The Dolly Sisters (1945)

The Dolly Sisters is a 1945 20th Century-Fox musical starring Betty Grable.

The movie is based, very loosely, on the career of the real-life Dolly Sisters, a very successful musical comedy act.

It begins in 1904. Uncle Latsie S.Z. Sakall (S.Z. Sakall) has just arrived in New York with his two nieces, identical twins Jenny and Rosie. (As adults Jenny is played by Betty Grable and Rosie is played by June Haver). After many vicissitudes they establish themselves on the vaudeville circuit.

They encounter a struggling singer-songwriter, Harry Fox (John Payne). Harry and Jenny fall in love but while the Dolly Sisters are going from success to success Harry’s career is going nowhere. Harry won’t marry her until he has become a success himself.

The sisters are soon the toast not just of Broadway but of Paris.

Harry’s career seems set to take off but then comes the war and he enlists.

The romance between Jenny and Harry just keeps on encountering obstacles.

A major obstacle is that Jenny has to choose between her career and marriage. Of course today’s audience would be outraged that this is even presented as a serious choice - what woman would choose family, a home, love and happiness when she could have a career?

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. If she gives up her career then Jenny will be ruining Rosie’s career as well. As Uncle Latsie keeps saying, you can’t have a sister act without sisters. And the sisters are very loyal to each other.

That choice keeps coming up again and again for Jenny.

I’m not a fan of biopics. This one loses a bit of steam halfway through with too much focus on the never-ending romantic complications. Their courtship takes years and years and years. There’s not enough focus on the singing and dancing which is what musicals are all about.

There’s just a slight touch of self-pity to Harry which grated on me a little.

With their hair done the same way and wearing identical clothes Betty Grable and June Haver really are convincing as twin sisters. I liked their performances.

There is one truly superb musical number - the Makeup Kit number. Very clever, very witty and very cute.

The movie’s biggest asset is Orry-Kelly’s stupendously amazing costumes.

Fox spent big money on this production, shot in Technicolor. It paid off. It was a major hit.

I’ve only recently started to delve into the world of 1940 Hollywood musicals and this one is not destined to be counted among my favourites. This is only my second Betty Grable movie and I have to say that I enjoyed Pin Up Girl (1944) more but The Dolly Sisters is reasonably enjoyable and it’s worth a look.

As far as I know this film has not had a Blu-Ray release. The old DVD release is now a bit hard to find.

Bluebeard’s Castle (1963)

In 1960 Peeping Tom ended Michael Powell’s career as a film director in Britain. After that he took work where he could get it. Bluebeard’s Castle is a low-budget German TV-movie and in anyone else’s career it would be an oddity. But Powell’s career was full of oddities.

The project was conceived by Norman Foster, who was the producer and star, and production designer Hein Heckroth. Heckroth had worked with Powell and decided he’d be the ideal choice to direct. So this was not a Michael Powell project from the outset.

It was intended for television broadcast but shot in colour so as to allow for a possible theatrical release as well. It was completed and then pretty much sank without trace until its rediscovery in the late 70s.

It’s a filmed version of Bartók’s very obscure 1911 opera.

It is obviously based on the fairy tale.

The libretto by Béla Balázs strips the fairy tale’s plot down to almost nothing. It becomes a psychological exploration.

In the film Bluebeard’s eighth wife Judith arrives at his castle to find that there are seven locked rooms. She insists on having the seven doors opened.

It’s all heavily symbolic. The doors don’t really lead to rooms in the castle, they lead to compartments of Bluebeard’s mind. Judith hopes that she will learn what makes her husband tick. What she finds is lots of darkness. But she finds no explanations. Neither Judith nor the audience has any idea why Bluebeard’s other wives met such unpleasant ends.

In the accompanying interview film critic Ian Christie suggests that it’s all rather Freudian and very very Jungian. It probably is. There are lots of elements that are symbolic of something although I have no idea what. The weaknesses of the film are undoubtedly inherent in Balázs’s libretto so Powell cannot be blamed.

The production design is all full-blown artistic modernism (and artistic modernism is one of my least favourite things in all the world). The visuals are extraordinary and wildly imaginative although also extremely ugly. Some of the visuals are effectively startling and memorable but some just seem overdone. But they are interesting and if you have more of a taste for modernism in art than I have you’ll enjoy them more than I did.

The ugliness was no doubt intentional - to represent the ugliness inside Bluebeard’s mind but since we have no idea of the reasons for his inner darkness the impact is not all it should be.

I’m also not particularly a Bartók fan which probably didn’t help.

This movie was a logical step for Powell. Powell and Pressburger had had a huge artistic and commercial success with their ballet movie The Red Shoes. They had followed it up with the even more ambitious The Tales of Hoffmann which combines ballet, opera and cinematic magic in a breathtaking way. It was not, alas, a commercial hit. Bluebeard’s Castle was done much more cheaply on a much smaller scale but it’s no surprise that Powell was delighted to get the directing gig and thoroughly enjoyed himself.

There are only two cast members. Ana Raquel Satre looks striking and is very good as the bewildered but adoring wife.

I don’t want to give the impression that I disliked this movie. I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped to but it is breathtakingly daring and visually extreme and in 1963 it was wild wild stuff. And it’s impossible not to admire Powell’s ambition. And its visual outrageousness is undiminished.

Bluebeard’s Castle is recommended as a unique slice of cinematic folie de grandeur.

The BFI Blu-Ray looks superb and there are some extras. This release includes the movie on DVD as well.

Tales of Hoffmann (1951)

Tales of Hoffmann is the Michael Powell-Emeric Pressburger film of Jacques Offenbach's 1881 opera The Tales of Hoffmann, which was based on three of the wonderful short stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann.

But this statement needs to be qualified and amplified a great deal. Powell and Pressburger did not simply film the opera. They adapted and altered it significantly. Opera is the most deliberately and consciously artificial of all art forms and the most uncompromisingly theatrical. Making a movie that is artificial and aggressively non-realist is no problem but opera is artificial and theatrical in a very non-cinematic way. And if you remove the artifice and the theatricality then you have removed the very heart and soul of opera. So how do you make an opera into a feature film?

Powell and Pressburger adopted a bold radical approach. Their first crucial insight is that yes this is opera but it’s a movie. There’s no need to cast actual opera singers. Why not cast actors and dancers, and have their singing voices dubbed by real opera singers? In fact the entire movie was shot as a silent film with every element of the soundtrack post-dubbed. This allowed Powell and Pressburger to use a lot of silent film techniques. They were much influenced by German Expressionism.

This also allowed Powell and Pressburger to pull off three casting strokes of genius. Moira Shearer had been a sensation in their 1948 masterpiece The Red Shoes. She couldn’t sing. But she was a magnificent dancer, so her singing voice was dubbed. And they were able to cast the great Australian ballet dancer Sir Robert Helpmann. He couldn’t sing either but again no problem. Not only could Helpmann dance, he was a very competent actor and he had extraordinary screen presence. And he had that amazing face. Once the makeup people were let loose on him he could become sinister, monstrous, comical, grotesque - whatever Powell and Pressburger wanted him to be. And Ludmilla Tchérina has breathtaking screen charisma.

Being able to cast dancers rather than singers allowed Powell and Pressburger to carry out their master plan - to create an extravaganza of music, images, dance and movement. A total artistic experience that was more than opera and more than straightforward cinema. Powell called it a “composed” film.

Casting dancers rather than singers gives the film a sense of dynamic movement and energy which would have been impossible otherwise. And choosing dancers such as Shearer, Helpmann and Ludmilla Tchérina who could act as well was another excellent idea.

Powell and Pressburger were totally and deliberately out of step with the mainstream of British cinema. With movies like Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948) they had already been pushing the boundaries. They were in fact operating more in the realm of European art cinema. They were making films with more in common with stuff like Jean Cocteau’s surrealist masterpiece Beauty and the Beast (1946) and were already venturing into territory that Max Ophüls would explore in his 1950s masterworks like La Ronde, Le Plaisir and especially Lola Montès. Martin Scorsese (a huge fan of this movie) has also correctly pointed out the influence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

There are three separate stories. Hoffmann is the only character appearing in all three. In the first story he falls in love with a beautiful girl but she is in fact a mechanical doll. In the second tale Hoffmann falls in love with the courtesan Giulietta but she helps an evil magician (played with gusto by Robert Helpmann) to steal his reflection (and presumably his soul). In the third story Hoffmann is in love with the lovely soprano Antonia who is suffering from consumption. She must give up singing to save her life.

There’s also a framing story and Powell and Pressburger added a whole new sequence that was not in the opera - the Dragonfly ballet (scored by Sir Thomas Beecham who also conducts the orchestra throughout).

So what went wrong? The episodic nature of the film is a problem - with the framing story and the added Dragonfly ballet there are in effect five disconnected stories which dissipates any real emotional resonance. The film collapses under its own weight and at 136 minutes it is a bit of an ordeal. Apparently when it was shown at Cannes Alexander Korda told Powell and Pressburger that if they dropped the third segment, the Antonia story, it was a certainty that they would win the Golden Palm. They were unwilling to do this, and the movie missed out on that coveted prize. But Korda was right. It’s the weakest of the stories and it makes the movie way too long. On the other hand the Antonia sequence has a technical tour-de-force ending.

The Dragonfly ballet has no connection to the rest of the film but it’s a crucial part of the Powell-Pressburger plan to integrate image, music and dance. And it’s a fine showcase for Moira Shearer who was after all the movie’s biggest box-office drawcard.

The first sequence with Shearer as the mechanical doll Olympia has so much charm and wit and then we get that very unexpected ending.

It’s the second sequence, set in Venice concerning the courtesan Giulietta, that is the highlight. Here we have a sexy bad girl and Ludmilla Tchérina brings an unbelievably degree of sensuality, eroticism and decadence to her role. This sequence is wildly flamboyant and surreal and dream-like. It’s magnificent cinema.

This is a movie for hardcore cinephiles, filmmakers and devotees of cinematic experimentalism. The Blu-Ray includes an audio commentary with Martin Scorsese. He talks (delightfully) about his obsession with this film but it was clearly an obsession with its awe-inspiring technical virtuosity. For a young would-be filmmaker it provided boundless inspiration. I’m not sure a general audience was ever going to be able to embrace this movie to quite the same degree. It really is an exercise in technique. It doesn’t really have any emotional centre or anything likely to engage the interest of an ordinary movie-goer. It’s a movie to admire and to be dazzled by might be be heavy going if you’re not a devotee of opera and ballet.

Highly recommended for its originality and strangeness and for the glorious use of Technicolor. It’s insanely ambitious and despite its flaws it is in so many ways a triumph of cinematic art.

Urban Cowboy (1980)

Urban Cowboy, released in 1980, is a movie in which a large part of the action takes place in a honky tonk. Not just a honky tonk, but the world’s biggest honky tonk. It’s Gilley’s in Pasadena Texas and it really existed and it really was the world’s biggest honky tonk.

In fact it’s a movie about the honky tonk. The original idea came from a magazine article about Gilley’s. Somehow or other paramount were persuaded to back such a movie. And it was shot on location at Gilley’s in Pasadena Texas.

It’s also a movie about a mechanical bull.

It’s the story about a cowboy who moves to the Big Smoke. Bud Davis (John Travolta) gets a job in a huge chemical plant. It’s dirty grimy factory work. Pasadena is a grimy industrial city. It’s a long way from home for a young cowpoke. The work is hard but at night there’s Gilley’s. Bud feels at home in Gilley’s. They play great country music. And it’s packed with cowboys (and cowgals) for whom it’s a taste of the world they really love, the world they really understand, the world of wide open spaces and horses and steers.

And there’s the mechanical bull. Which really was the thing that made the real life Gilley’s famous. Bud knows he has to ride that bull.

He meets Sissy (Debra Winger). She’s the kind of girl a cowboy dreams of marrying, a unspoilt down-home country girl, sweet but feisty. They fall in love and get married.

There’s a touching scene which could have been played for cruel mockery but it isn’t. Bud blindfolds Sissy and takes her to see the surprise he’s got for her. It’s a trailer. He’s made a downpayment on it. This will be their dream home. Sissy is over the moon. OK, it’s a trailer home, but it’s their home.

There’s a fly in the ointment, in the person of Wes Hightower (Scott Glenn). This movie is a kind of urban-set western and Wes is the equivalent of the sinister gunslinger who’s going to try to take Bud’s girl from him.

There are traumatic relationship dramas, with not just Sissy cheating on Bud with Wes but Bud cheating on her with Pam (Madolyn Smith Osborne). She’s a spoilt rich girl. Her daddy is a rich oil man but in a western she’d have been the daughter of a rich rancher.

And there’s the bull. Bud is obsessed by the bull. Sissy is obsessed by it as well. And there’s a mechanical bull riding contest with a prize of $5,000, a huge fortune for guys like Bud and Wes. In a western we’d be waiting for the climactic shootout but in this case it will be a climactic showdown in the form of this bull-riding contest.

The sexual connotations are very very obvious, with both Bud and Wes having to prove their manhood. And very obvious sexual connotations to Sissy’s obsession with riding the bull - she doesn’t do it to prove she’s as good as a man she does it because it turns her on.

John Travolta’s performance is the film’s biggest asset. Bud does some bad things but they’re comprehensible and Travolta ensures that Bud never loses our sympathy.

This was made not long after his star-making turn in Saturday Night Fever and the two movies have a lot in common - they’re sleazy and grungy and there’s plenty of despair and bleakness. Urban Cowboy is visually depressing but it’s deliberate. Pasadena Texas is not exactly picturesque. It’s a harsh mean urban landscape.

Debra Winger is very good also. The romantic dramas are believable. Bud and Sissy love each other but they’re too proud and stubborn to ask for forgiveness and we really do believe that that’s the kind of people they are.

The script resists the temptation to make Pam a straightforward Bad Girl. She has her character flaws as well but she’s a decent person and she does love Bud. But is her love as strong as Sissy’s?

If you love country music you’ll be in a state of bliss. There’s lots and lots of country music with performances by genuine country music greats like Bonnie Raitt and the Charlie Daniels Band.

Urban Cowboy was a moderate box office hit. It has some bleakness but some quirkiness as well and it has an engaging love story. Highly recommended.

You’ll Never Get Rich (1941)

Given that You’ll Never Get Rich, released by Columbia in 1941, was the first movie that teamed Fred Astaire with Rita Hayworth and that it was the movie that made her a star I was looking forward to watching it. In fact it turned out to be a huge disappointment for a variety of reasons.

Robert Curtis (Fred Astaire) is producing a Broadway show. Sheila Winthrop (Rita Hayworth) is one of the chorus girls. The owner of the theatre, Martin Cortland (Robert Benchley), is pursuing Sheila while trying not to let his wife find out about it. He tries to cover his tracks by making it appear that Robert is the one pursuing her. Both Robert and Sheila realise they’re being manipulated and they’re soon at odds with each other.

The first time Rita Hayworth appears on the screen we’re knocked out by her star quality, her beauty, her charm and her wit.

So at this early stage the movie looks like it’s going to be a fine breezy musical romance.

Then it becomes a totally different movie. It becomes a service comedy, and there is no species of movie I dislike more than service comedies. This was 1941, America was not yet in the war but Hollywood had worked itself up into a war frenzy which presumably explains why we get to see Fred Astaire in uniform and most of the film takes place on an army base. War was coming (or at least that’s what Hollywood hoped) and it was going to be so much fun.

It’s not just a service comedy, it’s a lame service comedy. The comedy is not just feeble it’s excruciating.

Inevitably this switch means that Rita Hayworth gets nowhere near as much screen time as she should get. She gets few opportunities to dance with Astaire and they have only one great dance together. This is a problem since Hayworth is the best thing in the movie. In fact she’s the only good thing in the movie.

You’ll Never Get Rich is in black-and-white. That’s OK, I love black-and-white movies. But the 1930s RKO Astaire Rogers movies had exquisite black-and-white cinematography and stunning sets. You’ll Never Get Rich has dreary black-and-white cinematography and boring ugly sets.

Even the costumes are dull, apart from one really nice dress won by Hayworth. But she should have been put in lots of gorgeous dresses.

It has a score by Cole Porter (something which should be a major asset) but it’s an entirely forgettable score.

The screenplay, by Michael Fessier and Ernest Paganoin, is feeble. The service comedy plot is the film’s major plot strand and it should have been ditched in its entirety. The love story between Fred and Rita is relegated to being a minor subplot when in fact it should he been the whole movie. The entire script should have been thrown in the trash can and decent writers hired to write a new one.

Director Sidney Lanfield’s efforts are barely competent.

Hayworth is great but Astaire is all at sea with material that doesn’t suit him at all. Robert Benchley is a lot of fun as the inept philanderer. The other members of the supporting cast are either unmemorable or irritating.

I hate to say this but this is a terrible movie. Unless you’re a Rita Hayworth completist it’s not worth bothering with.

The second (and final) Astaire-Hayworth musical, You Were Never Lovelier, is much much better. In fact it’s terrific.

Donkey Skin (1970)

Donkey Skin is a 1970 fairy tale adaptation written and directed by Jacques Demy. The original French title of the film is Peau d’âne. It was released in English-speaking markets with a variety of different titles including Once Upon a Time and The Magic Donkey. Demy emerged as a director at the time when the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave was becoming a thing in French cinema. Demy’s movies do not however feel very much like the contemporary movies of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut.

Demy is best-known for Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964) and Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (The Young Girls of Rochefort). Demy took a decidedly offbeat approach to the musical genre. Rather than actual songs there is dialogue which is sung, by actors and actresses who are not actual singers. It’s sounds like a catastrophically bad idea but weirdly it works and these two movies were international hits.

He uses a similar approach in Donkey Skin.

Donkey Skin is based on the fairy tale Donkeyskin, from Charles Perrault’s 1697 fairy tale collection which contained the original versions of so many of the most famous fairy tales.

Jean Marais plays the king and he is the happiest king of the happiest kingdom in the world. His queen is the most beautiful queen in the world, and they have a lovely charming daughter (played by Catherine Deneuve).

Then disaster strikes. The queen dies. On her deathbed she forces the king to promise that he will remarry (for the kingdom’s sake he needs a male heir) but only if he can find a princess more beautiful than his dying queen.

There is no princess in all the world who would qualify. None, except one. His daughter.

The king decides that therefore he should marry her.

The princess decides that maybe she likes this idea.

At this point her fairy godmother, the Lilac Fairy (Delphine Seyrig), decides that she needs to take steps to prevent this marriage. She suggests that the princess should stall by demanding impossible wedding presents, but the king manages to provide them. The Lilac Fairy then suggests that the princess should demand the skin of the king’s magic donkey.

Using the donkey skin to disguise her beauty the princess flees to a neighbouring kingdom. The young prince of that kingdom falls in love with her but then cannot recognise he. But he has her ring. No-one else can wear that ring, so if he finds a maiden who can wear it then he has found his princess.

There are a lot of things to like about this movie. The visuals are gorgeous and they’re gorgeous in interesting ways.

I like the fact that Demy does not succumb to the temptation to add an anachronistic modern political subtext.

I like the fact that he was not tempted to transpose the story to a more modern setting. This is a fairy tale world that mostly looks the way Charles Perrault’s readers in 1697 would have imagined it.

There are some clever moments referencing various poets and filmmaker, such as Cocteau.

But there are things that, for me, just don’t work. Having some of the dialogue sung is a gimmick he’d used before. It’s a gimmick that left me cold.

The big problem is that for all the visual splendours, it’s just a bit lifeless. The characters have all the vitality of wooden dolls. Perhaps, given his association with the New Wave, Demy was deliberately aiming for this and for extreme emotional distance. It doesn’t work for me.

And I hate to say this since I’m a fan of hers but Catherine Deneuve’s performance is a major weakness. She’s flat, lifeless, cold and charmless.

Before making this movie Demy should have sat down and watched Ernst Lubitch’s early masterpieces such as The Doll (Die Puppe, 1919) and The Wildcat (1921). Lubitsch shows how it should be done. Storybook characters come to life, but Lubitsch actually does bring them to life.

Donkey Skin does have some striking images but for me it was a movie to admire rather than a movie to love. There is however enough of interest here to make it worth a watch. Recommended.

Music in My Heart (1940)

Music in My Heart is a 1940 Columbia musical. Rita Hayworth is the female lead but this is pre-stardom Rita Hayworth. This is Rita on the cusp of stardom. When you watch this movie you can tell that it was just a matter of time. The star quality is there.

Tony Martin plays Robert Gregory, almost a musical comedy star. He is at least the understudy to the star. Now he finally gets to play the lead, but his visa has expired and he’s about to be kicked out of the country.

He’s on the way to the pier to board his ship when his cab crashes into a cab containing Patricia O'Malley (Rita Hayworth). She needs to get to the ship as well. Her husband-to-be Charles Spencer Gardner III (Alan Mowbray) is awaiting her. He’s a millionaire. She is pretty pleased with herself for snaring a rich husband.

They both miss the boat, literally. Now Robert has the cops after him and Patricia has missed out on her rich husband.

Of course they’re going to fall in love and have impossible obstacles to surmount.

Gardner’s manservant Griggs (Eric Blore) is plotting to bring his master and Patricia back together.

Patricia’s kid sister Mary (Edith Fellows) is plotting to bring his master and Robert together.

Patricia lives in a rooming house. On the ground floor is a restaurant run by Sascha (George Tobias), a crazy White Russian who is planning to restore the Romanovs, and a penniless Italian. They’re about to be evicted. They can’t pay their rent.

The plot is standard romantic farce and it works perfectly well.

Eric Blore is alway a joy to watch.

With Rita Hayworth not yet a star this movie was conceived as a star vehicle for Tony Martin. He’s OK but he doesn’t quite have the necessary charm or charisma.

Rita gets plenty of screen time, she really is the female lead, but musically the movie is built around Tony Martin’s singing rather than Hayworth’s dancing. Had the movie been made a year later the balance would obviously have been reversed.

While Rita gets very little dancing to do she gets plenty of opportunities to demonstrate her comic talents and her potential as one of the great romantic stars. She outshines her leading man Tony Martin to an embarrassing degree.

Andre Kostelanetz and His Orchestra are heavily featured. They would become hugely popular on record in the 50s and it’s perhaps surprising that they didn’t feature in more movies. Chet Forrest and Bob Wright wrote the songs one of which, It’s A Blue World, was a reasonably big hit for Tony Martin.

Joseph Santley had a long and prolific career as a director without ever attracting much attention. He does a competent job here.

The one big big problem is that Columbia knew they had a future star in Rita Hayworth but hadn’t yet figured out what kind of star and hadn’t realised that it might be a good idea to give the kid plenty of chances to do some serious dancing. That’s all that’s missing here. If they’d added a couple of dances for Rita it could have been a huge hit.

As it stands it’s still quite entertaining. It’s so fluffy and lightweight that the slightest breeze would waft it away but it’s amusing and likeable. A must for Rita Hayworth fans. Highly recommended.

You Were Never Lovelier (1942)

You Were Never Lovelier is a 1942 musical starring Fred Astaire and Rita Hayworth. It includes absolutely every ingredient you could ask for in a bubbly musical romance.

Robert Davis (Fred Astaire) is a famed New York dance star and he’s in Buenos Aires and he’s just lost his last dollar at the racetrack. He needs a job pronto. He figures he can talk his way into a dancing gig at the Sky Room, the swankiest night spot in Buenos Aires. Unfortunately the Sky Room is owned by the irascible Eduardo Acuña (Adolphe Menjou) who takes an instant dislike to the New Yorker. But then Acuña doesn’t get along with anybody.

Acuña has his own problem. He has four daughters. They’re lovely girls but family tradition demands that they should get married in birth order. The oldest has just been married. That means it’s the turn of Maria (Rita Hayworth). And Maria isn’t interested in marriage.

Maria has the reputation of being an ice queen. The truth is the exact opposite. She’s a wildly romantic girl. That’s why she hasn’t fallen in love. She is waiting for a dashing man to sweep her off her feet.

Acuña has cooked up a crazy scheme to make Maria think she has a secret admirer. To his horror Maria gets the idea that Robert Davis is her secret admirer. Acuña thinks Davis is a scoundrel.

All the expected romantic complications and misunderstandings ensue. Robert did not expect to fall in love with the girl.

And those complications are handled skilfully and wittily and charmingly by the script.

Adolphe Menjou is delightfully scheming and cantankerous. He’s not villainous. He’s just used to getting his own way and thinks he can manipulate his daughter because he thinks that he understands how to handle women. In his own way he means well but he creates emotional chaos.

Fred Astaire plays another variation on the hyperactive but charming persona he had perfected at RKO in the 30s.

Rita Hayworth is breathtakingly gorgeous and adorable.

Of course if you’re going to be Fred Astaire’s leading lady you’re going to have to be able not only to dance but dance superbly. And Rita Hayworth most certainly could dance. Astaire was apparently very impressed indeed by her dancing abilities. Their dances together are terrific. As usual her singing voice is dubbed.

And they have good chemistry. The main reason to see this movie is most definitely to see Astaire and Hayworth together. It is a pity they only made two movies together.

It’s all delightful but somehow it just can’t quite match the best of the Astaire Rogers musicals of the 30. RKO gave those movies a distinctive aesthetic (with a touch of fantasy) which this movie lacks. The settings look good but a bit generic. It doesn’t have the same magical flavour.

These minor quibbles aside this is a charming lightweight escapist musical. Recommended.

I don’t think it’s had a Blu-Ray release but the older DVD release looks fine.

Sweet Charity (1969)

Sweet Charity is a 1969 musical directed and choreographed by Bob Fosse. It was Fosse’s first feature film. The stage version of Sweet Charity was based on Fellini’s 1957 film Nights of Cabiria, the story of a prostitute’s search for happiness and love.

The 60s was a fascinating period for movie musicals with massive hits like The Sound of Music and huge box-office turkeys like Doctor Dolittle, Hello Dolly, Star and Darling Lili. Sweet Charity turned out to be one of the biggest flops of all.

Charity Hope Valentine (Shirley MacLaine) is a dance hall hostess. She dreams of falling in love. She does fall in love. Often. It never works out.

At the beginning of the movie she’s involved with a sleazebag named Charlie. He’s such an obvious louse that you immediately start to wonder about Charity’s judgment.

Then there’s a handsome charming Italian movie star played by Ricardo Montalban. She makes it as far as his bedroom, but not as far as his bed.

Then she meets Mr Right. He’s Oscar (John McMartin) and he’s as wholesome as freshly baked bread. Of course she can’t tell him she’s a taxi dancer. And what if he discovers that she’s not a virgin!

Lots of emotional angst follows.

It’s not hard to see why this movie flopped. There are so many things wrong with it.

The first problem is that at two-and-a-half hours it’s an hour too long. It is so slow.

Some of the songs are good but most are awful.

It’s an unstructured mess.

The biggest problems stem from what they did to the source material. In Fellini’s movie the heroine is a prostitute. That was changed for both the stage and screen versions of Sweet Charity. Had Charity been portrayed as a hooker the movie would have received an X rating which would have doomed it.

The trouble is that if she’s not a hooker the entire story makes no sense at all. All of Charity’s indulgence in self-pity and shame makes no sense. Oscar’s behaviour stretches credibility beyond breaking point.

And we’re seriously expected to believe that Oscar, a sophisticated New Yorker, is shocked and horrified by the thought that Charity might not be a virgin.

It all comes across as silly and we lose patience with both Charity and Oscar.

And they made her a dance hall hostess? A taxi dancer? In New York City in 1969? A profession that hadn’t been heard of for twenty years.

The only way this bowdlerised version of the story could have worked was as a period piece. In a 1920s, 30s or 40s setting it might have made sense. In a 1969 setting it’s an absurdity.

Some of the dance routines are well done. Fosse’s approach to choreography is genuinely fresh and exciting. But that’s maybe three musical routines in a long long long movie.

The Rhythm of Life number comes across as a desperate attempt to climb aboard the Summer of Love bandwagon. It doesn’t fit in the movie at all.

Visually it’s all over the place. The scenes in the Pompeii Club are excellent - they have a very euro decadent vibe.

I also have to say that I just didn’t warm to Charity as a character.

Sweet Charity just didn’t grab me at all. I can’t in all honesty recommend this one.

Footlight Parade (1933)

Footlight Parade was the third of the 1930s Warner Brothers musicals with production numbers by Busby Berkeley. I’ve always considered 42nd Street to be the greatest of the series but having watched it again I think Footlight Parade may be even better.

It has not just great Busby Berkeley dance sequences. It also has Jimmy Cagney! Gangster movies had made Cagney a huge star but Footlight Parade gave him the chance to do what he really wanted to do - to be a song-and-dance man. Cagney is absolutely fantastic.

This time it’s not about putting on a broadway show, it’s about putting on prologues. These really were apparently a thing for a while. They were very short live song and dance shows which would precede the showing of a talking picture in a movie theatre. At the start of Footlight Parade broadway producer Chester Kent (Cagney) is facing ruin. Nobody wants musical comedies any more. Everybody wants talking pictures.

There are these prologues but they’re expensive. Then Chester has a brainwave - pre-packaged prologues which could be moved from theatre to theatre in a single unit. This will be much more cost effective.

The Chester Kent prologues are a huge success. But he has a deadly rival - Gladstone Prologues. And Gladstone keeps stealing Chester’s ideas. Chester is also being cheated by his chiselling business partners.

He has to come up with new ideas constantly and he’s in danger of cracking under the strain.

He has woman problems as well. His ex-wife is trying to fleece him. He’s fallen for a no-good dame, Vivian Rich (Claire Dodd). He doesn’t know it but she intends to take him to the cleaners as well. If only Chester would realise that his faithful secretary Nan (Joan Blondell) is the right girl for him and that she’s crazy in love with him.

Meanwhile mousy little typist Bea Thorn (Ruby Keeler) is hoping for her chance to show what she can do on stage. We just know that she will get her chance.

Naturally Dick Powell is on hand as well.

There’s just enough plot to keep things ticking over.

Cagney is amazing. Charismatic beyond belief, hyper-active, bouncing off the walls, talking faster than a machine-gun. He did that in his gangster movies as well but here he demonstrates his ability to be incredibly likeable.

And Cagney can play the driven dedicated producer and then do the song and dance stuff as well (and he was a superb dancer). He dominates the movie to a much greater extent than the producer characters in 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.

Teaming Cagney and Joan Blondell was definitely a winning move. Not everybody likes Ruby Keeler but I think she’s sweet. And Claire Dodds makes a terrific calculating uber-bitch.

And then there are the Busby Berkeley numbers. The cat number is cute. The Shanghai Lil routine offers the promise of sin in the tropics. And the Honeymoon Hotel number is a joyous and very risqué celebration of adultery. The highlight however is By a Waterfall. Berkeley’s production numbers were staggering triumphs of organisation as Berkekley uses girls to create wild moving abstract paintings. Was there any way he could have made things even more difficult for himself? You bet - how about doing the whole thing in a gigantic tank, including underwater shots from multiple angles? The result is breathtaking.

Footlight Parade has less of a Depression feel than the earlier movies. It’s cheerful and optimistic. It’s such a total immersion in style class. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933.