Band Wagon (DVD)

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I suppose all this singing and dancing stuff must seem hopelessly old fashioned to today's younger audiences, and, indeed, the Hollywood musical continues to flounder, even with the successes of "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago." Certainly, 2005's deadly dull "Phantom of the Opera" didn't help matters much. But there was a time when film entertainment meant gayety and laughter, song and dance. And for the forties and fifties, that meant people like Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, and foremost, Fred Astaire, who stars here in 1953's "The Band Wagon."

"The Band Wagon" is as big and joyful as anything Hollywood ever produced in those days, and if it's short on plot or character (those would come later with things like "Guys and Dolls," "My Fair Lady," "The Music Man," "How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying," and "The Sound of Music"), it had impeccable credentials. "The Band Wagon" starred Astaire and Cyd Charisse. It was directed by Vincente Minnelli ("Cabin in the Sky," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "Ziegfeld Follies," "The Pirate," "An American in Paris," "Brigadoon," "Kismet," "Gigi"). It was produced by Arthur Freed ("For Me and My Gal," "Meet Me in St. Louis," "The Harvey Girls," "Easter Parade," "On the Town," "Annie Get Your Gun," "An American in Paris," "Singin' in the Rain," "Brigadoon," "Kismet," "Silk Stockings," "Kismet"). Its story and screenplay were written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green ("On the Town," "Singin' in the Rain," "Auntie Mame," "Bells Are Ringing," "Applause"). Its songs were by veteran songwriters Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz ("A Star Is Born," "All Through the Night," "Dancing in the Dark"). Its dance numbers were staged by Michael Kidd ("Seven Brides for Seven Brothers," "Guys and Dolls," "Li'l Abner," "Hello, Dolly," "Star!"). And additional, uncredited work came from Alan Jay Lerner ("An American in Paris," "My Fair Lady," "Camelot," "Paint Your Wagon"). With that kind of talent behind it, the movie could hardly have failed.

Astaire usually outshone his co-stars, whether they were Ginger Rogers, Judy Garland, Betty Hutton, or Audrey Hepburn. In "The Band Wagon" he's paired with the beautiful and balletic Cyd Charisse, but despite her fine dancing and ravishing appearance, it's Astaire who's the focus of attention in every scene. In fact, Charisse doesn't even enter the picture until a quarter of the way through. When she does come in, it's as a backdrop to Astaire, whose movie it is from beginning to end.

"The Band Wagon" is a backstage musical wherein the characters are putting on a show, in this case a Broadway show (called, appropriately, "The Band Wagon"), and the characters in the movie are largely patterned after people in real life. The idea is that a former stage and screen star, Tony Hunter (Astaire), has become a washed-up hoofer without a motion picture in years. So he returns to Broadway on a promise from two writer friends, Les and Lily Martin (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray), that they have written a new musical just for him, and it will be a smash. But when Tony arrives in New York, it's to discover that the show has been handed over to the bizarre dictates of Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), an eccentric director of classical drama who has never done a musical before. Cordova wants to turn the simple, happy-go-lucky musical the Martins wrote into a modern, downbeat version of the Faust legend, with a ballet star, Gabrielle Gerard (Charisse), as costar and himself as the devil.

Needless to say, everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The Martins' play is completely changed; the authors have no time to rewrite; and the two stars come to hate each other. The opening night is a disaster, forcing Hunter and his gang to start all over again with the simple musical play they had originally envisioned.

Clearly, the Hunter character is based on Astaire himself. He was never washed-up, but he was always going into retirement and coming back out. The bickering Martins are based on Comden and Green, the film's own writers. And Jeffrey Cordova, the egotistical "genius" director with several Broadway shows running simultaneously, could have been Orson Welles a little more than a decade earlier or, as Comden and Green admit, Jose Ferrer at the time.

Jack Buchanan was a well-known British stage and screen actor who had done little previous work in Hollywood, but he has a wonderfully hammy part as the quirky director and plays it to the hilt. Levant and Fabray overplay their parts at every turn, Levant getting a lot of mileage out of his various illnesses, one of the musician-humorist's trademarks. Charisse is expectedly radiant. Astaire, of course, is as graceful and sophisticated as ever, but here he adds a note of modesty and humility to the mix as well. Paul Byrd as Gabrielle's drippy boyfriend is the only one of the cast who gets lost in the shuffle.

The first two-thirds of the movie recount the characters' exploits trying to put the show together. Astaire sings "By Myself" and "A Shine on My Shoes," and then the four principals sing "That's Entertainment," the highlight of the picture. Most of the Dietz and Schwartz songs were written years earlier, but they wrote "That's Entertainment" expressly for the movie. "La Femme Rouge" is a ballet number for Charisse"; "Dancing in the Dark" is Astaire and Charisse's first real dance together, an enchanting piece set in Central Park; and "Up in Smoke" is a semi-comic number wherein the pyrotechnics upstage the stars.

The final third of the movie forsakes any semblance of plot altogether and simply strings together a series of songs and dances, the numbers being performed in the new show. It's here we find some of the movie's best tunes. "I Love Louisa," "New Sun in the Sky," "I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plans," "Louisiana Hayride," "Triplets," and a terrific musical parody of Mickey Spillane, noir-type mysteries called "Girl Hunt." ("She was scared; scared as a turkey in November.") The movie ends with reprises of "By Myself" and "That's Entertainment," with the whole cast joining in on one of Vincente Minnelli's patented grand finales.