The Big Screen (36 page)

The medium seemed to grasp its own split—the lifelike without life's detachment—so we could be allowed to appreciate a sadist, just as in the future we would be encouraged to study a rapist, an act of torture, a murderer…hell has no limit. In
Vertigo
, the fuss of the central story masks a vital first: the killer, Gavin, a master of refined cruelty, goes free. In a few years' time, Norman Bates was not free, but he was on show, holding
Psycho
's screen and the identity of the film. You can chart the following decades with dark characters not disowned by their films: Michael Corleone, Travis Bickle, Hannibal Lecter, Tony Soprano.

Yet in the same years of film noir—as
Detour
(1945) crossed with
Meet Me in St. Louis
(1944)—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer created a string of musicals that are still felt as an epitome of pure cinema and transcendent pleasure. Their dream was not simply that lovers found each other and lived in bliss in a flawless world. It was not even the songs sung in these films. It was that we might all of us sing and dance at the same time with the effortlessness that was the goal of Fred Astaire's relentless work. Of course, that unison was a white lie: in fact, the performers danced to a playback of the songs. But Astaire gave the musical a fluent cinematic style: he wanted to see full figures shot in unbroken coverage. He longed to believe the dream was real.

In hindsight, the color musical seems inevitable. Yet its example has never been attempted again, and it needed many circumstantial advantages, such as the acceptance of Technicolor. So explaining the musical historically is not simple. The genre goes against the grain of the postwar mood, and hangs upon a slight fellow with big ears, a high speaking voice, and no apparent desire to be an actor. Astaire remains one of the more implausible but most adored stars. The genre might not have taken flight without his elusive, cool manner, before “cool” had been noticed.

There had been earlier musicals. Al Jolson (far from cool) was the bearer of sound, talk, and song in
The Jazz Singer
(1927). Metro's
The Broadway Melody
(1929) won the second Best Picture Oscar. Warner Brothers developed what we call the Busby Berkeley pictures, black and white and often aware of the harsh issues of the Depression, but a choreographic lather of girls and orgasmic forms, where the camera was itching to plunge into the center of the big
O
. So Berkeley choreographed (and ordered the shooting of) the big numbers in
Footlight Parade
,
Gold Diggers of 1933
, and
42nd Street
(all three released in 1933), with players such as Cagney, Dick Powell, and Ruby Keeler. These films had aerial shots of waves, and whirlpools of chorus girls opening and closing their legs in time with our desire. It was as if the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov had been assigned to a pornographic ecstasy:
Willing Comrades of 1933
?

At RKO, in the Astaire-Rogers pictures, still in black and white, the exhilaration of the set-piece numbers (as conceived and visualized by Fred) ignored the weightless framework of the stories and their inane romantic complications. In no other area had Hollywood so freed itself of obligatory naturalism, or ventured so close to surreal abandon.

Though everyone knew they wanted fun at the movies, the musical was flagrantly attuned to pleasure. Factory films often clung to common sense: Would the audience be able to follow it? Would it make money? But the musical ridiculed such solemnity. You could think of the picture as a transporting dream, or even an orgy—as in ballet, there was an eroticism in the musical that slipped through the sieve of censorship. Just recall Cyd Charisse putting on lingerie in
Silk Stockings
(1957), a scene that might not have passed the Code in a dramatic film.

At M-G-M, a stronghold of practicality and business efficiency, under the leadership of the producer Arthur Freed, Metro made a series of musicals that look like a campaign to keep people cheerful as war ended and darker threats loomed.

There was a history: Metro had made
The Broadway Melody
as sound dawned. It had produced the Jeanette McDonald–Nelson Eddy films in the 1930s, and it had won a Best Picture Oscar again with
The Great Ziegfeld
(1936), in which William Powell played the showman and the film was an anthology of his numbers. The studio had done
Babes in Arms
(1939) and
Strike Up the Band
(1940), in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were kids putting on a show (and both films were in black and white). In
Broadway Melody of 1940
, Astaire (now under contract at M-G-M) and Eleanor Powell, all in white on a glossy black floor, had done the fabulous “Begin the Beguine” number so that the rest of the clunky picture was forgotten. In 1939 the confusion and hopes behind
The Wizard of Oz
turned into a pioneer fantasy with songs. When Dorothy sang “Over the Rainbow” she was behaving or acting like a character in a drama. “Over the Rainbow” introduced a new possibility of belief in which the studio embraced Technicolor and a bold, theatrical scheme of production design. The musical might be less a studio space—at RKO it was apparent that Fred and Ginger danced on sound stages—than a fictional place that only film could fashion. What is the Hollywood Walk of Fame (begun in 1958) but the Yellow Brick Road with product placement?

Come forward to
Meet Me in St. Louis
(1944). This need not have been a musical: it was based on a series of stories published in
The New Yorker
by Sally Benson about family life in St. Louis at the turn of the century. But the studio gave it color, an adult Judy Garland, and songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. One of them, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” comes near the end of the film. The Smith family is about to move to New York for their father's promotion at the bank. But not everyone is happy with the move. Esther (about eighteen) and her kid sister Tootie (about seven) are looking out over their moonlit garden and the “snow people” on parade there. That's when Garland sings what may be the most melancholy of Christmas songs in a very sisterly manner. Tootie (Margaret O'Brien) is so moved she runs down and smashes the snow people. Father comes home, observes the emotional distress, and decides to forsake his biggest opportunity in life.

As delivered on-screen, the father (Leon Ames) pauses over his desktop (it is like Kane noticing the snowball; it is a scene from a drama) before making his decision. The family will stay in St. Louis. This was 1944, when many people longed to believe that an earlier order and home might be enjoyed again—as if nothing had happened. It's an un-American closure, denying enterprise and mobility, and one of the most touching scenes in a musical.

The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli, who had been raised as a stage art director. He and Garland fell in love on the picture (it shows, and it pushed them into an impulsive marriage). Garland was an actress, to be sure, but she acted best when she sang—the same could be said of Frank Sinatra as a movie star. Minnelli was an M-G-M contract director all his career, and his musicals include
The Pirate
(1948, again with Garland, though they were divorced by then),
An American in Paris
(Best Picture Oscar winner for 1951, and a gaudy vision of Paris as seen by some of its great painters),
The Band Wagon
(1953),
Brigadoon
(1954), and
Gigi
(1958).

The other essential director in this history was Stanley Donen, once a dancer and choreographer, and very close to Gene Kelly. Together the two men were recruited to M-G-M, where Donen would make
On the Town
(1949),
Singin' in the Rain
(1952),
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
(1954), and
It's Always Fair Weather
(1955). One should add
Funny Face
(1957) to that list, though the inspired and tender pairing of Astaire and Audrey Hepburn was actually a Paramount picture.

How could any studio go wrong with Astaire, Kelly, and Garland? The coincidence of those three seems explanation enough for the surge of musicals at M-G-M. But there was also a stimulus coming from the theater. In this same period, Broadway premiered
Oklahoma!
(1943),
Carousel
(1945),
Annie Get Your Gun
(1946), and
South Pacific
(1949). These shows had a greater faith in story, character, and ideas than the review musical that had been dominant before 1939. They also shone a light on being American and treating an experience that extended beyond New York or Broadway.

M-G-M had ranks of stars. It also boasted Esther Williams, June Allyson, Van Johnson, Debbie Reynolds, and Howard Keel. One could add Lena Horne, who was at the studio and given a few songs (usually removed for the South) but never allowed to become a real star. There were other directors, such as Charles Walters (
Easter Parade
, 1948;
Summer Stock
, 1950; and
High Society
, 1956) and George Sidney (
Anchors Aweigh
, 1945;
The Harvey Girls
, 1946;
Annie Get Your Gun
, 1950;
Show Boat
, 1951; and
Kiss Me Kate
, 1953). To support them, Freed gathered a team of craftspeople: Roger Edens, songwriter and arranger (and the producer of
Funny Face
); Betty Comden and Adolph Green, scriptwriters (they did
On the Town
,
Singin' in the Rain,
and
The Band Wagon
); André Previn, who joined M-G-M as composer and arranger at the age of fifteen; Kay Thompson, who did so much to look after Judy Garland, and wrote the
Eloise
books, which had Liza Minnelli as a model; the choreographer Michael Kidd (
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers
); not to mention the designers, set decorators, costumiers, and photographers who collaborated on the exuberant prettiness of the studio musicals—audiences still gasp with pleasure at the fresh laundry brightness of
Meet Me in St. Louis
and the devotion to art behind
An American in Paris
, a film that is inseparable from the postwar surge in tourism and cultural expansion in Americans.

But these talents might never have been assembled or needed without the American songbook. These were years in which the nation and the world were singing the works of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, Harold Arlen, Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and so many others, including Arthur Freed himself, who wrote the song “Singin' in the Rain.” Was that the background of radio and live theater, or was it the weather we call confidence and optimism?

Why did the musical at M-G-M end? The studio was not the same by the mid-1950s. Its founding figures had died or retired. Louis B. Mayer was fired in 1951 and replaced by Dore Schary, who said he was looking for social realism. Production was in decline, and the studio was tempted by blockbusters that carried the company. In 1959 the studio had one of its last big hits,
Ben-Hur
, a reprise of the way it had started out. That Charlton Heston version cost $16 million and grossed $90 million. It won eleven Oscars, yet it's harder to watch now than the version from 1925. We don't want to hear what these earnest biblical folk are saying.

For the musical's demanding schedules, Judy Garland was too unreliable. Astaire was getting to be sixty, thirty years older than Audrey Hepburn in
Funny Face
. Gene Kelly's best years were passing. The songwriters were fading away (though their songs are still loved). Plus, music changed. Just as the movie musical had been sustained by radio and sheet music, so now pop music broke out in the excitement of rock and roll and a teenage audience who reckoned the old musicals were elderly, quaint, and sentimental.

Still at Metro, Arthur Freed was driven to make some wretched dramatic films. Kelly, Garland, and Astaire all sought to be regular actors. A future was being set up where people not alive when they were made might take delight in a retrospective of musicals from 1940 to 1960. In war, cold war, and a new, existential distress, a legend of happiness had been created by those films. You can feel Scorsese's nostalgia for it in
New York, New York
. It had been a way of singing in the rain.

I don't mean to take the musical over the state line and into noir. If you are old enough, you don't forget Donald O'Connor's “Make 'em Laugh” in
Singin' in the Rain
or “The Night They Invented Champagne” in
Gigi
, or every other innocent celebration in the M-G-M musical. But young people don't know those songs, so their wistful moments and soliloquies become more affecting once you hear loss in the melody. It's hard to find a more hushed intimacy than Gene Kelly singing “Our Love Is Here to Stay,” in
An American in Paris
, or Astaire coaxing Charisse out of her coldness and repression in “All of You” in
Silk Stockings
. The lasting virtue of those songs, and the dances, is their hesitancy on a perilous brink of inner life. It's as if, from somewhere, some sensibility is saying, well, sure, the musical is swell and lovely, but don't you feel warning signs?