Old Yorker

  • It’s Always Fair Weather

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen (1955)

    It’s Always Fair Weather begins in 1945 but most of the action takes place ten years later.  During that time, each of the three GIs we meet in the opening scenes – Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey) and Angelo ‘Angie’ Valentine (Michael Kidd) – have watched their lives turn disappointing.   Ted, who was going to be a lawyer or a politician or some kind of great man, is a far from high-ranking boxing promoter.  At the start of the film, he receives a ‘Dear John’ letter and he still hasn’t found the right girl a decade on.  Doug’s wife now wants a divorce and although he’s a successful advertising executive he wanted to be an artist.  Angie, who has not only a wife but a surfeit of kids, had ambitions of being a top chef:  he calls the place he runs ‘Cordon Bleu’ but it’s actually a hamburger stand.  The trio swears undying friendship on their last evening together at the end of the war; they vow to meet again in ten years’ time – on the tenth of October 1955.  They keep the date but find, when they’re reunited, that they get on each other’s nerves.  These soldiers three, exuberant in New York at the start, naturally echo the sailors on a day’s shore leave in On the Town, made by Kelly and Donen six years earlier:  plenty had happened to those two as well in the meantime.  By the time Fair Weather was made, their relationship had just about broken down and Kelly was depressed by MGM’s continuing refusal to release Invitation to the Dance.   The characters’ sense of disillusionment and the tensions between them when they get back together mesh with the film-makers’ state of mind.  This helps to create one of the most satisfying musicals I’ve seen.

    The film may be more impressive – as well as much more enjoyable – at this distance in time than it was when first released.  You might think the predicament of Ted, Doug and Angie spoke to that of many of their real-life contemporaries but audiences of the time evidently didn’t want acridness in screen musicals:  It’s Always Fair Weather was a box-office failure.  The very title, as well as picking up on the idea of inconstant friends, seems to poke fun at the received idea of the musical as a genre of determined optimism.  The combination of the principals’ self-reproach and an unambiguous contempt for the symbiotic worlds of television and advertising must have been as potent as it was unfamiliar.  Yet what may have felt subversive in 1955 seems, more than half a century later, refreshingly disenchanted and emotionally gritty for a Cinemascope musical of the era – you don’t need to make the usual adjustments to believe in the world  you’re seeing and hearing.   André Previn’s agreeable music is nothing special but that throws into stronger relief the witty lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who also did the screenplay.  And because the melodies have the quality of being made up as they go along, and there are no over-inflated production numbers, It’s Always Fair Weather is one of those musicals where breaking into song and dance seems a truthful and natural expression of a character’s feelings (an effect which Kelly and Donen underline through the reactions of some of the onlookers on the screen).

    Watching Gene Kelly here, I genuinely liked him for the first time.  He might not be specifically believable as an aspiring lawyer or embryo politico but that works – it serves to reflect Ted Riley’s sense that his life isn’t working out as he planned.  Kelly may or may not be drawing on his own recent disappointments but he’s convincingly subdued.  The dejection is organic, not performed; he seems a little physically reduced too (he probably is a few pounds lighter than in On the Town).  Because he’s less shiny, more introverted than usual, the few sequences in which he is upbeat are treasurable, especially the solo on roller-skates – when Ted likes himself and Gene Kelly is enjoying himself.   As Doug, Dan Dailey has a humorous melancholy and naturalism, an irredeemably middle-aged quality, which give depth to the film.  His increasingly drunken and sarcastic solo ‘Situation-Wise’ is one of the highest highlights.  Dailey’s and Michael Kidd’s physical presences complement Kelly’s perfectly, as does their dancing.  Kidd, best known as a choreographer, is vivid and charmingly funny in what’s essentially the Sinatra role.   The trio numbers are terrific – whether the vigorous ‘The Binge’ (which includes the dustbin lids sequence the film is best remembered for); or the scene in a restaurant when Ted, Doug and Angie glumly chomp celery sticks and voice their negative thoughts about each other to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz that’s playing in the background; or dance on a split screen – synchronised but in three separate rooms.   (It’s a pity, though, that the projectionist couldn’t get Dailey, in the left-hand segment, fully on the screen.  And although there was no apology from BFI, the print quality was ragged in several places.)

    As Jackie, the TV producer Ted falls for, Cyd Charisse doesn’t have the vocal skills needed to do full justice to Comden and Green’s lines but the exceptional wit of her movement makes up for it.  Her legs are at their most astonishing in the boxing gym number (‘Baby, You Knock Me Out’) where the contrast between her elegance and the persuasive grunginess of the fighters she dances with is very amusing.  Dolores Gray is superb as the unconquerably smiling TV chanteuse Madeline:   the satirical brio of her main number (‘Thanks A Lot But No Thanks’) is exhilarating.  As a fight-fixing Mr Big, Jay C Flippen has a splendid brutal leer and David Burns, the owner of the bar to which the three protagonists keep returning, is a fine foil to them.

    The dancing is wonderfully varied, both in style and mood.  The ex-soldiers regain their corps d’esprit in a climactic fight sequence with the boxing crooks in the theatre from which the ‘Midnight with Madeline’ TV show is being aired.  This is superbly staged by Kelly and Donen:  it’s thoroughly rhythmical but never overly choreographed.   As recently noted, applause at the end is becoming nearly par for the course at BFI.  On this occasion, someone clapped even as the film was starting, and there were little outbursts of applause after two or three of the numbers.   Although I’m disinclined to clap in a cinema, I felt increasingly that I’d want to join in at the end.  Yet the diminuendo of the last sequence is so effective that, when the moment came, I didn’t.  As the three men go their separate ways again – Ted with Jackie, Doug and Angie back to their respective (and repaired) marriages – the screen says ‘The End’ and we have the sense of an ending in more ways than one.  This was the last time Kelly and Donen worked together and their filmographies from this point on are very spotty, although Donen made a few good non-musicals like Charade.  It’s Always Fair Weather is a great leave-taking.

    13 December 2011

  • The Great Moment

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Preston Sturges (1944)

    The Great Moment marked the end of Preston Sturges’s relationship with Paramount.  The producer Buddy DeSylva wasn’t happy with the film; nor was Sturges with how DeSylva and the studio cut the picture before it was released, more than two years after being shot, in the late summer of 1944.  A commercial and critical failure at the time, this proved an unfortunately pivotal movie for Sturges:  it was the eighth feature he’d directed in the space of five years but he subsequently made only four more films before his death in 1959.  The odd narrative structure of The Great Moment reflects the director’s intentions as much as Paramount butchery; a good part of the piece’s interest derives from a tension between the conventions of contemporary Hollywood biographies of medical pioneers, and Sturges’s sensibility and style; and this puzzling, disjointed movie lacks the energy of all the other films of his that I’ve seen.  Yet I liked it a lot.

    William Thomas Green Morton (1819-68), a Boston dentist, was the first person publicly to demonstrate, in 1846, the use of inhaled ether as a surgical anaesthetic.  Whether he was also the scientific discoverer of ether’s properties as an anaesthetic is a more disputed claim – but one that Morton remained intent on proving for the rest of his short life.  The matter was still controversial in 1940, when the cultural historian and writer René Fülöp-Miller published a book called Triumph over Pain.  Fülöp-Miller contended that Morton was indeed the sole discoverer of ether as an anaesthetic but that he was vilified by the medical profession – not least because he was a dentist, not a doctor.   What isn’t in dispute is that Morton failed to profit financially from his work with ether, or ‘Letheon’ as he called it.   His patents were disallowed.  His repeated applications to Congress for ‘national recompense’ failed.

    Paramount purchased the screen rights to Fülöp-Miller’s book with a view to Henry Hathaway directing the film and Gary Cooper playing Morton.  Both men then left Paramount.  According to Sturges’s biographer, James Curtis:

    ‘… Preston Sturges picked up on the story, dismissing its alleged inaccuracies, embracing instead its marvellous lesson of ingratitude and despair.  It was the same kind of dark, everything-right-gone-all-wrong story that Sturges had concocted with The Power and the Glory [which Sturges wrote but didn’t direct]; the success and achievement scenario followed by trial and without a happy ending.  It offered something decidedly different in the genre of biography and, in 1942, a chance to direct a film with a theme and structure similar to his most prestigious film of the 1930s.’

    The opening credits for The Great Moment appear against scenes of a public procession celebrating what Morton (Joel McCrea) has done.   The cheering crowd display placards proclaiming ‘Pain is no more’, and so on.  (It’s tempting to see this as an echo of Hail the Conquering Hero; strictly speaking, it’s an anticipation of that film, which went into production a year later, although it was released before, The Great Moment.)    After a written prologue – which stresses, as well as the agony of medical surgery in the pre-ether age, human beings’ propensity to treat their saviours badly – Sturges cuts to a street in winter.  An elderly man (William Demarest) goes into a pawn shop and redeems an item, a medal inscribed ‘To the Benefactor of Mankind – With the Gratitude of Humanity’.  It was once awarded to Morton; its owner was forced eventually to hock the medal.   The man who has redeemed it – his name is Eben Frost – visits Morton’s widow, Lizzie (Betty Field), and gives the medal to her.  In conversation with Frost, Lizzie describes her husband’s last days.  Everything that follows in The Great Moment is thus shadowed by the knowledge of what eventually became of this particular conquering hero.  Sturges confounds storytelling expectations by next describing how Morton’s hopes were raised then dashed in his final petition to the government.  The melancholy mood of the story is firmly set by the time the narrative moves into a chronologically earlier flashback, which covers the early years of the Mortons’ marriage and of his dental practice, and the events leading up to his use of ether as an anaesthetic.  This flashback comprises the rest of the film.

    I don’t mean to imply that The Great Moment isn’t often funny.  It is – as social comedy and in mining the comedy of enduring fears of the dentist’s chair.  There are lovely, witty details, such as a sequence in which Morton hunts down information in a medical dictionary and Sturges puts the text of dictionary entries on screen (including ‘see page 341’ etc, to move Morton on to the next stage of his search).  The fair amount of robust physical comedy in the film functions almost as an expression of the conflict between Sturges’s movie-making temperament and the genre in which he’s working.  There’s an absorbing impasse too between his scorn for the human behaviour that ruined Morton and a desire to convey the substance of the protagonist’s achievements.  Manny Farber’s review of the film (27 November 1944) notes that Sturges:

    ‘… is definitely interested in the great trouble a man had in achieving success, and in the fact that what success the man had was followed by twenty years of miserable failure … [Sturges’s] knowledge of an interest in the non-American-dream quality of Morton’s career seems to have been suffocated by his interest in whatever there was in the career that looked good.’

    Joel McCrea’s quality of likeable, foolish determination, although sometimes amusing, has a tragic aspect here – the impact is stronger because this effect is so different from that achieved by McCrea in Sullivan’s Travels and The Palm Beach Story.  His straightforwardness and lack of pretension as an actor also increase this tragic impact – the same attributes that increased the comic impact of his characters in those two earlier films.  (I don’t get either Manny Farber’s nostalgia for the ‘maleness’ of Hollywood actors in pre-war Westerns and other action films or his dislike of later movie acting styles but I think I do see in Joel McCrea’s expressive naturalness, in his work for Sturges, something of what Farber preferred and increasingly missed.)  McCrea is well partnered in The Great Moment by Betty Field, whose Lizzie is a convincing character – socially conscious and pretentious, more concerned that her husband improves their bank balance than that he alleviates human suffering, repeatedly scolding but evidently loving him too.  As Eben Frost, the patient on whom Morton first uses anaesthetic and who becomes his doughty, clueless, repetitious sidekick, William Demarest blends broad-comedy brio with a surging loyalty that makes you laugh and is touching too.  The two men who claim that Morton has pinched their ideas, his former professor and former colleague, are played by Julius Tannen and Louis Jean Heydt respectively.  Harry Carey is excellent as the fair-minded surgeon John Collins Warren.

    Does Sturges’s title refer to Morton’s first successful use of ether on a patient or to the final event of the film, when he walks into an operating theatre to sacrifice his commercial advantage, revealing to Professor Warren – and the world – the chemical composition of Letheon?  Probably both.  It’s an unfortunate fact of Hollywood history that a movie with this name proved the turning point for Preston Sturges’s career.  You can only feel grateful that he’d already done so much good stuff – it’s been great watching it at BFI these last few weeks.  (An entirely coincidental but undeniable pleasure for this viewer and racing fan was in seeing a film called The Great Moment a couple of hours after one occurred at the Cheltenham NH Festival, when Sprinter Sacre won his second two-mile Champion Chase.)

    16 March 2016

Posts navigation