy. They didn't have Cyd Charisse.

Among the brighter moments are Kelly’s great “I Like Myself,” in which he roller skates around town on one of the biggest sets since DW Griffith gave us Babylon in Intolerance. It’s a knock-out number and especially refreshing for those of us who have seen the puddle-jumping gaiety of Singin’ in the Rain one too many times. The whole movie looks great and showcases the wonders of wide screen nicely, escpecially in a big number featuring Charisse and a motley group of boxers.

The true highlight of this film for me, however, is a bizarre and vastly entertaining performance by Dolores Gray as Madeline Bradville, a musical Madwoman of Madison Avenue. The star of a TV show that is part variety hour and part “Queen for a Day,” Gray gives us a creation suggesting the lovechild of Audrey Meadows and Charles Nelson Reilly. On her broadcast, when not shilling for the big sponsor, she delivers a showstopper called “Thanks a lot, but no thanks” in which slithers and careens around the stage, knocking off a whole battalion of chorus boys.

Gray had just arrived from Broadway (with a Tony for Carnival in Flanders) and by way of London (where she starred for three years in the West End’s smash hit Annie Get Your Gun). She also had to her credits a less-than-happy outing with Bert Lahr in Two on the Aisle (written by Comden and Green). Maybe singing Annie Oakley to the last row of the balcony for over a thousand performances at London’s Coliseum had made Gray a bit, um, overwhelming for the camera. She’s certainly larger than life here, this close to a drag queen, and very very funny. She would quickly go on to play essentially the same character, just with wardrobe changes, in MGM’s Kismet and The Opposite Sex.

Serious movie critics can point to several scholarly reasons why this is a must-see film. And I’m sure they are right. But for me, it’s Gene Kelly on roller skates and the clowning of the daffy, delightful Dolores Gray.