Movie Review: Easter Parade (1948)

A musical stacked full of singing and some dancing, Easter Parade is mildly enjoyable as a talent show but awfully thin on the ground in terms of plot and characters.

Don Hewes (Fred Astaire) has a falling out with dance partner Nadine Hale (Ann Miller), when she accepts a starring role in a big-budget Ziegfeld-produced musical. The furious Don vows that he can turn any girl into a dancer to replace Nadine, and he plucks singer Hannah Brown (Judy Garland) out of a cheap diner routine and starts training her as his new partner.

With Nadine's career enjoying the spotlight, Don and Hannah struggle to establish themselves. Hannah falls in love with Don but he still has feelings for Nadine while his friend Johnny (Peter Lawford) lusts after Hannah.

Easter Parade had a troubled production, Astaire coming out of a short-lived screen retirement to replace Gene Kelly after Kelly had broken his ankle, and Ann Miller rescued from B movie obscurity to replace Cyd Charisse, after Charisse broke her leg.

With an endless parade of songs by Irving Berlin, Easter Parade is not as much a movie as a disjointed stage show. The 14 musical numbers are thrown at the screen in exhaustive fashion, the plot elements treated as rude interruptions between costume changes. The film reveals its intentions early, as Astaire gets to perform the opening two numbers, Happy Easter and Drum Crazy, before a single word is spoken, director Charles Walters signalling that the characters and story are very much a secondary concern.

When the personalities behind all the singing are sketchily introduced, they are unusually unlikable. Don Hewes is obsessed with his dancing and treats Hannah with disdain, using her to get back at Nadine. Garland does deliver the most engaged performance, but there is no chemistry between her and Astaire, and any reasons for Hannah to fall in love with Don start and stop at childish infatuation. Don never convincingly reciprocates any feelings, leaving the central romance a lopsided jumble.

Nadine is portrayed as cold and manipulative, Miller stuck with a plastic smile throughout, while Johnny is abandoned with no character development whatsoever, Lawford stranded as a the blandest of second-fiddle lovers.

The enjoyment does come from the better musical numbers, all making use of sparking colours. Drum Crazy is an energetic Astaire romp through a toy store, Miller rocks the joint and steals the movie with machine gun tap dancing in Shakin' the Blues Away, while Astaire and Garland enjoy their best moments in A Couple of Swells.

Easter Parade is a musical overburdened with the music, not lacking in talent but skipping too many ingredients essential for a well-rounded movie experience.

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Movie Review: On The Town (1949)

A rapturous celebration of wild fun, quick love and the pleasures of New York City, On The Town is an infectious musical with a glittering cast.

Three sailor friends have a 24 hour shore leave in New York. Gabey (Gene Kelly) wants to find the girl of his dreams, Chip (Frank Sinatra) wants to see all the sites, and Ozzie (Jules Munshin) is the overwhelmed sidekick. Gabey falls in love with the picture of the latest winner of the monthly "Miss Turnstiles" subway competition, and soon catches a glimpse of her: Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen) is a simple girl from a small town, but Gabey thinks that she is a high society star. He is determined to catch up with her, and convinces Chip and Ozzie that they should help.

But as soon as they start their search for Ivy, anthropologist Claire (Ann Miller) bumps into Ozzie at the museum and is immediately enamoured with him, while determined taxi driver Hildy (Betty Garrett) sets her lustful sights on Chip. Ozzie and Chip abandon Gabey as they set off to have fun with Claire and Hildy respectively, and Chip gets to meet Hildy's nasally roommate Lucy Schmeeler (Alice Pearce). Gabey does track down Ivy and a serious romance ensues as they reconnect with Chip, Ozzie and their girls. The wild night progresses from the top of the Empire State Building to a variety of nightclubs, ending with a madcap police chase across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Coney Island.

An adaptation of the war-time stage musical, On The Town is revitalized for the screen with on-location shooting (unique for the time), a largely new musical score, and high energy dance numbers. Most of Leonard Berstein's songs for the stage production were dumped in favour of more upbeat material by Roger Edens, as co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen start pushing to define the boundaries of the new form of screen musical that will take hold in the 1950s. The dancing is high tempo, athletic and mixed with large doses humour, Kelly getting the flamboyant best out of Vera-Ellen and Ann Miller.

The highlights include the opening number New York, New York, as the sailors start their shore leave, and the quite hilarious Prehistoric Man with Claire wrapping Ozzie around her finger as Ann Miller tap dances up a storm. The aggressive Hildy finds all sorts of reasons for Chip to abandon his tour of the city and instead Come Up to My Place, while Gabey and Ivy imagine a small town date on Mainstreet.

Vera-Ellen features much more prominently than her sixth-ranked billing suggests. She shines as the multi-talented Ivy in Gabey's Miss Turnstiles imagination before he even meets her, and again dancing with Kelly in the dreamy ballet sequence.

As the day draws to an end the energy of the movie just gets stronger, the screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden drawing inspiration from all that New York has to offer to maintain momentum. The sub-text of man-hungry women like Claire and Hildy hunting down the sailors is somewhat surprising, but likely linked to the war-time origins of the musical, with men absent from the home front and women doing their duty to entertain those on leave. A clever tour of various nightclubs adds more humour and builds the romance between Gabey and Ivy to a crescendo, complete with a Cinderella-style runaway lover close to midnight.

With a compact running length of just under 100 minutes, On The Town turns into the perfect day in the big city, and a perfect musical experience.

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