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Between the storybook in the opening and the theater at the close, the Vincente Minnelli cinema. The demure maiden in the Caribbean colonies (Judy Garland) hungers for adventure and romance, the legendary buccaneer Macoco the Black embodies them but the aunt (Gladys Cooper) has other plans for her: "I got you a husband." "Anybody I know?" The island's mayor (Walter Slezak) promises only a staid home, elsewhere the brash saltimbanque (Gene Kelly) sweeps into town like a fusion of Fairbanks and Nijinsky, blithely wooing every belle in sight. (Kelly in curly pompadour and brown tights is out of Toulouse-Lautrec, with a Rousseau stage in a pavilion amid poles striped scarlet and white.) The heroine is no fan of his acrobatics ("I wish you'd stop circling me, it's like talking to a top!"), the mesmeric mirror at that night's show brings out her lusty side in a hot swirl revised by Fellini in Le Notti di Cabiria. The pirate's identity becomes a masquerade, he comes to her in a vision as the performer in black shorts and gleaming cutlass, erect mast and explosions and treasure chest and all. "I realize that there's a practical world and a dream world... I shan't mix them." Minnelli's unbound carnival, Cole Porter songs to enhance a beautiful delirium building on Yolanda and the Thief (and also on Leisen's Frenchman's Creek). The deception is shattered in tandem with a room filled with objets d'art, the reconciliation is a tuneful Pietà amid smashed décor. The vanity of actors and officials and cutthroats, the bounding Pierrots who transform an execution into a paean to escapism, the reprise with greasepaint and baggy pants. "You should try underplaying sometime. Very effective." On a Clear Day You Can See Forever is a virtual remake. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. With Reginald Owen, George Zucco, Fayard and Harold Nicholas, Lester Allen, and Lola Albright.
--- Fernando F. Croce |