BAND WAGON - DVD review

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.

"Gee, kids, let's put on a show" is the theme of "The Band Wagon," and its innocent, naive attitude is carried on throughout the film. But it's mostly all Astaire. When he meets Gabrielle for the first time, she inadvertently insults him by saying, "I used to see all of your pictures when I was a little girl, and I'm still a fan. I recently went to see a revival of them at the museum." It's amusing to see Astaire spoofing himself this way and taking it like a sport.

As with so many of these Astaire vehicles, it is not easy to find objection to "The Band Wagon." The romance is obvious but not too prominent. The characters are caricatures but fun. The songs are not always inspired but often memorable. And the whole thing is as cheerful and sprightly as you could want. If you like older musicals, or just like Fred Astaire, you'll probably enjoy "The Band Wagon."

Video:
Warner Bros. went all out on the DVD to produce a digitally restored print that is about as clean and clear as the day the movie was made. The screen size remains 1.33:1, the standard ratio of the day, just changing over in 1953 from 1.37:1 to 2.35:1 CinemaScope and wider. Had it been made a year later, it would undoubtedly have been in widescreen. Because of the cleaning and color correcting, the Technicolor comes off bright and exceptionally vivid, with blacks especially deep, nicely setting off the rest of the hues. Although there are no lines, scratches, flecks, age spots, or fading of any kind, there are some very small instances of line shimmer in striped clothing, and object delineation is a tad soft. Still, you'll get no complaints from me.

Audio:
The sound is presented in two formats: the film's original 1.0 mono and a newly remixed Dolby Digital 5.1 multichannel. The DD 5.1 has a decent stereo spread, but it does little in the rear channels that I could hear except provide a modicum of musical ambiance information. While the tonal balance is good, the frequency extremes are limited, and the overall quality is somewhat hard and edgy in the musical numbers. The midrange is excellent, so voices come over well, and since the music takes care of itself, no one will notice any minor shortcomings.

Extras:
This is another of Warner Bros.' two-disc Special Edition sets, so expect a multitude of extras. Disc one contains the feature film; twenty-nine scene selections; English and French spoken languages; and
English, French, and Spanish subtitles. In addition, it has an audio commentary track with the director's daughter, actress Liza Minnelli, and singer-pianist Michael Feinstein, who proves to be quite the film historian. Ms. Minnelli is her usual ebullient self, providing the personal anecdotes, while Feinstein remains more serious and anchored. In their enthusiasm, they often forget the movie, going off into tangents, but it is always Feinstein who brings them back with historical notes. Lastly on the first disc is a Fred Astaire movie-trailer gallery, which includes "Broadway Melody" (1940), "Ziegfeld Follies" (1946), "Easter Parade" (1948), "The Barkleys of Broadway" (1949), "Three Little Words" (1950), "The Band Wagon" (1953), "Silk Stockings" (1957), and "Finian's Rainbow" (1968).

Disc two contains a pair of documentaries. The first is probably of most importance to the film. It's a new, 2005, making-of piece called "Get Aboard! The Band Wagon." It is thirty-seven minutes long and includes just about everybody from the production who is still alive. These people include Astaire's daughter, Ava Astaire McKenzie; Vincente Minnelli's daughter, Liza; Arthur Schwartz's son, Jonathan; stars Cyd Charisse, Nanette Fabray, and Paul Byrd; screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green; and choreographer Michael Kidd. Of all the films Astaire made, he called "The Band Wagon" his favorite. Like most such documentaries, this one is quite self-congratulatory. Everybody in it calls "The Band Wagon" the greatest musical ever made. Fair enough. The second documentary is a vintage production, "The Men Who Made the Movies: Vincente Minnelli." It's fifty-eight minutes long; divided into thirteen chapters; written, directed, and produced by Richard Schickel; and narrated by Cliff Robertson. After the documentaries is a musical short subject, "Jack Buchanan With the Glee Quartet." It's six minutes of early Hollywood silliness from the English actor. The final items are the unused musical number "Two Faced Woman," plus about seven minutes of dailies for the scene.

I've said this before of WB's more-recent special editions, but it bears repeating: the two discs are housed in a slim-line keep case, further enclosed in a colorful cardboard slipcover. But Warners Bros. provide no chapter insert or informational booklet, which seems a strange oversight given the money they spent on everything else.

Parting Thoughts:
"The Band Wagon" followed "Singin' in the Rain" by two years, but I'm afraid it suffers by comparison. Both films are about the song-and-dance industry (one set in Hollywood and the other on Broadway), but "Singin' in the Rain" has the better songs, the better story, the better characters, the better everything. Nonetheless, that doesn't make "The Band Wagon" any the less entertaining in its own right. I mean, it's hard to dislike something so cheerful and uplifting as this movie. For a lot of people, it ranks right up there among the handful of best musicals ever made. Who am I to argue?