Movie musicals–I love ’em. This magical celluloid hybrid of dancing, singing, acting, and (very importantly) cinematography simply amazes me. If Broadway’s your bag, that’s wonderful, but I’ll take cinema’s version any day: on stage, it would impossible to track Gene Kelly as he splashes through the Hollywood streets in that iconic scene in Singin’ in the Rain. To make that scene perfect, you need the camera swooping around the hoofer as his umbrella swings around and around, and then you join him as he ascends the streetlight, the camera rising to meet him in the sky… simply awe-inspiring. Furthermore, if you want to experience the full force of these treasures, well, get thee to the big screen, my friend. This week, our pals at the Parkway Theater are presenting, for our viewing pleasure, two sassy little Gene Kelly/Frank Sinatra MGM numbers, On the Town and Anchors Aweigh.
On the Town is a personal favorite, the first MGM musical to be filmed on location in New York City. The story, as usual in a movie musical, is nothing more than cotton candy: three sailors, Gabey, Chip and Ozzie, (Kelly, the Frank, and horse-faced Jules Munshin, respectively), have a one-day leave. So they decide to hit the town, visit all the sights, drink milkshakes and dance… you know, like sailors do on leave. Along the way, our heroes meet three girls–the saucy cabdriver Brunhilde Esterhazy (Betty Garrett–what a cutie) who lusts after Chip with singular determination; the anthropologist Claire Huddesen (Ann Miller, whose last role in this world would be the creepy landlady in David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr.), who sees in Ozzie the remnants of a sexy prehistoric man; and Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen), Miss Turnstiles, a dancer whom Gabey falls in love with.
By some insane coincidence, Miss Turnstiles is from the same milkshake-and-clover small town that Gabey also calls home, there’s a mean old Russian piano teacher who has Ivy in her clutches, and a horrible running gag about Lucy Shmeeler (Alice Pearce) being just about the ugliest woman in the world (it’s actually quite disturbing how they make fun of this poor lady). But the musical numbers are dynamite, with its book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green (who gave us the masterpiece Singin’ in the Rain). Despite the fact that it was filmed on the Brooklyn Bridge, in Rockefeller Center, and the Empire State Building, directors Stanley Donen and Kelly (again, the minds behind Singin’) gave On the Town the needed intimacy that one would usually associate with a movie shot in a studio soundstage. And being a Gene Kelly musical it has one of those crazy dance sequences toward the very end.
Anchors Aweigh is also highly regarded–it’s famous for the scene with Gene dancing with the cartoon mouse Jerry. Frank Sinatra’s also in tow, and the pair also play sailors on leave.
These are a pair of great movies for young and old–I imagine children especially taking to dancing like cavemen in the “Prehistoric Man” number from On the Town, or singing, as I did when I was a pup, that movie’s opening tune “I Feel Like I’m Not Out of Bed Yet”, and trying to hit those low, low notes. I still sing that song today–it just gets the morning started right.
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