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Happy-hour at Ziegfeld's celestial proscenium, the showman (William Powell) nostalgic for his "eternal toys." (Stop-motion puppets reenact a Broadway revue, to mostly unsettling effect.) The spangled hodgepodge that follows is the impresario's bash, conjured up for the benefit of Powell-Pressburger and Ken Russell, among others. In "Here's to the Girls," George Sidney glorifies the American showgirl on a soundstage-carousel-wedding cake, pink ideals burlesqued by Lucille Ball's knowing smile and Virginia O'Brien's horny clowning. The rapid progression from Esther Williams modeling lipstick underwater to Keenan Wynn eating a telephone to an aria from La Traviata nicely illustrates the project's likely genesis, an eager-beaver brainstorming session in Arthur Freed's office. Victor Moore and Edward Arnold bring Kafka to vaudeville in "Pay the Two Dollars," "This Heart of Mine" is a seduction danced between Fred Astaire and Lucille Bremer in alarming swathes of crimson and azure. "A Sweepstakes Ticket" and "When Television Comes" are records of dead comic styles, Fanny Brice's Yiddish truculence and Red Skelton's stratospheric mugging, respectively. Lena Horne sings "Love" in a Caribbean dive, Judy Garland blooms under Charles Walters' gentle staging of "A Great Lady Has an Interview." ("Well, gentlemen, you've caught me pitifully unprepared," the diva tells a gaggle of reporters while adjusting her spotlight.) "Limehouse Blues" is a swirl of phosphorescent Orientalia and a Vincente Minnelli master class in mise en scène, "The Babbitt and the Bromide" is a polite pas de deux between Astire's aristocratic gliding and Gene Kelly's plebeian gymnastics. The closer ("Beauty") alternates between Kathryn Grayson's melodic cavity-drilling, Dalinian suffusions, and Cyd Charisse almost drowning in colored suds. After all this, Anger just had to do Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. With Hume Cronyn, William Frawley, James Melton, Marion Bell, Robert Lewis, and Grady Sutton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |