Category: Vincente Minnelli

THE BAND WAGON (1953)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Vincente Minnelli
CAST: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabray, Jack Buchanan
MY RATING: 9/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 95% Fresh

PLOT: An aging song-and-dance man reluctantly teams up with a prima ballerina to headline a Broadway musical, but the pretentious goals of its director threaten to sink the show before it even opens.


The Band Wagon has officially been added to the list of my favorite backstage films, along with The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), 42nd Street (1933), and Singin’ in the Rain (1952), to name just a few.  Even aside from the “meta” aspect of the plot, the scenes of a stage show in various stages of rehearsal hit close to home…sometimes TOO close.  After a disastrous tech rehearsal, one actress asks, “Are we really supposed to open tomorrow night?”  If I had a nickel for every time I’ve said or thought that when performing in a stage show…I’d have a lot of nickels.

Fred Astaire plays Tony Hunter, an aging song-and-dance man whose best days and best movies are behind him.  This is made poignantly clear in an opening scene where Tony’s famous top hat and cane are being auctioned off – and they don’t get a single bid.  He’s in New York because he’s been offered a role in a brand-new musical comedy written by his two good married friends, Lester and Lily Marton (Oscar Levant and the perky Nanette Fabray).  The catch: they want to pair him with Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse), a top-tier ballerina who can handle the challenging dance moves from the show’s choreographer, Paul Byrd (James Mitchell), with whom she’s involved romantically.  Tony, an old-school soft-shoe hoofer, is not confident he’ll pair well with a tall, leggy ballet dancer and “modern” choreography.

To top it off, the new show will be directed by Broadway darling Jeffrey Cordova (Brit comedian Jack Buchanan) whose artistic sensibilities run more towards Camus and Goethe than Comden & Green.  Will Tony and Gabrielle overcome their differences?  Will Jeff Cordova see the light before turning a light comedy into a long dark night of the soul?  Will Lester and Lily kill each other before opening night?  If you don’t know the answers to these questions being posed in an MGM musical from the height of the Arthur Freed era, you need to see more movies.

The plot of The Band Wagon could be blown over by a smoke ring, but it is extremely perceptive when it comes to backstage life during a stage production.  As an amateur actor, I eat this stuff up with a spoon.  There’s the audition scene: do we go with the seductive blonde or the girl who can actually dance?  There are the seemingly endless dance rehearsals.  There’s the ambitious director who fills the stage with special effects and forgets about the actors.  There are the threats of quitting, the fights over changing a line, the show-mance, and the gallows humor following a disastrous performance.  The Band Wagon, like 42nd Street, should be required viewing for anyone involved in live theater, especially musicals.

But that’s all just background for the main attraction: Astaire and Charisse.  While Gene Kelly was pure athleticism, Astaire was grace personified.  While Ginger Rogers was unquestionably (and literally) Astaire’s equal, Charisse brings a sensuousness to her duets with Astaire that is unmatched.  In fact, I got the sense in their dances together that Astaire, intentionally or not, was there to make Charisse look good, or even better, I should say.  Or maybe it’s just that Charisse is all I look at in their numbers together.  Little of column A, little of column B.  The highlight of their pairing is the justly celebrated “Girl Hunt Ballet”, a dazzling showcase for Astaire, Charisse, and choreographer Michael Kidd, which serves more or less as the movie’s finale.  A verbal description wouldn’t do it justice, but even if you’re not a fan of The Band Wagon, chances are good you’ve seen one or two YouTube videos that compare this scene to Michael Jackson’s video for “Smooth Criminal.”  Good stuff.

There are other highlights, as well.  This movie gave us the immortal showbiz anthem, “That’s Entertainment”, which was reportedly written in 45 minutes.  There’s also the famous “Triplets” number where Astaire, Fabray, and Buchanan use visual trickery to appear as infants in three little high chairs.  There’s the opening number where Astaire dances through a penny arcade on 42nd Street, incorporating an all-too-brief double act with a shoeshine man whom the producers literally pulled off the street when they saw him dancing for his customers.  Everything is done in the broad, brassy, Technicolor fashion for which director Vincente Minnelli was famous.

That’s really about it.  Astaire has been quoted as saying The Band Wagon was his favorite film of his career, and it’s not hard to see why.  Many moons ago, I watched this movie and, as I recall, slept through most of it.  I was younger and stupider back then.  As a devotee of theater and of classic films, The Band Wagon is one of my favorite musicals overall.  Check it out whenever and wherever you can.

SOME CAME RUNNING (1958)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: Vincente Minnelli
CAST: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Arthur Kennedy
MY RATING: 7/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 78% Fresh

PLOT: A war veteran returns home to deal with family secrets and small-town scandals in his small Indiana hometown.


Before getting into the nuts and bolts of Some Came Running, let’s just take a second to admire its pedigree.  It’s based on a novel by James Jones, author of the novel From Here to Eternity; that film adaptation won eight Oscars in 1953.  It was helmed by acclaimed director Vincente Minnelli, whose prior credits included The Bad and the Beautiful, The Band Wagon, An American in Paris, and Meet Me in St. Louis, among many others.  In fact, his film Gigi, released the same year as Some Came Running, would go on to win an astonishing NINE Oscars.

It stars Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, two of Hollywood’s most bankable stars of the day, along with an adorable 21-year-old Shirley MacLaine as a pixie-faced gamine, among the first in a long string of memorable roles and Oscar nominations.  The supporting cast is headed by 5-time-Oscar-nominee Arthur Kennedy, who may be unfamiliar to the casual moviegoer, but whom I recognize from memorable turns in Lawrence of Arabia and Elmer Gantry.

With all of that going for it, Some Came Running looks like it should hit a home run in all categories.  The story is edgy, the characters are not all totally lovable (no, not even Shirley MacLaine’s), and the ending definitely does NOT cave in to sentimentality…which is all very appealing to me when done right.  However, while I am definitely not calling it a failure, I have to say that I was not moved by the plight of these characters.  The fact that it dares to show the hypocrisy of polite small-town society in the ‘40s and ‘50s was interesting to me, but I never got into a lather over it.  (By contrast, a movie like The Big City from India, with a no-name cast and a modest budget, also centering on a family’s plight, made me genuinely care about the characters.)  But I must acknowledge the daring nature of the film’s story, some of its uncompromising language (to a degree), and its chutzpah to cast Dean Martin as a lovable, comic character who nevertheless refers to women as “pigs.”

The story does take a little while to get rolling.  It’s 1948.  Dave Hirsh (Sinatra) is a military vet who arrives by bus to his small hometown of Parkman, Indiana.  He’s astonished when Ginnie Moorehead (MacLaine) gets out with him, wearing too much makeup, a disheveled pink dress, and a purse made out of a stuffed dog doll.  She has followed him from Chicago based on a drunken invitation, but he wants nothing to do with her, so he gives her $50 and sends her on her way.

That’s not chump change, equivalent to over $650 in today’s money…what’s a military vet doing splashing out that kind of cash?  Turns out Dave is also a published author, but he’s given up writing at the moment.  He’s come home because…well, we never get a real answer to that question.  Maybe he has nowhere else to go.  But he doesn’t exactly get a hero’s welcome.  His brother, Frank (Kennedy), runs a jewelry store and is also on the board of a local bank.  When he learns that Dave has deposited $5,500 in a COMPETITOR’S bank, that raises eyebrows around town and earns Dave a mild reprimand.  Frank’s wife, Agnes, vows not to be home if Dave visits because of something he wrote in one of his books.

Despite the small-town hominess of Parkman, the only place that welcomes Dave with open arms is the local bar, Smitty’s.  It’s here that Dave meets Bama Dillert (Martin), a slick talker in a cowboy hat, a loose-fitting suit, and a tumbler seemingly permanently attached to his hand.  The chemistry between Sinatra and Martin is instant, fueled by the fact they were fast friends offscreen, and their friendship drives some of the major plot developments later on.

The rest of the movie does an excellent job of deconstructing the mythology of small-town life.  Dave meets an underage cad who tries to get him to buy a bottle of liquor for him.  We later learn he’s dating Frank’s daughter, Dawn, and no one seems to be aware of his fondness for liquor.  Agnes relents and agrees to host a dinner for Dave, but does nothing but snipe about him behind his back.  Dave meets Gwen French, a schoolteacher who has read his books, but who rebuffs his romantic advances until a peculiar later scene where she seems to turn on a dime because she simply lets her hair down.  When Dave gets in a scrap with a drunk outside of Smitty’s, the incident is reported in the small-town paper, and Agnes worries about what that will do to her reputation at the country club…not to mention that Dave has been spotted with Ginnie hanging on his arm, a woman who looks anything but reputable…

I think you get the idea.  Some Came Running does for small-town Americana what American Beauty and Blue Velvet did for white suburbia, perhaps not as intensely, but still pulling no punches.  I was also reminded of Rebel Without a Cause, and it occurred to me that they might make an interesting double feature, since there are more than a few scenes in Some Came Running featuring gaggles of teenagers in the background loitering on street corners, or even “parking” on a remote dirt road.  The feeling I got was that these problems exist, whether you paint over them with a centennial celebration or not.

I just wish it had grabbed me by the collar more than it did.  I never got tired of watching Shirley MacLaine’s performance – she outguns everyone, even Sinatra, in my opinion.  Dean Martin’s acting looks deceptively simple – just Martin being himself – until a plot twist late in the film gives it a deeper dimension.  But the movie, as a whole, never achieved liftoff.  Or, maybe it achieved liftoff, but never got into orbit before splashing down.  Some Came Running has an enviable pedigree, but it’s an example of how even the most sensational casting and directing isn’t enough to carry a movie all by themselves.  Whatever the “X” factor is, I didn’t find it in Some Came Running.