The Godfather: Peter Corris on musicals
When I was young, back in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I went often to Hollywood musical films, at first with my parents, later with my older sister or friends.
I saw a great many – Annie Get your Gun, Oklahoma, Luxury Liner, Kiss Me Kate, Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Show Boat, South Pacific, The Desert Song, and more.
I can’t say that I was discriminating, but I had some sense of what was good and what was … less good. I knew that Brigadoon and Gigi were fairy floss and that there was something wrong with the casting of Guys and Dolls – Marlon Brando was all wrong as Sky Masterson. I disliked Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris because I couldn’t stand Gene Kelly. I’ve since learned that he was politically one of the Hollywood good guys but he came across to me as impossibly conceited.
I knew that there was something special about Carmen Jones although I knew nothing about Bizet. I could see that Show Boat was about something other than songs, dances and costumes – racial prejudice in the USA – although it was sanitised. Similarly South Pacific, although romanticised, had a flavour of World War II, which, as schoolkids, we all knew about from Coral Sea Battle commemorations. The Desert Song was exotic and seductive enough to hook a pre-pubescent youth.
Westerns remained my favourite films at the time but I enjoyed the musicals. My parents had some of the sound tracks on LPs and snatches of the songs remain in my head to this day.
The golden era of the musical, when story and plot were subsumed by song and choreography, came and went. Later musicals had more substance: West Side Story (1961), although again sanitised, dealt with race and gang culture; My Fair Lady (1964) with a solid theatrical provenance, was a delight.
Browsing on Foxtel for a movie to record to watch in an idle hour, I’ve ignored the musicals, opting mostly for Westerns and film noir. But the idea came to me to watch one I’d enjoyed when young to see if I could recover and understand that enjoyment. The first to appear in the program list was Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which I remembered as being good fun. It starred stolid but reliable first man of many musicals, Howard Keel, and warbling Jane Powell.
I watched as much as I could bear and was appalled. The plot was flimsy, the acting poor, the songs indifferent and the choreography was brilliant but ludicrous. Although as we know, from published memoirs and the novels of James Ellroy, that Hollywood was seething with sex, violence and drugs, the studios chose to project in the musicals a white-bread America. That certainly existed. Thankfully, rock ‘n’ roll and Bob Dylan were just around the corner and the times would be a ‘changing.
I don’t think I’ll try the experiment again. Some of the films will no doubt stand up but I’d hate to feel less good about the songs – ‘Anything you can do I can do better …’ ‘Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends …’ ‘Who wants to be a millionaire …’ ‘The desert song calling, its voice enthralling’ – because of their shmaltzy contexts.
