31. Rabid Warrens: “The Movie Musical” reviewed by Louise Ebersdorf.
My, but Ebersdorf Tower has become a veritable animal house of creativity! Cheryl is on hold, of course, until Mme Beach and I reach a firm transatlantic agreement as to who will get her next choreographic work and under what conditions. Cheryl has been watching an energized Sandy teach my dancer-handyman Master Raro a new solo down on the 35th floor. (In search of a full-length ballet plot, she has also been watching Nicholas Ray movies, and now my rival Beach has suggested Lewis Allen’s Desert Fury. Does it stream?) Cat experts Albertine and Paco are raring to create a new performance art piece for the New MoMA, and they demand dearest Murr be returned for their feline choreographic ensemble. As a result, on the night of our book discussion (my subject: The Movie Musical by Jeanine Basinger, Knopf, 2019) yours truly decided to schedule a group powwow re our situation preceding any literary talks. Belle, Sesostris, Pippa and I confabulated.
Belle says that perhaps we should be careful about any association with the New MoMA. Since reopening, its early press is not so complimentary, including its new performance space. However, Belle loves the theme park aspect of the expanded museum, so reminiscent of current Broadway. Indeed, she calls it the best community center / shopping mall in her extensive experience. Take away the paintings and sculpture, she says, and it would still be well worth the trip. For Manhattanites, dropping in on the vast premises on 53rd will be like a refreshing glimpse of endless suburbs (all that expensive space!). Visiting tourists from the hinterlands should feel right at home amid the bland architectural inane. Getting lost among the many floors and exhibitions is part of the funhouse ambience. (Not much helpful signage, Belle reports.) Therefore, my resident Florida Aesthetician votes for anything Albertine would mount in the New MoMA. It is bound to make an impression.
Sesostris is also positive. Stroking her crystal ball, she says that the next step in the museum’s acquisitions will undoubtedly involve a lavish MoMA pet shop, not only because Board members will be able to drop off their house companions during daily walkabouts, but because advanced genetic engineering will soon be able to turn the buildings into an Art Warren with the imminent arrival of Bio Art. A commercially available, flesh-and-blood Jean Dufy Poodle – expertly genomed, groomed, and trained – straight from a future MoMA pet emporium is bound to give Baby Yoda a run for its money: a creaturely portrait come to Life modeled on Art, from dead canvas to live kennel-pup! Perhaps Albertine plans to exhibit my Ebersdorf prize felines in her new work as preview specimens, not because they are scientifically produced (not yet!) but because they are top-of-the-line through conventional breeding techniques, certifications, and artistic guidance from yours truly. My work, recognized at last! The Ebersdorf Lab downstairs stands ready and waiting.
Pippa suggested that if MoMA turns her down, Albertine should try the Eurovision Dance Contest, broadcast from Tel Aviv. (But I forbid travel for my bonded prizewinners.)
Cheryl informed me later that she can put us in contact with a certain Professor Wonkov in northern Siberia. He is the expert on producing what he calls “Denisovan Ballerinas” and thus should have lots of ideas about engineering aesthetically correct Modern Art felines, canines, and equines. Can’t you image the vast kennels and stables MoMA will add to its growing empire? (With a handy Fifth Avenue converted into a racetrack for art-inspired equine parades!) That J. Dufy Poodle will be just the beginning.
If Wonkov can also eventually introduce a new form of Human Dancer through his chromosomal magic, MoMA will be able to feature Ebersdorf ballerinas in its performance space, straight from my lab. Lincoln Kirstein would be so proud to see his dream of a dance department there dedicated to his favorite performance art. And perhaps I can move at last toward revival of my original ballet company, the Ebersdorf Ballet! I have to tell Liane Beach about our plans here in forward-looking New York. I must decide what A&P can be told about those plans. We may have to put a false front in place. I do not enjoy lying, but sometimes truth may have to be rationed. To that end, Murr will remain on the thirty-ninth floor where we girls enjoy his magic! Maybe my ballet company could alternate seasons with Beach’s visiting Le Swing ensemble at my currently shuttered Louise Theater? Possibilities, possibilities. China now is not so near.
Herewith, my book report. This new history of the Hollywood musical is a wonder warren all its own. The author, Janine Basinger, has styled her volume like a text for a university survey course. (Just imagine the multiple screenings students will scurry to across our nation! Or watch on the minute screen of a mobile iPhone.) Just when college textbooks are going up in price, this one is priced at an affordable $45.00. You get some nice stills, well reproduced, from certain all-too-predictable film classics. In the bookstores at this moment for holiday sales, The Movie Musical has few surprises for the older reader. Maybe the younger crowd will be intrigued.
Once again, I must comment upon a published work which deals with music and dance and which seems to have been written by someone who is versed in neither art. (Some knowledge is such a turnoff!) What can possess book publishers to produce such an effort? What sustains an author through the arduous years of collecting information doomed in advance to miss its aesthetic target? How does such a drudge summon the courage to endorse the result with an authorial signature? Clearly, this issue is the perfect subject for an academic dissertation. Graduate school types must be kept busy.
In days of yore, we oldies went to see a film musical for its creation of an alternate reality, rather like today’s young seek out horror movies, monster films, sci-fi epics, and superhero franchises for relief from “realistic” genres in film fare. In other words, such artfully confected entertainments allow an investigation of styles and forms of showmanship, however compromised by commercialism, that a more documentarian approach avoids. A successful movie musical creates a unique poetic universe. Basinger is dedicated to academic categorization, not varieties of lyricism produced from a mixture of humor, music, and dance. Film musicals once featured beautiful and talented performers, wit and humor, and imagination. Basinger seems sensitive only to the first ingredient – the spotlit talent in the room. She is respectful of Astaire the star legend, but she appears to have no critical tools for discussing his performances or his choreography.
A writer on film musicals must somehow deal with issues of style – in fact, the emphasis would inevitably be on substantive stylization in music, dance, as well as filmmaking. The author of the current volume is not really concerned with such matters. Basinger is an avid collector of plot summaries. She is generous with them here. The problem is that narrative can often be the least interesting element of a musical entertainment. Basinger – according to the jacket flap copy, a Founder of a Department of Film Studies – is a dedicated story-hound. Potted plots have a way, like many academic tools, of describing a literal version of actions in a spectacle; but literalism is seldom the point of an efficient musical entertainment. Fresh fantasy is the aim of much song and dance, not a garden-variety “realism”. Entering a crafted amalgam of music, comedy, and dance is actually encountering a kind of happy madness, somehow sustained across an evening. It is possible that a hard-line theoretical and critical advocacy of the “integrated” musical entertainment has been shaking the wrong tree since the coming of music dramas such as Oklahoma (1943). In the long run, the “book show” on Broadway has done the form few favors. What is wanted in a musical work is imaginative surprise as well as formal coherence. The academically-minded often find writing on “integration” to be helpful in producing ready copy. (Or teaching a course.) The typical student-reader may not be so convinced or moved. The issue of integration may be a version of middle-brow apologetics, a way of ignoring the real specifics of a poetic rapture.
For a historian, Basinger pays little attention to theatrical forebears to the film musical. There’s no mention of influential French farce. No reference to the Princess Theater stage musicals that created the American musical comedy. She wants to show how Hollywood tried to one-up Broadway in sheer scale, expense, and personnel. This ambition led to lots of vulgar excess on the American screen, but Basinger doesn’t contrast that corporate failure with occasional successes that achieve a unique lyric delight. For example, she doesn’t mention an early musical adaptation like MGM’s The Cat and the Fiddle (1934), with Jeanette MacDonald and Romon Novarro. We get a thorough summary of Show of Shows (1929) instead. I kept looking for a Kern through-line in her book: The Cat and the Fiddle, Swing Time, Roberta, Show Boat. Quite a record, that one. But Basinger is after study-topics, not composers.
Why no serious discussion of the choreographers who worked in Hollywood? Nothing on Robert Alton? Little on Hermes Pan? Not to mention the central achievement of Astaire, or the film work of Balanchine, his disciple? How does Basinger sleep at night?
I missed a ready reference to the long-lost Paramount Follow Thru (1930), which manages charming intimate scenes (“We’d Make a Peach of a Pair” with Nancy Carroll and Buddy Rogers) and extraordinary production numbers (“I Want To Be Bad”, sung by Zelma O’Neal). There are additional songs by Rodgers and Hart, and the film was shot in early Technicolor. No mention at all? There are excerpts on YouTube. Look it up.
Someone should take certain publicity prose terms away from our author. Basinger has a reliance on zingy formulations such as: snazzy, razzamatazz, pizzazz, gangbusters, perky, wow, and let-it-rip. A little of this verbiage goes a long way toward reducing the seriousness of her enterprise. I imagine the language is supposed to evoke a period or generic argot, but it becomes a crutch across 600 pages. As the sage Ivy Compton-Burnett put it, “it is the voicing of things that makes them real.” As film chronicler, Basinger obviously resides in her private movie musical reality. Few voices echo there. Brave of her. No coward soul is hers.
At the end of this volume, Basinger apologizes for certain omissions. (Too late.) Mamoulian needed more attention. Here was an ensemble director who “integrated” studio setting with cinematic technique, rather like G.W. Pabst. (I wonder if today’s Safdie Brothers know Mamoulian’s work?) Charles Walters is close to a footnote in this volume, even though he invented the mid-century MGM prototype film musical in Good News. And he was a choreographer who thought in film terms as well as dance. After a while, the reader must consider the possibility that The Movie Musical has been written by someone with superficial exposure to her subject and little taste.
If Basinger is weak on aesthetics, she is better on what she calls film “personalities”. Bing Crosby’s colloquial artistry is given its due. Doris Day’s versatility is celebrated. She includes the usual suspects: Jolson, Cantor, E. Powell, Garland, Cagney, Temple, MacDonnell, Eddy, Grable, Hayworth, Elvis. Basinger claims that such talents had celluloid presence and that Hollywood could build vehicles around their strengths. To her credit, the author is not fooled by La La Land. Her point is that there is no one in that film with the iconic weight of a poster of Ingrid Bergman featured in one scene. No “personalities”. There is an unfortunate section entitled “The Musical as an Art Form”. The Wizard of Oz is prominently featured. Some of us remember how Otis Ferguson referred to Wizard as “a pound of fruitcake soaking wet”?
It seems somehow fitting that the new film musical at 2019’s end (and at money-making holiday time) is Cats. The movie exploits three dancers whom I have sometimes followed: Francesca Hayward (as Victoria), Steven McRae (as Skimbleshanks), and Robert Fairchild (as Munkustrap). It is choreographed by Andy Blakenbuehler (Hamilton). Pippa and I saw the digitally revised and corrected version in a theater on a big screen and with Dolby sound. As you may have read in the press, there is a large problem with the makeup and costume designs. The results tend to obscure the faces of the performers (Steven) or to render them more imbecile than any animal could ever be (Francesca). Robbie Fairchild comes off best, but not for his dancing: it’s his profile displayed next to Judi Dench’s whiskers which is regularly framed. The dancing is in an undistinguished “Broadway” style, over-pumped and over-edited. As they say on Broadway, the first thing to be cut is always the dancing. The same with film musicals.
But the biggest mistake in Cats is the failure to find a fresh style for the feline creatures’ behavior throughout. The film’s figures are represented neither as animals nor as human beings. All the allowed human qualities on display are clichéd, just as the dancing is slicked up. The cat mimetics are also predictable. Put the two together and you have sci-fi CGI in full literalistic fig. The visual grotesquerie mirrors, of course, the pastiche in Webber’s score. I sometimes think that Italian verismo opera led musical theater down the wrong road, not only musically but in the resulting stylistic confusions in theatrical representation. At length, the operatic mode stunted and deformed fantasy on our lyric stages. No wonder some of us turn to the more confidently stylized ballet.
This film will be essential viewing (over and over) for A&P in preparation for their performance-art work. I may refuse my pets’ participation if there is any resemblance to the Andrew Lloyd Webber film. Perhaps A&P will reconsider the abandonment of their plans for a Demon Cat movie.
Pippa’s contribution to our powwow came after our meeting. Like Sesostris, my assistant may prove to have the gift of foresight. Pippa has now warned me that our wonder-working Murr (a feline Fountain of Youth) may have an artificial chip implanted somewhere beneath his fur, a device that allows him to transmit our discussions about plans for the Ebersdorf future to an interested agency somewhere, and thus we must be careful what we say in his presence. We must not be venturesome without serious safeguards. (In like manner, I take precautions against kidnapping when I sometimes go out on the town. My husband in Texas would never cough up my ransom.) I have subsequently conveyed instructions to Belle and Sesostris that therapeutic sessions with our Purrfect Puss are to be held in utter silence henceforth – perhaps passing handwritten notes if necessary. They have agreed. Our de-aging fêtes will continue with strict dignity and silent solemnity.
Contemporary life has its wayward labyrinths and hidden trapdoors. But we will cope!
L.E.
__________________
Kommentare