TIMES SQUARE AFTER DARK: HELEN MORGAN

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 razors edge and being willing to cross the line into the abyss, were strangely fused and often non-existent. Deaths from bad liquor, from gangsterism, from passion gone awry, were the accepted norm of the period--the lingua franca, if you will, of the normal, urban inhabitant of the decade. One of the best examples of this culture in action can be found in Joseph Moncure March's magnificent poem (ballad? legend?) "The Wild Party", written in the thick of the period. Another source is one of my favorite obscure novels, Ben Hecht's "A Jew In Love" which tells the story of an immensely successful young man of the period (based on the above mentioned Harris as well as the publisher Horace Liveright) and the delight he takes in sadistically controlling and interfering in people's lives. One gets the sense, when reading these works, that F. Scott Fitzgerald was, on the whole, dealing with a much more polite set of neurotic swells than the average urbanite of the day; that when Times Square grew dark--and nights were awfully long then as people seemed truly not to need sleep--a lurid and darkly sensual nature swept the urban culture, seizing the denizens of the back rooms of the speakeasies.

And so we come to Helen Morgan. Totally forgotten today, she was the first torch singer--before Piaf, before Judy Garland--who managed to infuse her dark and tormented songs with her own personal traumas. No hotsy-totsy of the bootleg era was Helen--she was a somber and brooding presence, draped over a piano, singing of heartbreak, booze and depression to an audience that was titillated by her sense of willing self-degradation at the hands of the violent (physically and emotionally) brutes to whom she was enslaved. Born at the birth of the twentieth century, Morgan was first noticed by Ziegfield dancing in the chorus of his 1923 show "Sally". She became a nightclub fixture in Chicago in the mid-twenties and descended, almost immediately, into a dipsomanical frenzy from which she never recovered. Many of her performances were given while drunk. Far from hurting her reputation, however, this seems to have clinched it; to experience Helen weaving to and fro atop a piano while singing about a lush's life was, indeed, the whole point. She was a "performance artist", a "method actor" before the terms were created. The ultimate performance by Helen Morgan would end not with a series of encores but with the diva passing out on stage; apparently this happened on more than a few occasions.

Morgan's great triumph was as Julie LaVerne in the original Broadway production of "Show Boat" in 1927--famously singing "Bill" and the gorgeous "Can't Help Loving That Man Of Mine". (She would play the role in the 1936 James Whale-directed movie version as well). This was another side of Helen--the respectable Helen, the big time Broadway performer Helen: she apparently studied a bit at the Metropolitan Opera whenever she could manage to come out of her stupor on time and lurch her way over to the rehearsal hall. In the '30's, though, she was already a name from the past--the twenties died not gradually like most decades but literally overnight as if the entire experience needed to be erased from the national consciousness. (In an instant, it seems, song styles, performers and even ways of speaking were replaced forever, relegated to the ash-heap of cultural history. 1928 looked a lot older to 1933 than 2003 looks to 2008). Nonetheless, Morgan tried gamely to beat the booze and continue her career as a stage performer. But it was not to be so: she died--dramatically and appropriately--while performing on stage in Chicago in a George White's Scandal's show. She had cirhossis of the liver. She was just 40 years old.

While Morgan makes a fine Julie LaVerne (and the '36 "Show Boat" is well worth seeing--much better than the '53 MGM version) I prefer the lowdown Helen--the nightclub chanteuse being carried from her dressing room on stage, propped up on the piano like a stuffed doll and then--assuming consciousness reigned--reaching deep into her dark soul for the songs that mirrored her tormented life, her soggy self. Unlike so many ghosts of the vaudeville and nightclub era, a good bit of film exists of Helen. Below are two clips that give a sense of the haunted, drowsy and decadent nature of her persona--first is "It Can't Go On Like This" from a 1930 movie called "Roadhouse Nights" (featuring the young and hairy Jimmy Durante playing a waiter and making a lot of strange faces for reasons that are unknown to me); and second is the eerie "What Wouldn't I Do For That Man" from the 1929 Ziegfield movie "Gloryfying The American Girl". By the way, here's a site with a Helen Morgan discography.

That word eerie sums up what most intrigues me about the twenties; I get the sense that it was a period in which humanity lived in the moment in a way we humans simply aren't built to endure; that there was an urgency to feel, to experience, to push beyond the normal perception of lived life, that led to a jangly, up and down and extremely kinky sense of reality. If you've ever drank way too much gin, smoked a bunch of unfiltered cigarettes, stayed up all night and then added black coffee to the equation (forgetting to eat of course) you get a sense of how urban people of the 20's felt...upon awakening. The rest--the violence, the emotional plumbing of the depths, the guns and lovers--came after dark, when urban America and its denizens awoke and--seeking to live life to the fullest--prepared for another dance with death.

COW PROBLEMS

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 given to sing).

Re Nickodell's, for those reading this who aren't familiar with long-dead LA restaurants. This was a steak and chop place near Paramount Studios--for years the joke was that the sound department at Paramount had a phone line installed at the bar...

The song is "Cow Cow Boogie". The rest needs to be seen.

LAST GASPS OF THE MGM LION: "IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER"

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 be "Silk Stockings"). Dark, quirky and never quite the plate of comfort food that musicals were supposed to be, Kelly and Stanley Donen's film--from an original script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green who wrote the score with Andre Previn--stands out from the pack as a true original, a musical noir about disaffected dreams and lost youth with a decidedly skeptical view of the "good life" in post-war America. Since the film is about the long looked-forward too reunion of three army buddies ten years after the war who, it turns out, now have nothing in common, it can be read as a kind of bookend to "On The Town" (also by Comden and Green), a dark, decade-later answer to that earlier show's optimistic belief that the world the sailor's were fighting for was a righteous one, filled with optimistic views of the national future. Instead, in IAFW, it seems that life in post-war America has deposited three vets at an emotional dead-end in a society to which they all feel alienated. Their reunion is also an excuse for some trenchant observations on the increasingly manipulative role of television in the national consciousness. This is an idea for a musical? In peacetime America? Perverse and weirdly ahead of its time, IAFW, shot in the heart of the Eisenhower era, clearly saw an America that was turning more mechanized, more impersonal, more hypocritical and more dependent on consumerism and commericialism than ever before. I wonder what the powers that be at MGM though of their decision not to loan Kelly out when the "production draft" of the script first arrived on their desks?

Below are two clips. The first is Kelly's famous "tap-dancing on roller skates" number, "I Like Myself". (This is one of those routines--like Nicholas Brothers dances--that never fails to fascinate because of the simple fact that NOBODY CAN REALLY DO WHAT HE'S DOING). Second is the hilarious number "Thanks A Lot But No Thanks", as sung by Dolores Grey (recently Audra MacDonald revived this song in concert to great effect). Dolores Grey was a theater and cabaret star with only a few film appearances to her credit--part of the Comden and Green New York smarty-pants clique (a couple of years before this she starred in a Broadway review by Comden/Green and Jule Styne called "Two On The Aisle". Her co-star was Bert Lahr).

In spite of his enduring popularity and a body of work any filmmaker would be proud of, I've always grouped Kelly the filmmaker along with a select number of auteurs who were denied the full chance to demonstrate their abilities by a film industry that didn't always feel comfortable with work that was too...original. Like Orson Welles and Erich Von Stroheim, Kelly was given the full services of the Hollywood machine and--like those men as well--used it to create boldly original work. (And unlike the other two, the work Kelly created was, for the most part, commercially viable as well). Still, Kelly was clearly groping toward something more ambitious--with IAFW as well as with his all-dance labor of love "Invitation To The Dance" (shelved for a good long time by a reluctant MGM). Unfortunately for him and us, these films, while broadening the cinematic language of the musical, were also washing him out to sea as a popular entertainer. Though the American musical film survived through the sixties, it did so in an increasingly stagebound, "only hits need apply" way--those monster-sized roadshow musicals from already proven hit Broadway properties. Kelly even directed one of them--"Hello Dolly" (you should pardon the expression). Kelly went on after the end of his MGM career--acting in straight roles, directing a handful of films. But professional as his later work as a director was, there was something missing. He was a functionary now, not an expressive force. Like other auteurs, Kelly was onto something special that was snatched away from him just as it was coming into being. The mix of naturalism and fantasy, the idea that a cynic could be the main character at the heart of a musical, the idea of a musical as a vehicle for studying the world around us...oh well. In "It's Always Fair Weather" he got to do it precisely once. Why bemoan the unmade, the unborn? Still, one wonders where the American musical might have gone if Kelly had been allowed to continue on his increasingly experimental path...

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY--ER--TONY AND CYD?

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 any singer much less one who's almost a century old). I understand that Martin recently performed again in New York at Feinstein's At The Regency to sell out crowds.

Rudy Vallee, of whom I've written about recently, has a chapter in his book "Let The Chips Fall" called "The Tony Martin Caper." In it, Vallee resurrects a mini-scandal that happened early in the second World War--wherein Martin was accused of securing an Officer's commission in the navy as a result of a bribe. Why Vallee, in his autobiography, seeks to dredge this up is a bit of a mystery--Vallee was completely uninvolved in the scandal and his book is nothing if not self-obsessed. That is, until you get to the end of the chapter. There, Rudy relates how he and his wife were staying at a New York hotel at some point in the 1960's where it so happened Tony and Cyd were performing. One day, Mrs. Vallee (who, like Cyd, was a leggy sort of dish) got on the elevator at the same time as Tony and a couple of his "pals". Tony got to his floor first. As he left the elevator, according to Vallee, he asked one of the men to "find out what floor she gets off on." To which Mrs. Vallee replied blithely: "Why Tony, don't you know me? I'm Mrs. Rudy Vallee!"

This story--indeed Vallee's whole book--has long fascinated me for what it leaves unsaid. What did Tony Martin say back to her? Did they all get together for drinks later? Clearly Vallee was amused by his wife's sass, but did things progress from there? Was there a "couples night" in the negotiations phase and did its failure to come off (my guess is that Cyd didn't fancy Rudy thus making the exchange a non-starter) piss Rudy Vallee off enough to dredge up the old "Tony Martin Caper" for his book? Would that I had the nerve to ask Mr. Martin, who appears to have all his faculties (and more) entirely intact and could probably answer such a tasteless questions...if he chose too.

CASBAH--A TONY MARTIN ANOMALY

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 friends. And of course he's Cyd's husband which counts for a lot...

But there might have been more for Martin in the movies had a film that he starred in--indeed it appears to have been a vehicle developed specifically for him--turned out to be a more conventional, less unusual exercise. In 1948, Martin starred in "Casbah", a remake of Julian Duvivier's 1937 classic "Pepe Le Moko" which had already been made into an American version the following year, titled "Algiers" and starring Charles Boyer in the role of the jewel theif stuck in the Casbah, dreaming of going home to Paris. The difference with "Casbah" is that it's a musical version of the story. Or sort of a musical--it has some great songs by Harold Arlen and Leo Robin yet I wouldn't call it a "score" as there simply aren't enough of them. Indeed, the whole venture never feels quite normal primarily because the smoky and fatalistic plot and the noir atmosphere is so unusual a basis for a Hollywood musical. Nor does "Casbah" fall snugly into my muzimeller (musical melodramas) genre because the songs don't arise from source situations--Tony Martin stops and sings when emotiion overwhelms him as is the convention in normal musicals (rather than because he's a nightclub singer as would be the case in a proper MM). Peter Lorre, seemingly in one of his opiated phases (whenever he left Warner Brothers for another studio he immediately took on his druggier persona which makes me wonder what torturous methods Warner Brothers used to keep him clean) is quite brilliant as the inspector who can't wait to lure Pepe outside of the Casbah and nail him. By the way, here's the original Variety review of the movie--which references both Martin's "socko" singing and the slightly off-kilter combination of melodrama and music...

"Casbah's" director, John Berry,, had an eccentric (and rather longer than you might think) career--beginning in the mid-forties when John Houseman, his mentor, hired him at the tender age of twenty-six to direct "Miss Susie Slagle's" at Paramount. After directing a mixed=bag of forties pictures--"Casbah" and John Garfield's last film "He Ran All The Way" are probably the best of them--he left the country, a victim of the blacklist. Abroad, he had something to do with Laurel&Hardy's mysterious last movie "Atoll K" (he's uncredited but apparently was responsible for a good deal of the movie) and later in the fifties made the Dorothy Dandridge/Curt Jurgens interracial romance "Tamango". (He also made a movie that I've never seen but with a title that I love: "Oh! Que Mambo") In the sixties he surfaces in New York, directing theater and episodes of "East Side West Side". Briefly in the seventies he's back in Hollywood's good graces--he directed the wonderful by-now cult favorite "Claudine" starring Diahann Carroll and James Earl Jones...and "The Bad News Bears Go To Japan"? How the hell did he wind up with that unenviable assignment? Things get even stranger as Berry doubles back to Paris (probably with a good deal of relief) to make a number of interesting sounding films during the late seventies and eighties, not one of which I've ever seen...and finally caps off his long run by making a fine film that I have seen-- an adaptation of Athol Fugard's "Boesman and Lena" starring Angela Basset and Danny Glover. More needs to be known about this unfairly neglected film. As well as this odd man and his long and singular directing career.

Below are two scenes--first is Martin wooing Marta Toren with "For Every Man", the song that won "Casbah" it's Oscar. (The other songs are, most notably, "What's Good About Goodbye?" and "It Was Written In the Stars"). The second clip is a fine long take scene between Martin and Peter Lorre cat-and-mousing it. I haven't seen "Casbah" in years. But I remember watching it as a kid on an unusual local LA station, Channel 52 which broadcast from Corona, Ca. and had the strangest collection of movies that they liscenced. Even way back then, 'Casbah" struck me as not quite...normal. It was the oddness of the dark nature of the material (which reminded me of the noirs I already loved but didn't know were called "noirs"--i.e. "Double Indemnity", "The Big Sleep", "Johnny O'Clock") and the incongruity of Martin's suddenly bursting into song that made the film stick out to me as something weird, haunting, not quite conventional. I wonder if this will sound odd: the film scared me in a way. I liked it and yet felt I was in dangerous hands at the same time. Certainly it wasn't like any other old movie I'd seen. Perhaps for that reason alone it still lives in my mind all these years later...

CYD CHARISSE: COITUS CHOREOGRAPHUS

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 censorship. My theory is, roughly, that Charisse possessed a startling mixture of deep sensuality and drop-dead good looks mixed with an aura of the high-falutin; she began as a ballet dancer and MGM featured her as such in her first appearance at the studio, 1945's "Ziegfield Follies". I'm not sure how calculated all of this was, but it seems clear that the powers that be--probably Arthur Freed more than anyone else--realized that they could get away with letting Cyd go places that other actresses would have been banned from movies for going...all because something about her act said "art".

Thus the below number, "One Alone", from the 1954 Sigmund Romberg bio "Deep In My Heart". In it, Cyd and her dance partner, James Mitchell (later famous as Palmer Cortland Sr. on "All My Children) all but simulate coitus in one of the most daring and still head-shakingly erotic dance numbers ever filmed. Where were the censors? My guess is that the "Cyd's a Ballet Dancer" shtick had them buffaloed--even the hicks from the Hays Office didn't want to look too square and they probably let a lot of this ride on the basis of it's artsy-fartsy-ness. (Her male partner being in tights probably reinforced the notion that this was highbrow stuff). The number--which stems from Romberg's "Desert Song" operetta (first produced on stage in the twenties, then made into several unwatchable movie versions)--is masterfully staged and shot by the director, Stanley Donen, who--thanks to his expressive use of both crain and dolly--shows us the magnificent set in a way that doesn't dwarf the perfomers who are on it...though given what the performers are up to on that set your attention would no doubt be on them no matter how it was shot.

"Deep In My Heart" was, I believe, the last Metro offering in the mini-genre that I think of Musical Biohacks--that is: hack jobs on the "lives" of popular composers of the day (Robert Walker as a glum Jerome Kern in "Till The Clouds Roll By", Tom Drake as a wooden Richard Rodgers and Mickey Rooney as a self-pitying "girls don't like me cause I'm short" Lorenz Hart in "Words And Music", Cary Grant as the tall, non-gay Cole Porter in "Night And Day" etc...) Why Romberg, whose music had long since fallen out of fashion--if not having already entered the realm of camp (hear the Hi-Lo's hilarious take on "The Desert Song" circa 1957)--was chosen for the full-tilt MGM screen treatment is something of a mystery. His life was decidedly undramatic and Jose Ferrer was the unlucky actor forced, kicking and screaming I'm sure, into portraying the man who "taught America how to love"...but who lived most of his life with his mother. Hm. Today Romberg is best remembered for two stilted love songs that, in the up-tempo hands of some jazz greats, lived on to become standards of the songbook: "Lover Come Back To Me" and "My Romance".

I've written previously of the fact that I interviewed Donen for the DGA Oral History program. I wish I'd known about this number at the time as I'd have had a few questions for him. Like: were they deliberately goading the censors and secretly cackling about the outrageous positions they dreamed up for Cyd? Did the filmmakers get to watch the film in the presence of the censors, smiles frozen on their faces as the room heated up with lust and embarrassment? (This reminds me of the scene in Mel Brooks "Silent Movie" where the executives look at a picture of a bombshell actress and profess mild interest...while the table they're sitting around rises majestically into the air...) Still, Donen did tell me a marvelous story about Charisse and the sheer white China Silk outfit (attached to her body suit) which she wears in the "dream ballet" number in "Singin' In The Rain". I'll quote it. (The below, by the way, isn't from my interview but is reprinted with no permission whatsoever from Stephen Silverman's bio of Donen "Dancing On The Ceiling". The anecdote is substantially the same, however, as when Donen told it to me):

"Cyd's outfit was a headache and the front office was going crazy because it was already so short and the veil pulled it back so far that her pubic hair was showing. Walter Plunkett, the costume designer, would lengthen it a little but the front office was still worried sick. They lived in such tremendous fear of the censors in those days. Finally Walter, who was driven nuts by all this himself, came to the set one day. Now, Walter, a very nice man was very swishy. He was very much like Franklin Pangborn. So this morning he shows up on the set, he's looking very satisfied with himself and I ask: "Walter what's up?" And he said "This time we've done it. We finally got the crotch licked." But that still wasn't the end of it. MGM wasn't satisfied yet. So what they had me do was go into the lab and paint in little white lines over her dark pubic hairs. Well, Technicolor prints start to fade, but the white doesn't. What happend was when the picture was playing theaters, Cyd's crotch started to light up like neon".

LAST GASPS OF THE MGM LION: "MEET ME IN...LAS VEGAS?"

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 with new, hepcat lyrics which are quite funny).

Making things even more mysterious is the fact that the director of "Meet Me In Las Vegas" , Roy Rowland, was nominated for a Directors Guild of America award for his direction of this invisible movie. What the hell? Rowland was a strictly routine MGM functionary who started out in the shorts department in the thirties directing Robert Benchley shorts (as well as a number of the somewhat interesting "Crime Does Not Pay" series which turn up, with some regularity, on TCM) before spending the bulk of his MGM career grinding out the mid-level sausage that made up the bulk of Metro's annual output--titles like "Affair With A Stranger," "Killer McCoy," "Our Vines Have Tender Grapes" and a Margaret O'Brien vehicle that I actually caught some of recently on TCM, "Tenth Avenue Angel." "AND THE WINNER FOR BEST DIRECTOR OF 1956 IS...(pause, rip)...ROY ROWLAND FOR 'MEET ME IN LAS VEGAS". Was this ever a true possibility?

Even the title--with it's distant echo of the glory years--seems...a little hinky...almost as if it were a temporary title during the production period but which, out of the general boredom and inertia that pervaded at MGM during the period, was simply let to stand. The same studio that made "Meet Me In St. Louis" made "Meet Me In Las Vegas?" Were they planning a "Singin' In The Snow"? Perhaps "Gone With The Breeze"? "Meet Me In Las Vegas"???

Nonetheless, I'm pursuing a copy of the film because, as you'll see from the below clip, there is at least one bang up number (and some of the on-line reviews of the film are quite positive). And even if the below number is all the film has to offer, I'm more than a little interested to see Cyd and her action on my fifty-inch screen instead of on youtube...

SILK STOCKINGS PT. 2: LEO GASPS, ASTAIRE KICKS ASS

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 mention of Hollywood in the movies, that audiences aren't interested in self-reflection from the film industry. This enormously stupid canard is as old as the Hollywood Hills and is still very much with us. Once a producer named Robert Rehme, former head of the AMPAS, lectured me on this subject (I forget what exactly I was pitching him but it was a Hollywood tale of some sort), sternly insisting to me that Hollywood had no business making movies about movies, that it never "worked" for mass audiences. I started reeling off title after title --multiple versions of "A Star Is Born", "Sunset Blvd."--a classic film and forty years later a hit stage musical--"Dreamgirls", "Gods And Monsters" etc. Moments later I was shown the door.

Second is Astaire's socko finale "The Ritz Roll And Rock"--a sort of Elvis in Tails number that has about as much to do with rock and roll as Porter's "Now You Has Jazz" (from the previous years "High Society") has to do with jazz. But Porter always has tongue firmly planted in cheek and one gets the sense that he wasn't quite so concerned with writing a song that worked for the genre as he was in demonstating that all genre songs are inherently reductive and therefore deserving of comic treatment. Thus the very title "Now You HAS Jazz", rather than seeming condescending, can be read as a joke by Porter on how preciously high-hat everyone had gotten, by the mid fifties, about dixieland and traditional jazz. In much the same way, the premise of "Ritz Roll and Rock", as presented in the opening line of the song ("Rock and Roll is dead and gone...since the smart set took it on!"), can be seen as a satirical swipe at the newly popular music that was, in fact, spelling the end of the previous era. Whether or not he knew that, it seemed to Cole Porter that Rock and Roll was merely a street thug which needed only to be confronted by Fred Astaire (and a bunch of chorus boys in tuxes) to be exposed as the cowering bully that it truly was.

SILK STOCKINGS: ASTAIRE AND CHARISSE AND THE LAST GASPS OF LEO

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 reason but the film itself is just too dull to be believed). When "Les Girls" misfired it was curtains Gene Kelly--unbelievable that Kelly was rendered obsolete a mere five years after "Singing In The Rain". But as the lion gasped it's last roars (or roared it's last gasps I suppose) there emerged "Silk Stockings", starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. Based on a Broadway musical hit of the early fifties which in turn was based on the 1939 Ernst Lubitsch/Greta Garbo non-musical classic "Ninotchka", "Silk Stockings" was directed by the masterful and famously edgy Rouben Mamoulian, who quit more films than he directed. (This turned out to be his last credit, though he lived another thirty years and walked off several more movies including "Porgy And Bess" and "Cleopatra"). Alas, "Silk Stockings" did nothing to revive MGM's interest in keeping the Freed Unit alive--the movie was greeted with condescending and hostile notices and is barely acknowleged in most histories of musical movies. Its reputation at the time seems over the years not to have improved, making it critically beyond rehabilitation (the dated USSR Commies Vs. Good-hearted Capitalist plot doesn't help).

Which is a shame. Because "Silk Stockings" is, I think, a perfect musical, filled with humor, excellent dance numbers (choreographed by Astaire favorite Hermes Pan but shot by the control-freak Mamoulian who did not suffer second-units lightly), a funny and tender mix of late Cole Porter songs and some real electricity between the 56 year old Astaire and the 36 year old Charisse. Most of the negative criticism at the time of the films release usually centered on the fact that Charisse is no Garbo. But who cares with gams like that? Charisse was simply the best dancer MGM had after the reign of Eleanor Powell (see 1/18 and 1/19 posts) but she was, in her own way, a more daunting figure than Powell. Ballet trained Charisse was an all-around virtuoso who impressed both Astaire and Kelly more than any of their other partners--Astaire says in his autobiography that when one "danced with Cyd you stayed danced with". Charisse, by the way, is alive and well and still married to singer Tony Martin who is--get this--ninety-six years old and recently performed a one man show in New York at Feinstein's At The Regency.

Below is "Red Blues", a thrillingly staged number that builds wonderfully well and needs to be seen in its entirety to be truly appreciated (the number neatly divides into two sections and the first half is chopped off in the MGM compilation "That's Dancing"). The first comedic section is amusing and adroitly accomplished--the premise is that they're all in the Soviet Union and not allowed to be singing this "crazy chazz moozik." (Also check out Jules Munshins ill-advised "splits" and how he's carried off). But when Charisse authoritatively taps the piano three times at the halfway point, the number shifts into high gear and seriously kicks. Mamoulian makes fine use of the set, using all four walls and turning around several times (i.e. making complete camera reversals) to keep the staging energized rather than lining things up "flat" (which is what Charles Walters or George Sidney probably would have done). After that I've posted the marvelously sensuous "All Of You" number, featuring Astaire and Charisse and one of the best late Cole Porter ballads. "Silk Stockings" certainly deserves to be seen in its entirety--Mamoulian's touch is deft throughout and Janis Paige is superb comic relief as well. Perhaps this will wet the appetite of some reader who stumbles across this entry to search it out on DVD. If it's on DVD...