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Genre Criticism: The Musical Though not all classical musicals are like On the Town, it is fairly typical of the big-budget MGM offerings of the 1940s and 1950s. It is a far cry from the very early Warner Bros./Busby Berkeley/Ruby Keeler 1930s show business musicals, which very often tacked a bunch of musical numbers on the end of a routine theater story. By the 1940s the musical had come of age. Gene Kelly was on his way to his greatest triumph ever, Singin' in the Rain, and everyone else in the cast is from MGM's top drawer of musical and comedic talent. Studios in those days tended to do what worked, and On the Town is the third in a trilogy of Kelly/Sinatra offerings (after Anchors Aweigh, in which they also played sailors, and Take Me Out the Ballgame, which also starred Betty Garrett and Jules Munshin). Vera-Ellen and Kelly had done the wonderful "Slaughter on 10th Avenue" number the previous year in the Rodgers/Hart biography Words and Music. Ann Miller had played the provocative tapper many times before, including Fred Astaire's erstwhile partner in Easter Parade. There would be no surprises with this cast, and the combination of the cast with great music from Leonard Bernstein and the veteran lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, it's no wonder that On the Town is a cut above the rest, while still being very characteristic of Hollywood musicals. Neither Gene Kelly nor Stanley Donen (who co-directed) had ever directed a movie before, and they would direct together twice more — the wonderful Singin' in the Rain, and the not so wonderful It's Always Fair Weather. (Side-note on the latter — how can you have Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse in the same movie, opposite each other, and not have them dance together?) Kelly would direct some films on his own, including Invitation to the Dance, made up entirely of dance (something most of his earlier films, including On the Town, had been leading up to), Hello Dolly, the western Cheyenne Social Club and the comedy Tunnel of Love. Even in the latter two, which are not musicals, Kelly cast musical stars — Shirley Jones and Doris Day. He just couldn't get away from his musical roots. Donen went on to direct other pictures in many different genres: musical (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and several others), comedies (Indiscreet, Bedazzled), suspense (Charade, which is often mistaken for a Hitchcock film) and fantasy (The Little Prince). Previously, Donen had been a choreographer on many of Kelly's films-the pair evidently worked well together, and while they made (together and individually) some very good films, I don't think it's appropriate to consider either one of them an auteur. Kelly's ballet sequences are certainly a personal touch, but they appear even in films he did not direct, notably Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris, but also George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh. His influence appears to be more as dancer/choreographer than as director. Donen's films do not seem particularly "his" either, as evidenced by the comment above concerning Charade — more than "A Stanley Donen Film," it is a clever imitation of Hitchcock swirled up with a little bit of 1960s panache. Bedazzled plays almost completely off the interplay of the two comedians rather than anything the director adds. I had to go check my records that gave him credit for Seven Brides for Seven Brothers because it didn't seem like a Donen film. Even though it's difficult to believe that Hollywood turned out dozens of musicals with the same plot, the "boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy sings a song and gets girl" formula remained relatively intact until the 1960s. Starting with West Side Story (1961), however, the formula began to change. The hero could die. A musical could end unhappily. The original movie musical pretty much died in the '60s as well, never to return. Virtually every musical since 1960 has been based on a pre-existing stage musical. Many earlier movie musicals had also been based on stage plays, but they were balanced by an at least equal number of original stories and scores. It is hard to choose a representative musical from the 1960s and '70s, because the genre was pulled in several different directions. The '60s mostly kept going where the '50s left off — more Broadway imports, wider screens, bigger production numbers, longer running times. The '70s essentially saw the end of the musical as an entity of its own. During that decade it was more influenced by the film scene around it than by its own previous history. Page last updated 8/1/04. |
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