Most gracious Ladies and Gentlemen of Epinions, do draw near, for on Friday, July 26, 2002, I did kneel before one of the Great Ladies of Hollywood's Golden Age, at the City of San Francisco, in Drake's Land, where her career was born. There were food and drink, dancing and song, good cheer all around; and, seen by few living humans -- and long thought lost -- a presentation of magic and sorcery: KISS ME, KATE, in 3-D!

You doubt me?

Let me conjure some of those delights anon. Meanwhile, all's the World's a frame, and through it, we but mere temporary decorations within it. Lend me your eyes . . . .
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"The Taming of the Shrew is almost the only one of Shakspear's comedies that has a regular plot and downright moral." -- William Hazlitt (Characters of Shakespear's Plays, 1817).

Let's take this Shakespeare critic, early to record the re-discovery of the Bard, and use his observation to see George Sidney's 3-D movie production of Cole Porter's Kiss Me, Kate -- as if through a divining telescope!

Hazlitt would have known, as we might not in our ignorant age, that William Shakespeare's comedy draws on the tradition of Italian Commedia dell'Arte, which emerged afresh in England around 1545, the Next Big Thing of its day: a cultural sensation until well into the 18th Century; the basis for the circus, puppetry, minstrelsy, vaudeville, musical theater; the counterpart, as an influence, of Rock 'n Roll, Hip Hop, or Improv in recent decades. Commedia dell'Arte was performed by strolling players, who set up a play of generic plot on a street or in a nobleman's castle, embellished it with song, dance, jokes, artwork, juggling, etc, and literally passed the hat afterwards.

The ancient form, dating back to the Romans, was seized by Shakespeare and utilized in a number of his dramas, most memorably for his 'play within a play' which provides the climax of Hamlet. Shakespeare, declared by Critics Samuel Johnson and Hazlitt as the most important Elizabethan playwright, and since thought by many the greatest English poet of all time, first used the form as a device in his early comedy, The Taming of the Shrew (1593).

At the beginning of the play, for a prank, a nobleman picks up Christopher Sly, a drunken lecher, takes him to his castle, and dresses him while he's asleep in fine clothes. When he awakens, Sly is tricked into believing that he is rich man being treated to a performance of a Commedia dell'Arte play. It is called . . . "The Taming of the Shrew": a tale of a wife-hunting womanizer and an impossible bride. But Sly's part is only a framing device, and he disappears as an active character when Petrochio and Katharina take the stage.

[Note: This scaffolding is often discarded in modern presentations of The Taming of the Shrew.]

Let us adjust the lenses of our telescope:
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Four hundred years later, arguably the finest writer of popular songs in the 20th Century, Cole Porter, was brought an idea for a new musical:

It seems that in 1935, a theater-struck neophyte named Arthur Saint-Subber stood in the wings every night as the reigning couple of the New York Stage, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontaine, played Petruchio and Katharina in a smash revival of The Taming of the Shrew. Performance after performance, when the Lunts rushed past him off stage at their exits, they would switch from Shakespeare's iambic arguments to the bitter Modern English invective of a frustrated, long-married couple. Over a decade later, Saint-Subber, by then a stage manager, was introduced to Lemuel Ayers, a scenic designer who had worked with Cole Porter. They thought a combination of Lunt, Fontaine, Porter and Shakespeare would be great theater.

Through Playwright Thornton Wilder (who had rejected the idea), they approached Bella Spewack to realize their brain storm, and for the score, Porter, who was also reluctant at first to take on another classic theme. Depressed by constant pain (from a horse-riding accident in 1938), he had not had a real hit since 1943, and his last offering to Broadway, Orson Welles' production of Around the World in Eighty Days, in 1946, had closed after 75 performances. His chronically ill wife's worsening physical condition -- she was confined to an iron lung next to his work area -- could not have cheered him. Perhaps because of his desire to match wits with Shakespeare or his latter experience with the ebullient Welles or his knowledge of the Lunts or simply because his mother was named Kate [Cole], the same as Shakespeare's heroine, he finally agreed to write words and music to Bella Spewack's book.

Spewack, herself estranged from her philandering husband Sam, had a special incentive to write this setting for a classic about marital discord. She pared down and freely adapted Shakespeare's farce, while creating a new dramatic envelop concerned with a modern divorced theatrical couple, Fred Graham and Lilly Vanessi, who are starring in the Baltimore tryout of a musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. Sam Spewack came back to help his wife polish it (contributing mainly the scene for the show-stopping "Brush Up Your Shakespeare"). They reconciled and went on to win the first Tony ever awarded to the book of a Musical.

Kiss Me, Kate, which opened on a rainy December 30th, 1948, with Alfred Drake as Fred/Petruchio and Patricia Morrison as Lilly/Katharina, ran nearly 1,077 performances, and another 450 in London in 1951. With a huge score of 18 numbers, it was Porter's triumphant comeback, the high point of his career. Kiss Me, Kate (title derived from Petruchio's last speech) is considered Porter's masterpiece. Unfortunately, his wife died shortly afterward, one of his legs had to be amputated, and his last years were lonely and miserable, for all the acclaim.

Another, brighter lens, Ladies and Gentlemen:
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In the Post World War II Period, MGM had produced a series of superb musicals: EASTER PARADE (Walters, 1948), ON THE TOWN (Donen, 1949), ANNIE GET YOUR GUN (Sidney, 1950), SHOWBOAT (Sidney, 1951), SINGIN' IN THE RAIN (Donen, 1952), etc. But the studio was in trouble. The Federal Government had forced it to divest itself of its monopoly agreements with theater chains, and Television was sapping its revenues. THE BANDWAGON (Minnelli), made according to a lucrative formula of the past, was not enough in 1953. MGM had already turned to the Next Big Thing, which after the success of BWANA DEVIL (Oboler, 1952) and HOUSE OF WAX (de Toth, 1953), promised that 3-D Spherical Cinematography would save Hollywood from TV. The Studio Heads rushed into 3-D production Dorothy Kingsley's screenplay of KISS ME, KATE, as free and spare an adaptation of Sam and Bella Spewack's stage version as had been theirs of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew.

Veteran George Sidney directed.

Sidney was at the top of his career, with ANNIE GET YOUR GUN, SHOWBOAT and SCARAMOUCHE (1952) on his immediate resume. He was able to draw at MGM on the greatest contractual collection of popular music artists in Movie history (plus a constant flow of new talent from all over the World). To rearrange the score, he had Saul Chaplin and Andre Previn, who won Oscar nominations for their musical direction. For Production Design (then known as Art Direction), the studio assigned the marvelous Cedric Gibbons, and Walter Plunkett for Costumes, both with 20 years experience on some of the finest pictures ever to come out of Hollywood.

The cast who strode Gibbons' sets and wore Plunkett's modern and Commedia dell'Arte costumes were perhaps (amazingly) MGM'S second string but impressive in their own right. A musical theater lead, made a movie star by parts in ANNIE GET YOUR GUN and SHOWBOAT, stalwart and commanding Howard Keel was the vain bon vivant Fred (later Petruchio). Kathryn Grayson, who got her start as a date of Andy Hardy in 1940, had developed a rather fine soprano voice, and her Lilly (later Katharina) was the pinnacle of her career. (She made only one more film.) Ann Miller, a sensational tap dancer in movies since 1937, was cast as the available Lois Lane, and the supposedly virginal Bianca in the play within a play.

A troupe of character actors and dancers filled out the cast, including nearly last but not least, the great Bob Fosse in his first dance performance in Movies.

[Under a cap, that's Dave O'Brien playing the Stage Manager. He was the narrator and star of many PETE SMITH SPECIALTIES (Shorts), in the 1940's. And the tough gazing blond sailor eyeing Ann Miller late in the film is Hermes Pan, her choreographer.]

The tricky problem of using 3-D to arrange the players within Cedric Gibbons' design and settings fell to Charles Rosher, an English cinematographer, whose career as an innovator went back to his foray into Mexico for Raoul Walsh's 1913 semi-documentary, WITH GENERAL PANCHO VILLA IN MEXICO. He was eager to apply his skills to the challenge of the new technique. He also incorporated a combination of the revolutionary British innovations in combining theater and backstage life, seen in Laurence Olivier's HENRY V (1942) and Powell-Pressburger's THE RED SHOES (1948).

The mix could only be brought off through careful framing of the 3-D photography, the rage as they began to shoot. The results at 110 minutes were superb, likely the best application of the technique in its brief history. Unfortunately, by the time KISS ME, KATE was ready to be premiered, the vogue for 3-D had passed, and that version, on which the full success of picture depended, was summarily scrapped by the producers. Without its frame, while many critics admired its elegance, audiences found the conventional presentation slow and the obligatory objects thrown by characters at the screen frame unimpressive and distracting.

Now, 50 years have passed, and we apply the Big Lens.
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The Castro Theater in San Francisco last week hosted Ann Miller, star of KISS ME, KATE, now 84, a key character (Coco Lenoix) in David Lynch's brilliant, maddening *MULHOLLAND DRIVE (2001). She came as guest of honor for Marc Huestis's AIDS benefit: "Two Darn Hot! An Evening with Living Legend Ann Miller." A 50 buck ticket got you as much ham, biscuits, broccoli, sliced carrots and cucumbers, papusas, several kinds of cheeses and crackers you as you could hold, plus all the white and red wine or bottled waters you could drink, plus a personal audience with Ann Miller, an hour of clips from her best dance routines, a musical stage revue, an on-stage interview with Miller and a showing of the original 3-D KISS ME, KATE.

What a deal!

Ann Miller, with her dark hair, pale skin and large expressive eyes, is a perfect ancient Dresden doll. She wore a red sequined jacket, white lacks, comfortable white shoes, and she carried a red, white and blue rhinestone evening bag. Seated in a comfortable chair in the lobby, a glass of white wine at hand, she greeted individually nearly two hundred people in an hour's time. Miss Miller was in good humor and showed an amazing stamina and quick memory for someone her age.

She deadpanned when I told her that Jack Dempsey, Victor McLaglen and she had been my earliest screen idols: "Well, I'm honored to be in such august company." And when I remarked that the first film I could remember her in was one where she was a dancer in a Western music hall, her face relaxed in a smile and she was 21 again. She shot back, the memory passing over her face, "That was GO WEST, YOUNG LADY . . . 1941. It was a fun picture."

At the conclusion of her information and gossip filled interview with local critic Jan Wahl, which lasted another hour, a sold-out audience of hundreds put on its weird-looking 3-D glasses, had several pictures taken, and settled down to watch KISS ME, KATE.

Immediately, as the MGM Lion roars out from the screen, we realize the effectiveness of the 3-D technique and how carefully the picture has been shaped to its virtues. It opens with a scene neither in Spewack or Shakespeare. Cole Porter (Ron Randell) comes to Star-Impressario Fred Graham's New York apartment to help him audition talent for his new musical version of The Taming of the Shrew. (We notice the foregrounded Graham [Keel] appears about eight feet away from Porter during much of the scene.) Enter Fred's quite bitter former wife, Lilly Vanessi (Kathryn Grayson), who is as unwilling as the real Porter was to take part in the musical, but Fred charms her into sing through of the love duet "So in Love" [much earlier here than in the stage version], and she begins to melt.

Enter singer-dancer, Lois Lane (Ann Miller), with a five piece combo in tow. She is wearing red tights under a coat and she is here to audition for the part of Bianca, Katherina's younger sister. Lilly suffers the first of some periodic disillusionments with Fred when she notices Lois already knows her number, "Too Darn Hot" [which on Broadway was an entr'act sung by Black baritone Lorenzo Fuller and dancers playing dressers]. Could Fred and Lois be an item? Her suspicion is confirmed when Lois wanders around the apartment looking for a drink, opens a drawer, and calls to Fred: "Hey, you're out of ginger ale again!"

The band goes into action, and Lois/Miller demonstrates that it's "Too Darn Hot" by tearing off her coat to dance on every inch of the place, including the coffee table. She strips herself of earrings, necklace and red chiffon scarf, which she tosses to her auditioners and to us, one by one. She is a wow, energizing the scene, and giving the film a forward momentum which it fails to sustain.

[There is one extraordinary sequence here where Miller dances on the left side of the screen and a bongo drummer gives her the beat, apparently perched in midair above our heads at about Row 20.]

All is soon forgiven between Fred and Lilly, Lois is in the show, and the troupe goes into rehearsal. However, it is clear that the dalliance of the unreliable, prideful Fred and the demurely lascivious Lois continues, a fact Lilly is fitfully to discover.

Meantime, Lois has her own troubles with a regular boyfriend, Bill Calhoun (dancer/choreographer Tommy Rall, later Hortensio), who is in love with a pair of dice and many race horses. Then there is Tex Callaway (Willard Parker), a millionaire cattleman. Tex provides her with sides of beef, while Bill provides the story with a plot when he forges Fred's name on an IOU for $2000, which brings a pair of mob enforcers, Lippy (Keenan Wynn) and Slug (James Whitmore), to intimidate the cast in order, one way or another, to get their boss's money back. As Lois puts it to Bill in a rooftop staging, "Why Can't You Behave," and to Tex, "[I'm] Always True to You [Darling in My Fashion]."

When the production moves to Baltimore for a tryout, the backstage story begins to entwine with the onstage Shakespeare, through the stage mechanism of a treadmill in "We Open in Padua."

In addition to "So In Love," Keel and Grayson have a fine duet when they remember a sojourn in Germany as "Wunderbar." Individually, Keel is particularly splendid in "The Life That I Late Led" scene, which cleverly unites the thrust stage with the depth of focus, and Grayson gives a passionate rendition of "I Hate Men," demonstrating both stereophonic sound and 3-D banging and throwing pewter tankards around, in time with her angry song (made more so by her discovery of a note from Fred to Lois).

[You need only see Kenneth Branagh's LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST to realize how bad musical Shakespeare can be.]

And the two thugs, Lippy and Slug, who don costumes and go on stage to insure their boss's investment, late in the film sing and dance to the droll "Brush up on Your Shakespeare." They are peculiarly charming in the number, alternating choruses and teaching each other time-steps, because you sense that neither is a particularly trained in either form.

But most critics agree that Ann Miller consistently steals the picture. It is her best performance in films, where frequently she was just thrown in for a cameo dance number, with little or no allowance for character development. Her cheerful vigor and beauty blaze out at us from the screen. Only in "From This Moment On" (originally in Porter's Out of this World), which she and Rall share with Bobby Vann, Jeanne Coyne, Bob Fosse, and Carol Haney, does she fail to pleasurably overwhelm us. The number is presented as a rather traditional round of pas de deus, given an interesting variation provided by Fosse and Haney, and so Miller, a standup tap dancer, is unable to stand out as she does in her other numbers.

[In her interview with Jan Wahl, Miss Miller claimed to have, in a sense, discovered Bob Fosse, who is instantly memorable, even if you do not know who he is. She told us that one day, early in the rehearsal schedule, while on a break, she heard the sound of music and dancers feet from an unused sound stage next door. Curious, she peeked around the corner and found a couple, Bob Fosse and Carol Haney, going through a routine. She was taken with its originality and said to the Director and Musical Director of KISS ME, KATE, "Mr. Sidney, Mr. Previn, you should look at this." They did and the inference I drew is that the result was that "From This Moment On" was added to KISS ME, KATE, to oblige the routine developed by the young dancers. Fosse appeared in two other movies in 1953, GIVE THE GIRL A BREAK (Donen) and THE AFFAIRS OF DOBIE GILLIS (Weis), but his career as a giant of modern popular dance began in KISS ME, KATE.]

What one carries away from KISS ME, KATE, a film I never saw in 3-D before -- in fact, never saw in a theater -- is that without the frame provided by 3-D projection, it is a pretty average film, despite the music, Miller, and the play within a play. Projected as it was meant to be seen, it is extraordinary. Scene after scene is set up in an interesting way to take advantage of the depth of focus. Natural frames are created, such as shots taken through doorways or with corners in the foreground as screen right or screen left. Notice how the famous spanking scene foregrounds the couple against a background of the audience (a viewpoint patterned after a similar one in THE RED SHOES).

True, the bane of 3-D, the throwing of objects out the frame at the audience is overused, but even there, a couple of the applications are extremely effective. The process is less so when showing wide, long shots, which look flat.

But the frame is the key.

I am reminded of "The Story of the Magic Box," an incident recounted in Barbara Leaming's biography of Orson Welles (entitled simply Orson Welles, Limelight Editions, New York, revised 1995). It is in the epilogue, written after his death. Welles heard that Leaming was going to Chicago on a tour for the book in 1985. He urged her to visit the Chicago Art Institute where he used to go and sketch when he played hooky from school as a kid.

Welles wanted her to check out the bronze lions in front, on whose tails he once liked to perch eating an icecream cone, and to find out if "The Thorn Rooms" were still in the museum. He suggested they were the key to his work. He would not tell her what they were, but she soon discovered that they were a large series of framed displays in the children's section, miniature interiors of rooms from different places, in many periods of history. Each room gave away to other rooms and finally to suggestions of the exteriors beyond. Welles was so elated when she phoned him that she bought him at the Institute, as a gift, a book of Thorn Room photos, but when she gave it to him in LA, he did not hide his disappointment.

"This isn't my magic box," he said, pointing to the pictures. "Don't you see what they've done? They've cut the frames off!"

That's what the producers did to KISS ME, KATE. They robbed the picture of its intended frame, making it in most formats in which you see it now flat and disjointed.

And now to close the circle:
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In 1934, Ann Miller was discovered at age 13 by Lucille Ball and Comedian Benny Rubin, dancing in the old Bel Tabarin of North Beach. Last week, Ann Miller came back to San Francisco.

"I like to say that thing they say," she exclaimed, taking a healthy sip of wine. "What goes around, comes around. Isn't that fun!"

It was good that the original KISS ME, KATE had come around.

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Note: I see that this version recently played at the Film Forum in New York City, so it may turn up in a theater near you. If you don't have certain eye conditions, it can be quite an experience.

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Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older