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For a few cents more, the mating of proletarian rights and musical romance. "Doggone communists!" Impasse at Sleep-Tite factory, the raise employees build their futures around is not forthcoming, the company's questionable ledger is kept under lock and key. New superintendent (John Raitt), a most stolid beefcake, versus Grievance Committee (Doris Day), "a very cold, hard-boiled doll." He second-guesses himself in "Hey There" and she denies the attraction in "I'm Not at All in Love," "There Once Was a Man" ticklishly celebrates their amorous acknowledgment. (Eddie Foy Jr. and Carol Haney play the parallel couple, "master of the flying blades" turned time-study man and the galumphing secretary he jealously loves.) "My future depends upon the titanic struggle for pajama survival." The George Abbott Broadway experience, transmuted into cinema by the restlessness of Stanley Donen's camera and Bob Fosse's choreography. Drab industrial spaces transformed by vivacious rhythms, rows of sewing machines studded with neon placards and nightshirts that come alive with vapor blasts. The "Once-a-Year-Day" picnic is a plein-air whirl of grass and sky and spinning figures, "everyone's entitled to be wild," the house by the railway track is equipped with rainy blue windows and green and red lights for mood filters. A signature Fosse rectangle of bowler hats and slanted limbs, "Steam Heat," just a bit of entertainment after the union meeting. "I know a dark, secluded place," Haney in all her glory massacres a tango and invents Carol Burnett for "Hernando's Hideaway." (Matchstick flares in the gloom give way to a widescreen of flickering Chinese lanterns.) The punchline finds the Metropolis head-heart-hands mediation replaced with jammies tops and bottoms. Godard reviewed this twice, first for Cahiers du Cinéma and then as Tout va Bien. With Reta Shaw, Thelma Pelish, Jack Straw, Barbara Nichols, and Ralph Dunn.
--- Fernando F. Croce |