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Showing posts from 2021

Men in Armour, Light Your Chandeliers!

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In many ways, Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon are companion films. Released just one year apart, both films were produced by MGM's highly successful "Musical" department, run by Arthur Freed. Both films have witty, razor-sharp scripts by the writing team of Betty Comden & Adolph Green. Both films were explicitly built around an existing song catalogue: the songs of Arthur Freed & Nacio Herb Brown for Singin' in the Rain ; the songs of Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz for The Band Wagon . Both films were vehicles for MGM's biggest musical stars (Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, respectively) and both films are thinly-disguised fables about the trials and tribulations of producing musicals in real life. While Singin' in the Rain dealt with Hollywood's extremely bumpy transition from silent to sound, The Band Wagon tells the story of Tony Hunter, a veteran song-and-dance movie star whose career has hit something of a speed bump. When his ol

In a change to our scheduled programme...

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 Those of you who came to the screening of Singin' in the Rain a few months ago may recall that I made a comment that evening which raised a question I promised I would address in the future. I had said that although Singin' in the Rain was one of my favourite films , it was not one of my favourite musicals . Inevitably, I was asked which film was my favourite musical, and I promised to return to that subject at a future date.  That date has not quite arrived , despite what I said at the end of last Thursday's event. Sorry. I know I promised everyone my favourite musical next Thursday, but on careful reflection I have decided to postpone that occasion by one week. In a last minute substitution, I have chosen an earlier film which also ranks very highly on my list of all-time-great musicals (not that I am admitting to the existence of such a list). 42nd Street is the original "Backstage Musical". It tells the story of the director and cast of a Broadway Musical

Star Wars on Original Instruments

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In the world of Early Music, playing something on "original instruments" means to play it using instruments appropriate to the historical era in which the music was written. But beyond that, it also means attempting to re-create the performance style of an era.  In other words, don't try to play Bach like it's Bruckner. The trouble is that no matter how authentic the performance might be, the audience is never going to be authentic. The musicians can be as historically accurate as they want to be; they can perform on instruments of the period, they can re-create the tuning, the phrasing, the interpretation; all of that mishegas . They can (hypothetically) give a performance that exactly re-creates the music as it sounded the first time it was ever performed. But this new, hyper-authentic performance is going to reach the ears of an audience that is completely different from the audience of the time. When an audience listens to Bach today, they are hearing Bach in the

And So, the 70's...

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 Raging Riders, and Lots of Bull Depending on who you ask, the ten-year period of 1965-1975 was either one of the best eras in American cinema, or one of the worst. While it was certainly a Golden Age if you were a straight white male who loved extreme violence, casual sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, it was far less enjoyable if such things tended to make you uncomfortable. (Three guesses how I feel about this era.) To some extent, Cinema was merely reflecting the tone of Society itself during that decade. After living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of  President Kennedy (and, two years later, Malcolm X; and a few years after that , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) there were the almost daily news reports of  violent suppression of  Civil Rights campaigners and (if you wanted some relief from the vicious and bloody domestic news) there was the ongoing horror show of the Vietnam War. Eventually of course the 1960s came to an end, and America moved into the

By Popular Request, We Are Finally Showing "Pleasantville"

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 If anyone cares to cast their mind back to the beginning of 2020 (back before we started to fill our lives with words like "Lockdown" and "Self-Isolation" and the ever-popular "COVID") they might recall that we were in the middle of a film series at the Victoria Park Baptist Church - a film series we never actually got to finish, thanks to the Armageddon. I am pleased to announce that this Thursday (exactly twenty months later) we will be screening Pleasantville ; the film that was to have concluded that pre-Pandemic film series. Pleasantville centres around a (fictional) 1950s television series about a "perfect" All-American community full of happy home-makers, preppy kids and white picket fences. This is the fondly remembered past that many American Conservatives like to invoke when they talk about "traditional values" (basically, this is the again in "Make America Great Again"). Unfortunately (or not, depending on your per

...And Now the Berlin Airlift Moves to London...

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 Last week's film (Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three ) took place in Berlin, a city that was completely cut off from the rest of Western Europe by a strange and unique set of circumstances. This week's film imagines what might have happened had those circumstances occurred in London rather than Germany. The result is a film that is quintessentially, joyously British : In Passport to Pimlico , a chance discovery of long-buried historical documents (and a considerable quantity of treasure) reveals that a neighbourhood in Pimlico, South London, is actually foreign soil - and its residents are not subjects of the Crown. The screenplay then proceeds from that basic premise to hypothesise (in completely rational, logical stages) about what might happen following such a discovery. Some writers have been tempted to read Passport to Pimlico as a metaphor for Brexit, but I personally think that entirely misses the point of the film. The residents of  Pimlico don't want to be separa