Men in Armour, Light Your Chandeliers!

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 old friends Lily and Lester Martin invite him back to New York to star in a new musical comedy on Broadway, he jumps at the chance to get back to work; but times have changed, and Tony's performance style may not be relevant any more...

When we showed Singin' in the Rain back in September, I said that although it was one of my favourite films, it was not necessarily one of my favourite musicals. Make no mistake: I love Singin' in the Rain. It's a funny, devastatingly accurate account of the problems and headaches associated with Hollywood's first faltering steps into the world of recorded sound. But I also think that the musical numbers are not always integrated into the film quite as smoothly as they could have been, and the "Broadway Melody" sequence, wonderful though it is, feels like it escaped from a completely different film.

The Band Wagon is a kettle of fish of a different colour.

For a start, The Band Wagon was directed by Vincente Minnelli, one of the most stylish directors working in Hollywood at the time.


Every shot is a painting, and the overall look of the film is simply breathtaking. 





Fred Astaire's portrayal of Tony Hunter, the almost has-been musical comedy star, was a bold turn by the 54 year old dancer, who had been repeatedly attempting (unsuccessfully) to retire at this point in his career. (He eventually did genuinely retire a few years after this film. Twenty-eight years after, but who's counting...)

Oh, yes; remember Cyd Charisse? The dancer who had that small but extremely memorable cameo in Singin' in the Rain? Well, The Band Wagon is her film.



Cyd Charisse, by the way, had originally taken up dancing as a child in order to build up her strength after recovering from polio. To any vaccine sceptics out there, you're not Cyd Charisse. Just get the damn vaccine.

Now, I should say that we hope to be screening The Band Wagon on Thursday, the 16th of December at the Victoria Park Baptist Church, but there is a possibility that the venue will be full of scaffolders that day. I promise that as soon as I know, you will know, so please, Watch This Space. 

All things being equal, this Thursday will be our final film night of the year, but we plan to resume on the 13th of January for a brand new season of films. 

I look forward to seeing you!









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carry On... #Don't Trust Anyone over 25

Image
Please note that this week's film has been rated  12  in the UK. Last week's film ( Logan's Run ) is a prime example of a science fiction film that was emphatically a product of the era in which it was made. If anything, its very relevance proved to be its vulnerability. By the time it reached the theatres in 1976, many of the social trends it was responding to were already starting to fade. That may also be why attempts to produce a remake have consistently failed to make any headway. Hollywood studios have repeatedly attempted to reboot Logan's Run over the decades, and at least six different directors have embarked on such a project over the last 30 years. Multiple writers have been approached, and in some cases have written complete screenplays - but to no avail. Logan's Run has remained stubbornly and imperviously un-remade. If you think about it (and I have, trust me) remaking Logan's Run is easier said than done. After a decade of hippie culture, you...
Read more

The Best Bond Film of All Time; Thursday the 14th of October

Image
 James Bond has been in the news quite a bit recently, following the much-delayed release of No Time to Die , the most recent offering in this (almost) 60-year-old film franchise. No time to die, indeed. Like all self-respecting zombies, the James Bond character is steadfastly refusing to lie down and stop breathing, despite (or perhaps because of) six decades of sexism, racism, casual violence, jingoism and sexism (sexism is a very big thing in the Bond franchise). It should really have been called  Enough Already. Still, the Bond Movie has become an important cultural icon, and each offering follows an instantly recognisable style and pattern: a suave hero in a tailored suit, a smooth-talking but quietly menacing villain with a dangerous and (devotedly) faithful henchman, a beautiful, sexually available girl, a wide variety of exotic and photogenic locations and an endless parade of increasingly complicated and implausible assassination attempts. What's not to love? With all...
Read more

The Feast of "Stephen"

Image
If you're a Christian, you might know "The Feast of Stephen" as St. Stephen's Day (the 26th of December) when young men dress up in vaguely nightmarish straw costumes and wander around the town playing alarming music while carrying a dead bird. This is not about that. If you're a Doctor Who fan, you might know The Feast of Stephen as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas episode (broadcast on Christmas Day in 1965).  This is not about that either. For our purposes this week, The Feast of Stephen  concerns a small but pivotal character in the beloved Noël Coward/David Lean classic Brief Encounter .  Brief Encounter is remembered today as perhaps the most famous unconsummated love affair in cinema history. Released in 1945 (but without so much as the slightest hint of a war or its effects) it tells the story of two (married) individuals who meet by chance on a train platform and proceed to teeter on the brink of having an affair for a few weeks. They do not, in fac...
Read more

Another Cold War Movie. A very, very Cold War Movie.

Image
 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie. This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust. Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies. Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years. I'm not going to attempt to expl...
Read more

And So, the 70's...

Image
 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 Ame...
Read more