My Fair Lady (George Cukor, 1964)

Pros:

1. Those gorgeous, eternal songs and the fecund musical universe it engendered. Read Tim J. Anderson's two chapters about the myriad recordings of the numbers and how they trained America in a new form aesthetic discernment in his terrific Making Easy Listening: Material Culture and Postwar American Recording (University of Minnesota Press, 2006). For one such spirited-and-then-some version, check out Lypsinka's take on Marilyn Maye's take on "Get Me to the Church on Time" here.  

2. The sick, gay-ass costumes and art direction of Cecil Beaton. I want never to leave the "Ascot Gavotte."

Cons:

1. The godawful, received, arbitrary, compulsorily heterosexual ending which George Bernard Shaw would've hated.

2. The length. Gawd, post-1960 Hollywood cinema makes my ass itch!

3. The direction. Cukor pulls off some elegant swirls. And I appreciate the perversity of rendering this a de facto inscription of the Broadway show. But lawd, is the camera heavy in that tumescent, Oscar-pandering, post-1960s Hollywood way! Cut! Track! Show me one (1!) fourth wall!

4. Audrey Hepburn. To state the obvious, she acquits herself admirably but Julie Andrews would've smoked her. 

Grade: B

Streets of Fire (Walter Hill, 1984)

I watched Streets of Fire because I'm going through yet another hardcore Steinman phase after his recent death. He wrote the songs for the film so I foolishly assumed it would be a full-blown kitsch musical. Turns out he wrote only two songs for it and he thought the screenplay was terrible, strong words from a man taken to writing about women who offer their throats to the wolf with the red roses. "Terrible" is putting it too lightly; this unholy meld of The Wild One and Flashdance and Escape from New York is an abomination.

One need only compare it to another 1984 film, Voyage of the Rock Aliens, to discover what went wrong. Voyage is an abomination too but it's a fun one. De facto music videos are jammed into the narrative at such a frequent rate that you have little clue what the story is about. But you don't care because you get peppy numbers featuring spacemen, cute boys, and Pia Zadora in a Union Jack half shirt. Streets of Fire halts the narrative with a bunch of stillborn fight scenes of indeterminate import. The viewer is not even certain when and where the action takes place, a postmodern escape clause Hill and co-screenwriter Larry Gross allow themselves with the opening title "Another Time, Another Place." Nothing is at stake and there are no spontaneous outbursts of song to compensate. Instead, we get soundtrack silage from The Fixx, Ry Cooder, Maria McKee, Greg Phillinganes (a quintessential session musician in a solo role), Stevie Nicks (sung by Marilyn Martin), ugh. The big hit from the film, Dan Hartman's "I Can Dream About You" (actually, a damn solid song), is not sung by Hartman in the climactic scene. The Blasters appear in two scenes, sweaty and confused. Hill was obviously in way over his head with this "rock & roll fable," a barely musical musical the likes of which he wisely never attempted again. 

Even the two good aspects of the film wind up as disappointments. The first number, Steinman's "Nowhere Fast," is a peppy burner that fails to deliver on its promise of a feature-length sugar rush. And while the film doesn't end with the formation of a heterosexual couple, the optics are still present as butch McCoy (Amy Madigan) drives off with the hero Tom Cody (Michael Paré, a prettier, more vacant Sylvester Stallone). Add in a lost Willem Dafoe (looking like a fugitive from a Depeche Mode video), thankless cameos from Ed Begley Jr., Bill Paxton, E.G. Daily, Robert Townsend, and Lee Ving, and Voyage of the Rock Aliens starts to take on Criterion proportions.

Grade: D

Blinded by the Light (Gurinder Chadha, 2019)

Before I begin slicing and dicing, let me confess that I did get choked up at the end of Blinded by the Light when director Gurinder Chadha (Bend it Like Beckham) shows photographs of Sarfraz Manzoor, the real Bruce Springsteen fan whose 2007 memoir Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock N’ Roll inspired the film. Chadha includes several snaps of Manzoor with his best friend, his parents, and several with The Boss himself, all figures with whom we've spent the previous running time. Manzoor was able to make something of his intense fandom (he's seen Springsteen live more than 150 times). Good for him. Now on to this terrible movie.

Even Springsteen's most rabid fans must admit that the man traffics in corn. His high-fructose post-teen symphonies to America (is there something grander than capital-A?) have certainly inspired a corresponding cottage industry of corny criticism. Take Greil Marcus on the Springsteen show at the Sports Arena, Los Angeles, Au­gust 27, 1981: "I was there because I wanted to hear him sing one line: 'Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart.' He didn’t just sing it, he did it." (rolls damn eyes) Manzoor and Chadha love that line too (and I wouldn't be shocked to discover they know Marcus' blurb as well). They use it many times in the film because it derives from "The Promised Land," evoking the Pakistani diaspora and Manzoor's struggles with assimilation in 1987 England.

And therein lies the problem with corn and this movie. Like the fungible foodstuff of its namesake, corn in art repeats on you. It abjures specifics and recycles low-nutrition homilies in their stead. And right about now, I should admit that Springsteen has transcended these shortcomings in most of his oeuvre with not just lyrical specifics but musical ones as well, especially his 1980s oeuvre which comes off as conversant with a wider swath of popular music than the monochromatic Rock of the 1970s albums - punk on The River (1980), Suicide on Nebraska (1982), pop on Born in the U.S.A. (1984) and Latin freestyle on Tunnel of Love (1987) (although I'm open to the suggestion that he was wrestling with boogaloo on 1973's The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle).

Specifics would just get in the way of Blinded by the Light's goal of creating a feel-good movie. Never does it suggest that anything about the music of Bruce Springsteen has fired up Javed Khan (Viveik Kalra, adorable), a Pakistani teen based on Manzoor. Chadha merely shows lyrics whirling around Javed, a desperate conceit that is supposed to convey Springsteen's genius to the audience as automatically as it does for Javed. Worse, the apparently self-evident brilliance of the music is constantly counterposed against all other musics. The ebullient "Born to Run" number comes at the expense of Tiffany and the Pet Shop Boys, that inauthentic pop and new wave junk played by the DJ at the high school radio station. Javed and his friend Roops (Aaron Phagura) put on "Born to Run" and then lock the door to the station, preventing anyone from changing the song. Roops and Javed and his girlfriend Eliza (Nell Williams) then proceed to run through the halls and eventually the city streets, singing along to Springsteen's song while ignoring how Tiffany and the Pet Shop Boys have provided succor and escape for their listeners. Javed does come around to appreciating other music, especially as he dances (suddenly, without much reason) to the bhangra group Heera at a daytimer. But it's far too little, too late.

It gets even worse. In a scene soon after, Javed's father Malik (Kulvinder Ghir, in the "I hef no son" role) must pawn his wife Noor's (Meera Ganatra) jewelry to pay the bills after he's been laid off by Vauxhall Motors. "O Duniya Ke Rakhwale" from the film Baiju Bawra (Vijay Bhatt, 1952) plays non-diegetically over the scene and the effect is two-fold: 1. It associates Hindi film music with suffering in explicit contrast to the freedom (however provisional) of "Born to Run." 2. It cannot be commented on so we learn nothing about the song. Why aren't the lyrics to this song swirling around his parents' heads? Why do we hear no mention of the name Mohammed Rafi (or Lata Mangeshkar, heard in another scene), who sings this song and is one of the greatest playback singers in Indian cinema history? What does this music mean to Malik and Noor? In 117 minutes, one would think the subject could have been broached at some point.

Most curiously of all, there's a deeper, emptier nostalgia to this already emptily nostalgic movie. Bruce Springsteen's new album at the time, Tunnel of Love, is almost never mentioned. We see a picture of the album cover when Javed learns that Springsteen is going on tour...for that album. But we hear no songs from it. Not even the title is uttered. There's no rush to buy it at the record store, no taping it off the radio, no playing the CD to death. The most current Bruce tracks played in the film come from Born in the U.S.A. three years prior. So the Bruce Springsteen of Blinded by the Light is one that's already past. Tunnel of Love happens to be my favorite Springsteen album, a perversely revisionist gesture, I've been told, although it landed at #2 on that year's Pazz & Jop list. But even if it were the worst, this oversight cheapens Springsteen's legacy. It casts him as perpetual backward-looking journeyman rather than an artist actively engaging with the present. And it gives the audience a license to ignore the music that's happening around them today.

Grade: C+

The Great Waltz (Andrew L. Stone, 1972)

I crossed off an item from my Dying To See list - The Great Waltz (Andrew L. Stone, 1972). Dying to see for *purely* professional reasons, that is. It's godawful. BUT. It is more watchable than Stone's previous horror Song of Norway (1970) which remains my choice for the worst film musical of all time. This one benefits from some Strauss père/fils tension at the beginning, Mary Costa's campy arias, and a hilarious singing voice-of-God narrator dropping such narrative nuggets as "In 43 days locked in this house/Johann Strauss composed Die Fledermaus." Lawd! Horst Buchholz (didn't know he was bisexual!) stars as Johann Jr. I'm embarrassed for both of us.

Thanks to the amazing Rarefilmm site for allowing me to finally see this although several minutes are missing probably due to a faulty broadcast or rip.

The Happiest Millionaire (Norman Tokar, 1967)

I'm stunned at how progressive Disney was with sexual politics in the late 1960s. The Happiest Millionaire follows a homosexual horndog played by Tommy Steele aka Toothy McTootherson (or is that Tusky McMammoth?). He goes cruising the openly secular (!) John Davidson (of That's Incredible! fame).

I mean, he really lusts after him!

Eventually, they get it on at a gay bar.

And a good time is had by all.

Just kidding. That was my willful queer misreading to stay awake in the final third of this Three. Hour. Movie. In truth, it features an ancient heteronormative gambit - not only does the film end with the requisite formation of the heterosexual couple (Davidson and Lesley Ann Warren) but that formation must be celebrated, here by a community of prisoners they just met (although the Detroit song that scores the celebration is one of the few nifty numbers).

There are some touching moments throughout, especially from the underappreciated Fred MacMurray who has a tough time letting go of his daughter.

But as with all roadshow musicals ever, it's too long, too eager to please, too clueless, too too. Worth noting, though, is a cute breaking of the fourth wall...

a mention of Benghazi in song (rendered as "Bengasi")...

and a scene in which alligators are accidentally frozen but then thawed back to life which may have influenced Disney (who died just as production on this film was wrapping) to cryogenically freeze himself.

Sooooo Not The Gayest Musical Of Them All!

The Great American Broadcast (Archie Mayo, 1941)

Mardi Gras (Edmund Goulding, 1958)

One need only compare Best Foot Forward with its quasi-remake Mardi Gras to grasp the sorry state the Hollywood musical was in after rock 'n' roll. Dick Sargent (the second Darrin on Bewitched), Tommy Sands, Gary Crosby (Bing's son), and Pat Boone sleepwalk through a story by Curtis Harrington, of all people. Goulding couldn't save it even if he weren't sleepwalking himself. This was his last film in a rather undistinguished career (including the freakishly overrated Grand Hotel). What little oomph he brought to The Old Maid or Nightmare Alley had evaporated by this point. Crummy songs, poorly distributed musical numbers, no choreography to speak of, the pits. Some decent cheesecake, though.

Memorial Day catch up

An evening of eh.

Call Me Madam (Walter Lang, 1953) bears all the markings of 1950s Hollywood bloat. Too long and too expensive, it helped render the musical an increasingly untenable proposition despite containing perhaps the quintessential Ethel Merman film performance. A pop-friendly editor could easily chop 25 minutes from the running time. At the very least, the moments when George Sanders sings (!) have got to go. Still, even the non-Ethel numbers roar, especially a drunk Donald O'Connor in "What Chance Have I With Love?" singing the type of clever/corny lyrics that made Sondheim roll his eyes. Try "Look at what it did to Romeo/It dealt poor Romey an awful blow" or "If an apple could finish Adam/They could knock me off with a grape."

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (Don Weis, 1953) - That pop-friendly editor would leave just two Youtube clips - Bob Fosse, Debbie Reynolds, Barbara Ruick, and Bobby Van hoofing it up at a college juke joint and Van alone in "I'm Thru With Love." Otherwise, Slog Central even at 72 minutes.

Frozen (Chris Buck and Jennifer Lee, 2013) - The last shot shows Anna and Elsa skating together rather than Anna locking lips with Kristoff (and Elsa remains partnerless). A mildly radical payoff for sitting through a slate of crummy, dead-bottomed songs. Best part - Olaf confessing he has no bones.

The Wolf of Wall Street (Martin Scorsese, 2013) - I'll admit that every time Leo started to explain IPOs or whatever, I wanted to ask him to slow down. But that's no excuse for Scorsese allowing him to abandon the explanations. So, slow down! As Todd Haynes proved with his even longer Mildred Pierce, there's enormous drama in laying out processes. In any event, we need to update Richard Dyer's dictum in "Entertainment and Utopia" to demonstrate that Hollywood films show us not how to organize dystopia but what it feels like (for those who organize dystopia). Sequel: The Schmucks of Any Street - a glimpse into the lives destroyed by Jordan Belfort et al. and an investigation into Belfort's current life of exorbitant speaker fees and pokey paybacks.

Found: Greatest Pic Ever

Here it is:

Also screen grabs from two crappy musicals:

                               Moonlight in Hawaii (Charles Lamont, 1941)

                                Moonlight in Vermont (Edward Lilley, 1943)