Rinaldo

@SomeTameGazelle I think I know the one you're talking about, and it does sort of shimmer. But I'm useless on recalling the name. Meanwhile, let's talk about The Card! I'm very fond indeed of this movie.

I remember that after reading the play in high school (and I was already familiar with it and loved it), we were led to the school auditorium to watch this movie. And I was frankly puzzled: why were so many lines missing, while bits never dreamed of by Shakespeare (like the ballet sequences) went on interminably? I was alternately frustrated and bored. Now, all these years later, I find it rather fascinating, but for the surrounding circumstances rather than its contents. The legendary director Max Reinhardt, having fled Germany, directed a spectacular production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Hollywood Bowl and then was invited to make a film (with Olivia De Havilland and Mickey Rooney retained from the stage cast, but movie people otherwise imported). His theatrical taste was probably already becoming a bit old-fashioned at the time, and was certainly idiosyncratic; that pas de deux of the sinister male fairy carrying off the fluttering female fairy was evidently important to him, as he had included it in the live production as well. I may just be insensitive to ballet, but I'd rather get on with the story (it's a good story, after all). And I have to remind myself that there was little tradition for Shakespeare on film at that date, so to see such a sumptuous production must have meant a lot to those interested. And it launched Eric Wolfgang Korngold in his groundbreaking film-music career; he adapted and arranged Mendelssohn's music here and was given a free hand with it, and its effectiveness got him launched into his many wonderful film scores. Now we're spoiled for choice with movies of this play. Last I looked, just Prime had 3 or 4 to offer (many of them recent ones that I had no idea existed). So I find it easier to be indulgent toward the oddball charms of the 1935 one, even if I roll my eyes at some of the acting and can't consider it a satisfying rendering of the play as a whole.

Yeah, I'm not sure what I meant myself now. Looking back, I guess I took your "yes, really" to mean "can you believe my high school did it?" whereas now I would suppose it to mean that your having seen no other production might seem unlikely. So, in my mistaken frame of mind, I mentioned that high schools did it a lot then, and despite the school repertoire in general having shifted, they still do it a lot. Wasn't that the case with school productions in general? I've had the impression that they were way ahead of professional opera and theater productions in that respect -- I suppose for the practical reason that schools have to cast the best available talent in the school, without searching beyond it. I myself didn't see Grease on Broadway, but I did see its first London production, in which Danny was played by a young unknown American import named Richard Gere. (The rest of the cast seems to have been British.)

Many of the "golden age" musicals are being done less and less in high schools, but Guys and Dolls still seems to be a standard choice, alongside the much newer ones. I would that that's partly because of its irreverent lively tone which still feels appealing to kids, and partly because there are four equal leading roles (no "second couple" syndrome), plus a couple more that are nearly as central. I never found the movie of it very satisfying, but I'm happy for those who do -- it gives them something to enjoy that I don't have. (Susan Loesser, in her bio of her father, expressed similar sentiments if I recall right.) I do miss the missing songs and don't find the replacement ones a fair trade. And for me some of the casting just misses the mark. But those who feel otherwise are right -- for them. @SomeTameGazelle, if I understand you right, I think you're misremembering. "Climb Every Mountain" in the movie stays right where it always was, as the Abbess's "end of Act I" inspirational song (though the movie relocates the intermission). But I agree that moving "My Favorite Things" to be the thunderstorm song for Maria and the children was a wise and needed move. (The stage show has "The Lonely Goatherd" in that spot.) As originally located, "My Favorite Things" has one of those unbearably corny lead-ins (it was corny on opening night), with the Abbess asking Maria, "What's that song I heard you singing in the hallway yesterday?" and the two of them then doing it as a duet. I quite like the two songs for Max and Elsa, but the different premises of the film medium probably made it inevitable that they had to go. And "Something Good" is vastly better than the song it replaces (almost anything would be). My own candidates for films of classic stage musicals that live up to their stage sources (when they make changes, the changes feel justified) would be The Music Man, West Side Story, How To Succeed in Business, Cabaret, Chicago, Little Shop of Horrors, and Into the Woods. I'm off for two days of research at the Library of Congress (on musicals, as it happens), so I won't be likely to respond for a while.

Rather than rely on my immature memories of something seen once in 1961, I remembered that it's 2024, and loads of things can be found online. So here's the review from the June 16 issue. (I make some elisions in the interest of fair use.) If an author was credited, the name didn't make it to the online archive. The title is "Doubtful Pleasure." So my remembered phrase was a very minor glancing blow in a more general sneer.

I'd venture to say that that's a widely shared reaction to The Pleasure of His Company. Were it not for the occasional TCM airing, it would be totally forgotten even among old-movie fans, despite those two popular stars. I do want to catch up with it sometime, though, just to try to make sense of what I remember of the Time review, which talked about distasteful incestuous undertones. But I can wait. I finished watching Bitter Sweet, which means, I think, that I've now seen all the MacDonald-Eddy movies except The Girl of the Golden West. My feelings about the series are complicated. I do like them both as singers, and it's rather envy-inducing to imagine an era in which a screen pairing could be a big money-maker largely on the basis of two beautiful classically trained voices (both of them legitimized by successful onstage opera appearances -- he before the series, she after). She had more going than that, of course; she had a sexy vivacious side that came out especially in her pairings with Maurice Chevalier (I still regard Love Me Tonight as one of the highest peaks of movie musicals) and was great to look at, especially in Technicolor (though apparently inordinately fond of ruffles). He has been unfairly vilified as the worst actor ever, which of course he wasn't; but in all candor, he wasn't all that good an actor either. He always gives me a feeling of the first-timer pulled into the school show, and everyone's proud of how well he did "considering." I don't want to pile on, but secretly I wish his acting were up to his singing. But really the thing that makes theses movies frustrating for me is how they eviscerate the music. All these operettas and musicals had first-rate elaborate and lengthy scores, and the films invariably cut that down to the two or three most popular tunes, throw out all the ensembles and finales and songs for other characters, and usually dumb down the story as well (when they don't replace it with a new story altogether). As a historian-researcher, and just plain lover of musical theater, it frustrates me that the world now thinks that's what those shows were like. Bitter Sweet does the same thing, excising half the story and two thirds of the score (including one of Noël Coward's most famous songs, "If Love Were All") and the present-day frame that should enclose the story. Coward himself loathed it all.

We all have our favorites, and while I happily salute those for whom it's Breakfast at Tiffany's, my own supreme experiences of Audrey-with-Mancini are Charade, and most especially Two for the Road. I had to catch at least the start of the latter last night, even though it was after midnight and I've seen it countless times and own the DVDs. The old magic still happens for me as it did when I saw it on first release. Mancini Day was certainly a splendid gesture by TCM, and it included one pre-fame contribution from his earlier days (Touch of Evil) and began with an obscurity. I'd never heard of Carol for Another Christmas, and catching up with it this morning on Watch TCM, and noticing the 4:3 ratio for a 1964 film, I could make a guess why. I was right; Wikipedia confirmed that it was made for TV, unseen after its single showing till TCM rescued it in 2012 and has shown it periodically since, though with replacement music until the Mancini soundtrack was recovered in 2021. I may finish it, though the report on its critical reception isn't encouraging (Rod Serling at his most didactic, they say). The other choices of the day seem unexceptionable, though Dear Heart (which TCM brings out so very very often) might have been spared in favor of another side of the Mancini touch -- maybe a full-scale period production like The Molly Maguires, or his late-career work for The Glass Menagerie (currently unavailable on home video). One movie that they did air is worth seeing for those with an interest in odd byways, Soldier in the Rain. In the peacetime army, Steve McQueen plays comedic sidekick to Jackie Gleason, with Tuesday Weld excellent in support, all in an adaptation of a seriocomic early novel by William Goldman. The Mancini music is mostly light frisky stuff until Gleason has an introspective moment and we hear the evocative dream melody that for years was the only thing I knew about Soldier in the Rain.

When I saw the lineup for Tuesday April 16, I had a hunch that a birthday might be being celebrated... and I was right! That date would have been Henry Mancini's 100th birthday, so we get 24 hours of movies that include his soundtracks: A Carol for Another Christmas, Soldier in the Rain, Touch of Evil, The Great Race, Bachelor in Paradise, TCM's umpteenth airing of Dear Heart, Days of Wine and Roses, The Pink Panther, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and on after midnight with my beloved Two for the Road, then Charade and Wait Until Dark. I know most of those well, except the first on the list, but I'll probably watch most of them again anyway. Most are worth a look on their nonmusical merits, and in several cases the Mancini touch elevated the movie to classic status. Speaking of music, on April 20 Dave Karger's Musical Matinee (where we usually expect the likes of Singin' in the Rain) will apparently be Ingmar Bergman's film of Mozart's opera The Magic Flute (in Swedish). If it's at his urging, all the more credit to Dave -- it's a marvelous movie experience.

It was a kick to see One Touch of Venus as part of the Scorsese double bill. If it's ever appeared on TCM before, I can't recall it, and it has its oddball charm. Partly, I suppose, because of my long-term involvement with the stage musical that is its source, preparing a restored and corrected edition. As was customary with all film musicals and operettas in that period, a bare minimum (or less) of the stage score was retained -- one song intact, another with some lyrics altered to turn it from a solo to a trio, a third with all lyrics (including title) replaced, plus a smattering of the omitted songs included in the main-titles overture. Most characters changed or omitted as well, and the milieu changed to a department store. At least they cast the optimum choice at that date to embody a goddess of love, Ava Gardner (her singing, as always, dubbed). Robert Walker had charm in his lightweight way, but the mystery remains how Hitchcock could see in this everyman juvenile the person to embody the soulless creep Bruno in Strangers on a Train. However he came up with the idea, he was right.

As someone who tries to find something to love in almost any musical, I must agree that The Broadway Melody mostly has historical value to offer now; the mere fact of seeing a show-biz story with songs and dances must have been overwhelming at the time; it's hard to explain a Best Picture award otherwise. And I'm gradually coming to the conclusion that show dancing tended toward the rudimentary and clunky at that time, at least within ensembles. No Balanchine had yet brought in balletic elements, never mind the individualistic handiwork of a De Mille or Robbins or Fosse. Of course there were brilliant soloists -- Jessie Matthews, the Astaires -- but I wonder what we'd think if we could be time-traveled to the premiere of a Gershwin or Kern show. I have to reinforce the praise for Dodsworth. To my shame, I never saw it (never having heard much about it) until maybe 5 years ago, at which point it became an all-time favorite. The production and the whole cast are excellent, but Walter Huston and Mary Astor are utterly outstanding.

Having posted this, I then began to use my brain, reminding myself how much is available somewhere-or-other these days, and asked my Xfinity Search how to watch it. It turns out that a streaming channel FXM has it available, so I watched it last night. As it's not from TCM (though who knows but what it might turn up someday -- it's in their database), I won't give it a full report. But it lived up to memory as a reasonably dignified un-campy telling of the story. It did elevate the Moabite Ruth to the position of temple priestess, so she got to be one of a lineup in studio-approved Naughty Lady costumes: shimmery strapless bias-cut gowns. After she marries a Judean and turns virtuous, she goes in for rough homespun clothes like everyone else. Our Ruth was Elana Eden, one of the wave of "charmingly accented" Middle Eastern ingenues imported by Hollywood in those years (see also Haya Harareet and Dahlia Lavi), and like some others had to change her surname to something sufficiently timeless and "exotic" (she started life as Elana Cooper). The latter part of the story also underwent some streamlining and Code-accommodation to get around that "uncover him while he sleeps and huddle at the foot of his bed, and he'll have to marry you" business that's so puzzling in Sunday School. And after Ms. Eden gave a graceful rendition of the famous "Where you go, I will go..." speech, Franz Waxman gave us a very pretty choral setting of it as background to Ruth & Naomi's travels across the desert, which then became the basis of the underscoring of the second half of the movie. And it acquired a bit of a civil-rights undertone (1960, after all), what with "don't stone or bully people who are different from you" being baked into the story.

I dunno, Max von Sydow isn't chopped liver. Also, to his great credit, he kept his dignity in a picture that hasn't (IMO) survived the years as well. By that I mean that while King of Kings for the most part cast good but lesser-known actors, The Greatest Story Ever Told went all out for the star-cameo phenomenon -- in fact it probably remains the classic instance (short of jokey examples like Around the World in 80 Days). I remember one witty, if irreverent, review remarking that if you're going to stuff your Bible movie with big stars in small parts, it's better to avoid names with lots of sibilants. Otherwise, the brief appearance of The Woman Healed will be followed by a theaterful of people hissing "Shelley Winters" to their friends. I quite seriously wish that some of the other biblical movies (i.e., not Jesus, Samson, David, or Solomon) of the era would sometimes be shown by TCM. I remember The Story of Ruth being unusually good, but I was a kid in the back seat at the drive-in, and what did I know? I'd like to re-experience it as an adult.

I myself didn't see it all either -- to my own chagrin, and by my own doing, because I'd been curious about that strange title for a long time, and yet I stopped partway through because it was just dead on the screen and I just couldn't make myself continue. I'd say this is one of those projects when nothing went right, starting with that title, which is the title of the source novel, which is (as they say) a reason but not an excuse. I would be interested to read the full history of how it got made sometime, if someone has researched it. But, knowing nothing of that, I would guess that they got the famously charismatic Ezio Pinza under contract for two movies, had to find a vehicle for him, decided that this book (by a Knopf) would serve, had Lana Turner under contract so in she went. And it just refused to work, starting with Mr. Pinza himself -- truly one of the great bass voices of the 20th century (a strong contender for #1, in fact), by unanimous report intensely stellar onstage in decades of opera and then through the run of South Pacific once the voice could no longer fill out operatic roles... and, it seems, unable to convey whatever version of "it" he had to a movie camera. He made his two movies (and a cameo in another), and that was it for him. Too bad. You may be right about that. But there is an analog for the song's placement, as a separate event before the main credits start. That had also been done the year before, in Three Coins in the Fountain, in which we hear Sinatra (who doesn't actually appear in the film) sing the complete title song with nothing happening onscreen, and then the title and credits run. I guess that's indicative of his cultural weight in that period. I noticed that when the movie first was released, and was surprised because in my mind he was indelibly associated with Laura and nothing else -- he was almost a legend from he past, and here he was in the present. That's when I did a bit of research and found that he'd been an active professional and had scored a lot of movies over the decades. And then years after that, I saw him in person and even got to meet him, in the sense that I murmured something admiring and shook his hand. This was at a Saturday Gershwin symposium at the Library of Congress, for which he, as a longtime friend of Ira Gershwin, spoke on one of the panels. (Another person who participated in a similar way was Angie Dickinson, who'd been a neighbor of the Ira Gershwin's in her early Hollywood years. The big surprise there was that she's quite short!) His score for What's the Matter with Helen? is a good one, as is Forever Amber for sure. Of his many other fine scores, I might mention Force of Evil, which shows up on TCM occasionally. But Laura is surely his claim to immortality.

All these "servicemen on temporary shore leave" musicals interest me as to similarities and differences (cf. On the Town, Anchors Aweigh, Three Sailors and a Girl). TCM doesn't show Hit the Deck that often compared to other MGM titles of the era, and I'd always been curious about how it could lead up to that very unreal studio-set number danced to "Hallelujah." And the answer is... it doesn't! We just suddenly cut to the entire cast plunked down in MGM Limbo singing this song straight to camera, and then the movie's over. Great fun, actually. Wikipedia gives a surprisingly detailed account of the origins and tryouts of the source play, considering that it's an artifact of its period that has surely vanished onstage, even in community theater. Anyway, it seems that it was quite extensively revised for the screen, even if its stage bones persist in showing through. The Debbie Reynolds character was beefed up to provide a star role for her -- the star female role onstage (played there by the legendary Kim Stanley) was the character played onscreen by Celeste Holm. the friend from out of town was Robert Preston, and Charlie was Ronny Graham, reportedly cast precisely because he was a goofy non-dreamboat type which would make his womanizing behavior seem more palatable. The main things I like to recall about the movie are musical ones -- odd, as it's not a musical. The hangover sequence near the end is an amusing bit of "choreography" for the wide screen. And the title song is thoroughly featured. In addition to popping up as Debbie's rehearsal song halfway through the story, it gets a full rendition by Sinatra, awkwardly walking slowly toward the camera, before the opening credits even start. And then a reprise after the movie's over, shared out among the cast. That latter choice tickles me, because David Wayne and Celeste Holm were A-1 musical stars onstage (he in Finian's Rainbow, she in Oklahoma! and Bloomer Girl) who never got to sing in the movies, except this one time.

Both Brian's Song and Duel got theatrical releases -- the former (for a modest run) after it proved so popular on TV, the latter mostly abroad. I remember it was all over London the summer I lived there (1973).