I was flattered recently when Ian McDonald in his Sunday Stabroek column of December 16 challenged, “Anyone can mention a subject to Godfrey – sweeties, seawall or sugar estates or dominoes or the old D’Urban racetrack or anything you like – and hardly pausing Godfrey could produce a Nostalgia which will make you laugh and wonder, and say ‘yes that is how it was.'”
Sunday, Jan 6, I spent a wonderful afternoon with Ian and his charming wife Mary in their beautiful garden in Bel Air Gardens – reminiscent of Kew Gardens, London. Their garden is certainly a prime example of what Georgetown was like yesteryear – A bountiful Garden City, with profuse roses, lush hibiscus, flowering bougainvilleas, blooming ferns in every pailinged yard. (But that’s another upcoming Nostalgia.)
On return at dusk to Guyenterprise’s office, I read in the Stabroek that the Tuesday, Jan 8 evening film show at Castellani House was Singin’ in the Rain, and while every effort was made to glorify this musical extravaganza in the press release, I was disappointed that the musical hits were omitted and Donald O’Connor’s solo comedy dance Make Me Dance was not mentioned.
Monday, Dec 31, at his birthday and open house after lunch, David de Caires asked his guests comprising the local intelligentsia, “What was the best musical ever?” and mooted Guys & Dolls (Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra) as his No 1 choice, while another countered My Fair Lady (Rex Harrison).
I responded that both of these musicals were “adaptations of Broadway shows,” and my best choice in this category would be MGM’s Annie Get your Gun (Howard Keel, Betty Hutton), with the best Broadway musical score ever from Irving Berlin – Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better; Ya Can’t Get a Man with a Gun; Falling in Love is Wonderful; Ah Got No Diamonds; Doing What Comes Naturally; No Business Like Show Business.
Other great musicals adapted from Broadway would be Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, Carousel, Oklahoma, and top perennial favourite, Sound of Music.
My response for best original film musical was Singin’ in the Rain, and I could easily defend my selection with the tap dancing of Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor; the Broadway segment, Gotta Dance, with Gene and Cyd Charisse, and of course Gene’s solo tapping/singing in the rain – with the rain actually being ‘milk’ for the camera to highlight visually the drizzling rain.
The madcap comedy stunts; Hollywood’s emergence into sound from 1927 after Warner Bros’ Jazz Singer (Al Jolson); the parody of the big studio rivalry amidst Jean Hagen’s raucous voice; glorious technicolour; original music score – all scores this as the best musical ever, as was previously listed in the Guinness Book of Records, some while ago.
The big song hit ‘Good Morning, Good Morning/It’s time to rise & shine/Good Morning’ was played every day locally after 1952 following the film’s release at the Astor that Christmas. Only folk song Marning Neighbour, Marning matched its popularity locally, as did Christy Lane’s One Day at a Time or the Trini’s Choir Sing out my Soul as Matthew Allen welcomed each new day on the local airwaves.
I believe that ‘every man kisses his wife a different way’ and we will always differ in our choice of best or worst, that’s what makes life so stirring and meaningful.
Rather than justify or prove that Singin’ in the Rain was the best musical ever, perhaps it’s better to nostalgise on the Golden Age of Hollywood musicals from a Guyanese point of view. At least in doing so I can accept the challenge of Ian McD to write on any subject off the cuff – from the noggin – without research, so here goes.
In 1945 at 8 years the Classics Illustrated Comics would feature at the back a short bio of the author. The Three Musketeers was one of the first literary classics issued, and in the author’s bio – Alexander Dumas – it was claimed that Dumas “could see a feather wafting down in the wind” and write an exciting plot and adventure. On reading this I pledged then and there to be able to write, discourse, gaff on any subject profusely, and guess that the ability to retain in the noggin any piece of info seen or heard and regurgitate it in a flash began. The rest is now history, and my nostalgia series came to fruition.
WWII had ended, and the plethora of patriotic war movies churned out to mobilize/motivate the allies/flagwavers for the home and battle fronts had waned. Hell, war movies will be another Nostalgia! I mention them only to set the mood why musicals became popular on the silver screen. Veterans returning home were tired of the ravages of war – guns, battles, etc, – and sought escapism and lighter entertainment as an alternative to action on the screen.
At this time in the early fifties we were reaching the teenage years. The QC prefects and end-of-term high school dances served to shark our puppy crushes, as love, song and romance drove the hormones like the mini-buses today.
MGM musical spectaculars released at the Astor particularly, were eagerly awaited, and the blazing technicolour trailers would list and preview 10 to12 song hits that were a must see for courting dates and trysts.
MGM’star power included top hoofers – Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller and of course Judy Garland (A Star Was Born). From her teenage hits with Mickey Rooney – Strike up the Band and the Andy Hardy series – they both topped the box office.
Gene Kelly was innovative, and won an Academy Award with his An American in Paris. He danced with cartoon Jerry the mouse, challenged Fred Astaire – who was himself a dancing legend in Barkley’s off Broadway Easter Parade and Silk Stockings. No need to mention his RKO classics with Ginger.
The crooners included Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, Tony Martin, Dennis Morgan; baritones Howard Keel and Ezio Pinza; and tenor, Mario Lanza.
Kathryn Grayson, Jane Powell, Betty Hutton and Ann Blyth were splendid in solos and duets that touched our souls to tears. Ethel Merman belted out No Business like Show Business in the best 20th Century Fox musical, with Dan Dailey and Marilyn Monroe
Warner Bros’ Romance on the High Seas, 1948, debuted Doris Day with the song hit It’s Magic, and thereafter enjoyed box office hits for the next 25 years with two Academy songs, Secret Love (Calamity Jane) and Que Sera, Sera (The Man Who Knew Too Much) with James Stewart. Her early musicals with Gordon McRae, On Moonlight Bay and Look for the Silver Lining were favourites, as were her biopic portrayal of Ruth Etting in Love Me or Leave Me with James Cagney, as her mobster boyfriend, ‘Gimp.’ Her other WB’s hits were April in Paris with Ray Bolger and Danny Thomas in I’ll See You in My Dreams.
MGM made mermaid Esther Williams a bathing beauty and Neptune’s daughter in musical extravaganzas that reprised the choreography of Bus Berkeley in breathtaking underwater sequences. Their producers/directors included Vincent Minnelli, Alan Freed, etc.
Mario Lanza’s The Toast of New Orleans and The Great Caruso were excellent as was his ‘voice-in’ for Edmund Purdom in The Student Prince.
Biopics of Jerome Kern Till the Clouds Roll By; Rodgers & Hart Words and Music; Sigmund Romberg Deep in my Heart, etc, allowed MGM to showcase their galaxy of stars – as many as the heavens above – in depicting Broadway stage scenes in memorable showcases.
The studios competed fiercely for box office hits – Warner Bros ‘bioped’ Cole Porter in Night and Day and George and Ira Gershwin in Rhapsody in Blue. Columbia gave us The Eddy Duchin Story (Tyrone Power); 20th Century Fox, Jane Froman, With a Song in My Heart (Susan Hayward).
I never missed a musical, and while the biopics were ‘exaggerated’ for box office appeal, one became familiar and could list the music of all the great composers by heart from Tin Pan Alley to Broadway – including Gus Kahn (I’ll See You in My Dreams) to Chopin (Song to Remember) to Liszt (Song Without End) to Strauss (The
Great Waltz) to Tchaikovsky.
Twentieth Century Fox black and white musicals featuring Glenn Miller Orchestra Wives and Sun Valley Serenade with the Nicholas Bros doing some of the best tap ever seen on the screen, and Universal’s The Glenn Miller Story were box office delights. Even the March tunes of John Phillip Sousa were depicted in Marching Along with Clifton Webb.
Many of the Glenn Miller tunes were written by Harry Warren, and he remains one of Hollywood’s best composers who has never been truly recognized. His hundreds of hits include I Know Why.
Eleanor Parker was recommended for an Academy Award in Interrupted Melody and James Cagney portraying George M Cohan, the founder of Broadway, showed his versatility in WB’s Yankee Doodle Dandy for which he won Best Actor.
Even Ronald Reagan, later President of the USA, made a good WB musical, This is the Army, which featured an appearance by Irving Berlin belting out his hit Oh, How I Hate To Get Up in the Morning from his WWI hit show Yip Yip Yaphank.
June Allyson, Van Johnson and Peter Lawford became stars after intros in musicals like Good News.
I loved both versions of Desert Song with the music of Sigmund Romberg. The first was Dennis Morgan in the forties, and Gordon McRae and Kathryn Grayson in the early sixties.
Lana Turner and Ricardo Montalban danced a great samba in Latin Lovers, while Silvana Mangano was a hit in ?… Hell, a senior moment – saw her first picture at the Plaza and the tune was a big dance hit by the Ramblers.
Must not forget the Rock and Roll hits of Rock Around the Clock, Don’t Knock the Rock or Elvis Presley’s hip-swinging showcases including Blue Hawaii.
Even the second stringers, Marge and Gower Champion matched the big stars with powerful dance routines, while comedy interludes were added by Red Skelton, Bob Hope, etc.
The fifties was the golden age of musicals, which waned as spy thrillers like James Bond and Matt Helm and horror movies came into vogue. Every so often a musical hit would make box office, especially with Broadway shows being adapted, and by 1977 with the disco-Latin hustle and Saturday Night Fever, musicals were popular again for a short while.
Must mention only one of our local cinemas opened with a musical – the Plaza in 1951 – with Warner Bros Painting the Clouds with Sunshine with Dennis Morgan and Gene Nelson
Am yet to verify that Metropole opened around 1935-36 with The Merry Widow. Astor refurbished in1954 with a wide screen Vista Vision showing Bing Crosby and Danny Kaye in White Christmas. Metropole’s first Cinemascope release was The Benny Goodman Story with Steve Allen.
To close: My pick for best musicals ever are Singin’ in the Rain; Annie Get your Gun; Till the Clouds Roll By; Show Boat. What’s yours?
My all time favourites worth seeing for the umpteenth time are Danny Kaye in Hans Christian Andersen and Cornel Wilde and Paul Muni in Song to Remember, the story of Frederick Chopin.
