Pros: Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse shimmer in their dance numbers.
Cons: Too loud, too ordinary, too much like the much better Singin' in the Rain.
The Bottom Line: If you stacked all the movie musicals end-to-end, forming a line from here to the moon, The Band Wagon would still be a mile from the lunar surface.
The MGM lion was at the peak of its roar when The Band Wagon was released in 1953. Just look at the roster of memorable song-and-dance films in the preceding years:
Easter Parade (1948)
On the Town (1949)
Annie Get Your Gun (1950)
An American in Paris (1951)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Whew! It’s enough to make a guy want to go out and tap-dance in a rain puddle.
The success of musicals at MGM even caused the studio to divide their work into “units” according to producers There was the Arthur Freed Unit, the Jack Cummings Unit, and so on. There were also the fabulous teams of composers: Comden-Green, Lerner-Loewe, Bernstein, Gershwin, yowza! The directors: Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, George Sidney. And, of course, the stars: Astaire, Kelly, Sinatra, Garland.
So, with all that going for it, why does The Band Wagon leave me feeling less-than-giddy? It’s not a bad film by any means—given the choice between repeated viewings of it or, say, Grease 2, I’d hop on the band wagon any old day—but when you put it in the lineup of the other films mentioned above, it lacks just a little of their oomph and sparkle.
Part of the problem lies in its proximity to Singin’ in the Rain, arguably the best musical Hollywood ever made (and certainly the best movie about movies Hollywood ever made). Singin’ in the Rain deluged theaters in April 1952; sixteen months later, The Band Wagon came rolling into town. Both had legendary hoofers in the lead (Gene Kelly in Singin’ and Fred Astaire in Wagon), both shared the dancing legs of Cyd Charisse (a cameo in the first film, a full-blown co-starring role in the second) and both were written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. But Singin’ has better songs, better character co-stars (Donald O’Connor, Jean Hagen) and a higher ratio of LPM (Laughs per Minute).
Where Singin’ in the Rain is sheer exuberance at every turn, The Band Wagon just seems to get by on the energetic charm of Astaire, the choreography of Michael Kidd and the talented hand of director Vincente Minnelli. It takes those ingredients and makes a very good motion picture out of them, but it’s still not a musical I’d put in that library of movies I watch over and over (like The Wizard of Oz, Holiday Inn, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, The Music Man, My Fair Lady and Oliver!…to name just a few of my favorite things).
The Band Wagon is also too close for comfort to Singin’ in the Rain’s plot. Both are backstage dramas—Singin’ parodies Hollywood; The Band Wagon takes on Broadway, the legitimate “thea-tuh.” This is a world that Comden and Green knew intimately and to their credit, they paint a spot-on picture of what goes on behind the curtain. However, where the jokes in Singin’ came like finger snaps, the one-liners are few and far between in The Band Wagon. That’s surprising because I myself spent many years in the theater world (okay, the community theater world) and I know for a fact there are some folks behind all that greasepaint who are wackier than anybody with a Beverly Hills zip code. Maybe Comden and Green had used up all the really good dialogue the previous year.
As the movie opens, we see Tony Hunter (Astaire) traveling on a train from California to New York. He’s a washed-up has-been movie star of pictures like Swinging Down to Panama (an in-joke to those who remember Astaire’s own Flying Down to Rio). He’s on his way to the Big Apple to help out his friends Lily and Lester Marton (Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant), a song-writing couple not-so-loosely based on Comden and Green themselves. The Martons have this idea for a big hit musical, but they need the backing of big Broadway director (and even bigger-headed Broadway actor) Jeffrey Cordova (played to the hammy hilt by Jack Buchanan).
The Martons persuade him to take on the project with Tony as the star and snooty ballerina Gabrielle Gerard (Charisse) as the leading lady. But disaster ensues when Cordova turns the whole thing into a bizarre version of Faust. His idea of good theater mainly consists of huge pieces of moving scenery and exploding flashpots. When the show bombs, the cast and crew pull themselves together (“Hey kids, let’s put on a show!”) and produce the play the Martons originally had in mind.
Meanwhile, Tony and Gabrielle are falling for each other. Tell me you didn’t see that coming from a mile away with bright headlights! There’s friction at first—uh-huh—as Tony gripes that Gabrielle’s got “a superior smirk” and she comes back with “I used to see all your films when I was a little girl; in fact, I just saw them again at a revival…at the museum!” Ouch.
But true love conquers all Broadway flops and everyone ends up happily ever after as the curtain comes down. Well, duh.
I wish I could say my happiness lived on forever, but to be honest The Band Wagon started to wear thin along about the second act. For one thing, it’s much too much: too loud (Levant’s unmodulated braying doesn’t help), too eager to punch every note, and too full of itself. It’s as if it was opening night at Carnegie Hall and it was trying to project all the way to the back row. Those theater types are such excitable people!
In the midst of all the bellow and bluster, however, there are some truly marvelous moments, mostly thanks to Mr. Astaire’s feet. When he first arrives in New York City, he visits a 42nd Street penny arcade and starts singing “A Shine on Your Shoes,” an infectious number that involves a shoe shine, a mechanical fortune-teller and lots of happy-go-lucky attitude. It doesn’t add anything to the plot, but it’s a prime example of what we love so much about Astaire: that giddy-gazelle grace which seems to come so effortlessly from his heel-to-toe anatomy.
Charisse also shows us why she was the top-rated dancer of her day. Take a look at the first time Tony sees her, dancing on-stage in a lavish ballet. She does nearly the entire scene on pointe. As Tony says, “She’s fabulous, sensational. The loveliest thing I’ve ever seen.” And how!
Things get even lovelier in the film’s centerpiece dance number, “Girl Hunt,” an extended jazz ballet which parodies the hard-boiled detective genre. Choreographer Kidd and director Minnelli pull out all the stops for this number and it’s a visual thrill. It’s also a mirror image of the long dance sequences in An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain where Gene Kelly worked up a cool sweat strutting his stuff with Leslie Caron and Charisse, respectively. Astaire might not have the muscular forcefulness of his pal Kelly, but what he does have is a relaxed joie de vivre which simply pours off the screen in every scene he’s in (up to and including his last picture, Ghost Story in 1981). Even in the most so-so of Hollywood musicals, Fred Astaire can convince you that there is no greater feeling than moving your feet in syncopated rhythm.
The Band Wagon concludes with the entire cast enthusiastically belting out “That’s Entertainment!” (similar to the way Ethel Merman and crew join hands and sing “There’s No Business Like Show Business!” at the end of that movie) Sure, The Band Wagon is entertaining…but only mildly so. I’d much rather go shower in the Rain.
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