Movies Til Dawn

The critic and historian, Martin Gottfried, in his excellent biography of the demonic Broadway producer Jed Harris, notes that the 1920's were "times of floridity, of vamps with panthers on leashes, of Rudolph Valentino and Bela Lugosi...in the 1920's it was not so odd to view and even live life in purple." This is one of the finest--and spookiest--evocations of any era that I know of, in large part because it looks beyond the usual "gin some and sin some" party-time, Wall Street-booming, Charleston-dancing image that we generally assign to the period--the "Ain't We Got Fun" racoon coats at the Harvard/Yale game bit. Indeed there was much about the 1920's, as reflected in its popular culture, that was exceedingly dark, strangely perverse, masochistic and sadistic to a degree that it may be hard for us to understand today. For in the twenties, the lines between sex and death, booze-fueled fun and booze-fueled collapse, living life on the raz...

An old friend of mine (he's not old, we've just known each other for far too long) recently showed me the below clip of singing cows. To borrow James Agee's comment about "Bill And Coo", another excercise in anthropormorphia (using birds), it is "conservatively speaking one of the goddamned-ist things I've ever seen..." But what the hell is it? Is it from another film? Who made it? IMDB is unhelpful though it's not their fault--they have no mechanism in place for searching on "singing cows". Was it just a scrap or mischief produced by some clever post-production guys at the studios who needed a break from the relentless grind of meeting the never-ending release dates of the once high functioning studio system? And so instead of drinking up the night at Nickodells restaurant they made this? Can anybody help explain how the below came into existence? And, more to the point, why it's so inanely amusing? (Note the line the black cow is...

According to a post on the imdb page for "It's Always Fair Weather", Gene Kelly had been offered the lead in "Guys And Dolls" (presumably Sky Masterson) but MGM nixed it, refusing to loan him out to Samuel Goldwyn. As a result, they had an unhappy star to placate and so let Kelly make whatever musical he wanted too--maybe our friends at GeneScene, a very good Gene Kelly blog , can vouch for the veracity of this tale. If that was indeed the case, losing out on "Guys And Dolls" was a blessing in disguise not only for Kelly but for the American musical canon. For "It's Always Fair Weather" turned out to be a far better film than Joseph Mankiewicz's unhappy, ponderous and never convincing adaptation of Frank Loesser's great hit show. Indeed, IAFW may well be--after "Singin' In The Rain" and "The Bandwagon"--the best of the fifties musicals... at least it ties for third with (fill in your choice--mine would ...

Two more clips to complete our mini-history of Tony Martin , aka Alvin Morris (from Oakland California of Polish-Jewish parentage, not from Seacaucus New Jersey and originally named Antonio Martinelli as I, and perhaps you, might have thought) aka Mr. "I Get Ideas", aka Mr. Cyd Charisse. First is marvelous rendition of "Lover Come Back To Me" from the Romberg bio-hack "Deep In My Heart" (see 2/11 post--and I do mean SEE IT). I feel much better about Cyd's "Desert Song" rumpy-pumpy ballet bit knowing that her husband was also employed in the film and therefore had a valid reason to be lurking around the set. Second is a quite unbelivable clip of Tony Martin singing this past summer--look at this man and tell me that he doesn't have a painting of himself aging in a closet. He's 95 in this clip and looks and sounds pretty much unchanged (the song he performs is "Begin The Beguine", not an unchallenging piece of material for a...

The lucky Mr. Cyd Charisse, vocalist and entertainer Tony Martin , was a major pop singer in the forties with a number of hit records to his credit, most memorably "To Each His Own", "There's No Tomorrow" and "I Get Ideas". He also appeared in a number of movies starting in the 1930's--probably his best known credit from this distance being the Marx Brothers worst movie "The Big Store". Martin possessed a rich baritone voice and dark good looks. But he always seemed to fall a bit into the "meatball" category--not quite taken as seriously as some of his contemporaries (Sinatra, Torme, Frankie Laine) nor able to develop a serious acting career. In addition to hit records, though, he had plenty of success in nightclubs and the general aura Martin has always given off is, I would say, a slick one--a polished "professional entertainer". The kind of performer enjoyed by both gangsters (and their girls) and your Aunt and her...

Little known facts about Cyd Charisse (at least little known to me): She's from Texas (I assumed she came from the same place Hedy Lamarr came from wherever that was); her birth name was Tula Ellice Finklea--a name that could only have been invented by W.C. Fields. She married her dance teacher, a man named Nico Charisse. She was called "Sid" by her brother because he couldn't say "sis". She left Charisse (they had one son together) and married Tony Martin a year later, in 1948. (They too had one son together, the unimaginatively named Tony Martin Jr.) They're still married--he's ninety six. She's eighty six. She was in "The Silencers" with Dean Martin. And she did an episode of "Fraiser" in 1998. Having all but lost myself in Cyd Charisse clips over the last few days, I've come to the conclusion that this great dancer and charismatic screen personality was, in some ways, Hollywood's greatest weapon against censorshi...

I normally wouldn't write about a film I've never seen. But this is different. Not only have I never seen "Meet Me In Las Vegas" , a 1956 end-of-the-era MGM musical starring Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse, I've never even heard of it. I don't mean to sound boastful, but this is damn near impossible. I've heard of every mainstream American film made me between 1929-1970. But "Meet Me In Las Vegas?" What makes this even more puzzling is that, from the looks of the below clip, the film looks exceptionally worthwhile--I stumbled upon it while searching for more Cyd Charisse material and the below number is, quite simply, one of the most sizzling dance acts you will find in the American Musical canon. Charisse and her partner--who is this guy? he's not identified in the IMDB cast list--dance an extraordinarily risque routine to a wonderful recording of "Frankie And Johnny" as sung by--Sammy Davis Jr! (The number updates the old lyrics wit...

Here are two more clips from the Fred Astaire/Cyd Charisse starring, Cole Porter music and lyric-ed, Leonard Gershe/Leonard Spiegelgass scripted, Peter Lorre/Jules Munshin/Janis Paige co-starring and Rouben Mamoulian directed 1957 musical "Silk Stockings." Both feature Astaire--first with the great Janis Paige--in enormously good form: energized, athletic and funny. He was fifty-six when this was shot and seems to my eyes to be perhaps a year or two older than the man who you first saw in 1933's "Gay Divorcee." First up is "Stereophonic Sound", a very funny Cole Porter jab at the current state of filmmaking , Hollywood now contending with competition from television and pulling out all the stops--Three-D, Cinemascope, Cinerama, etc.--to keep audiences coming to theaters. This number is curious as it was written for the film (not the stage version) and flies in the face of Hollywood's usual boring philosophy that it's imperative to avoid any me...

Once Arthur Freed's musical unit closed up shop at MGM, the studio itself went more or less in the tank. Indeed the finish of the Freed era in the late 1950's more or less conincided with the "end of history" for MGM--not that the studio went out of business (though given the movies they made in the sixties one might have wished it had). No, it was more that the kind of filmmaking we think of when we hear those three letters uttered in that particular order became a thing of history, dead as the dinosaurs. "MGM" meant a gold standard of craft, a plush wedding of material and performers. MGM movies--musical or not--were luxury items, weighty and both there to please you as well as being pleased with themselves. The last musicals made at MGM are a strange lot. "Gigi" was a big hit and won Oscars, though I find it impossible to watch and I don't think I'm alone; the film appears to have no reputation whatsoever today (the icky plot is a big re...