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Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen take the MGM musical outdoors, the New York minute stretched to 24 hours. The prelude has the hard-hat tenor at the dock if not yet quite out of bed, a sleepy note before the allegrissimo Big Apple ode by sailors eager to "paint this town pink, green and yellow." (The slaphappy montage from a camera car, punctuated with a 360° turn on the RCA Building observation deck, clearly anticipates the Nouvelle Vague.) The Indiana dreamer (Kelly), the sightseer (Frank Sinatra) and the goofball (Jules Munshin), out of the battleship and into the subway, "a comedy in three acts with music." Their guide is the brassy cabdriver (Betty Garrett), at the Museum of Natural History is the reformed nympho with a yen for troglodytes (Ann Miller), plus Miss Turnstiles (Vera-Ellen) the Cinderella who turns hoochie-coochie odalisque at the stroke of midnight. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are off on a lark!" Bernstein's metropolitan decathlon as swirl of realism and stylization, Dassin's location filming (The Naked City) yields to Vera-Ellen's balletic transfiguration against a mustard backdrop. "Prehistoric Man" is capped with a cameo from Bringing Up Baby's collapsing dinosaur, "Come Up to My Place" harmonizes Sinatra's lounge honey with Garrett's libidinous salt, a Chinatown nightclub accommodates "You Can Count on Me" ("As the adding machine once said...") along with Alice Pearce's honking tango parody. ("A Day in New York," by contrast, is pure Kelly and a dry run for the impressionistic pantomime of An American in Paris.) Scorsese has a flashing memory of the Brooklyn Bridge chase in Mean Streets, from the top of the Empire State Building to the Coney Island fairground is one long carnival. The final ascending crane contemplates an industrial cityscape transfigured by music. Cinematography by Harold Rosson. With Florence Bates, George Meader, Hans Conried, and Carol Haney.
--- Fernando F. Croce |