I'm not the most knowledgeable man when it comes to dance, but I'm at least a little familiar with Cyd Charisse. As everyone should be. Next to Ginger Rogers, she was possibly the most iconic female dancer in film history. Even those of us cinephiles who skip out on most dance musicals have at least seen her famous number from Singin' in the Rain (above). A few years ago, when Moviefone counted down the Top 10 Best Dance Scenes, it was #2 (just behind Dirty Dancing).

Charisse has died of an apparent heart attack at the age of 86, and she's hopefully joining old partners Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly for some of the best dance scenes ever seen up in heaven. With the former, she was paired up in The Band Wagon, Ziegfeld Follies and Silk Stockings (for which she received a Golden Globe nomination), and with the latter, she danced in Brigadoon, It's Always Fair Weather, Invitation to Dance and, of course, in Singin' in the Rain.

Normally I might post an image from Singin' in the Rain as we get closer to Christmas; for some inexplicable reason, it's one of my favorite holiday-season movies. However, I was instead moved to post something by news of the death on Thursday of Betty Comden, one of the film's co-writers. Comden and Adolph Green teamed up to write a number of stage musicals and films, such as On the Town, The Band Wagon and Bells are Ringing. Comden and Green also adapted the play Auntie Mame into the 1958 film -- another holiday favorite of mine. For Singin' in the Rain, Comden and Green were engaged to write a movie musical around a catalog of existing songs from the 1920s and 1930s by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown. A few original songs were later added as well to the 1952 movie, such as Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh" number.

I think one reason why I like Singin' in the Rain so much is that it is well written, with clever dialogue and lots of amusing moments. The musical numbers are impressive, and of course everyone remembers Gene Kelly performing the title song. But I love all the details about the transition from the silent era to talkies. I'm particularly fond of Jean Hagen as Lina Lamont, the gorgeous silent-film star with the horrible speaking voice. The scene in which Hagen and Kelly are shooting a silent love scene and murmuring sweet nothings like "Why, you rattlesnake!" and "I'd like to break every bone in your body" is one of my favorites. I also like the opening sequence, shown above -- I recall reading that Comden and Green wrote three different opening scenes for Singin' in the Rain, and ended up incorporating elements from all of them in the final script.

A few years ago, I finally saw The Band Wagon, which Comden and Green adapted from their stage musical a year after Singin' in the Rain, and hoped for the same delightful combination of humor and music. It felt terribly flat and dull in comparison (and I know I'm in the minority on this opinion, so feel free to defend the film). I'm not fond of most 1950s musicals, but Singin' in the Rain is a glorious exception. I actually found two great photos from the film last night; perhaps I'll post the other one around Christmastime.

I posted earlier today on Joystiq that a new TV commercial for the role-playing game World of Warcraft hit the airwaves on Monday, which of course means it hit YouTube about .0815 seconds later. I'm waiting for the day that things come out on YouTube before they reach TV or the big screen. YouTube will become self-aware and telepathic and rule the world one day. You think Terminator was just a movie? SkyNet is YouTube, silly rabbit.

Oh, look ... we've veered back on-topic. This commercial features footage from Office Space with everyone's favorite cubicle-slacker Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston) playing WoW while Bill Lundbergh (Gary Cole) tries to talk to him about TPS reports. Originally in the scene, Peter was playing Tetris, but they've stuck this footage in pretty seamlessly. Look how they've even littered his desk with the Warcraft box and game discs.

The ad works here because Office Space isn't generally considered a "classic", but how long until companies really screw up something that Cinemaniacs will cry sacrilege over? Come to think of it, it's already happened several times. We've had Gene Kelly selling Volkswagens, Steve McQueen pushing Mustangs, and Elton John plugging Diet Coke with Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney, and Louis Armstrong. The recent Gap commercial starring Audrey Hepburn was funky and fun, but I found myself wondering what she'd think about it. It's hard to imagine that she would be thrilled. Will Apple use Citizen Kane to sell iPods? Matthew Broderick hawking new computers in WarGames? Okay, that last one probably wouldn't really bother me, but when does it end? At what point is too much just too much?


Check out these ads after the jump and let us know what you think.

I'm not sure what I could say about Gene Kelly that someone else hasn't already said before, perhaps in a documentary with lots of cool dancing footage. Today's his birthday -- he would have been 94, but died in 1996. I decided against a typical photo from Singin' in the Rain, because most of us know the image even if we haven't seen the movie. I really wanted a photo of Kelly and the Nicholas Brothers in The Pirate, but couldn't find one. Instead I found this lovely still from An American in Paris, with Leslie Caron. I haven't seen An American in Paris yet, because I keep waiting for it to play on a big screen, feeling that the TV will not do it justice.

I'm sorry to say that the last time I saw Kelly onscreen in a theater was during a trailer for the film Viva Knievel!, as I'd prefer to forget the later days of his career. I'd rather remember the first time I saw him, in For Me and My Gal, which I watched as part of a big Judy Garland marathon on TV when I was growing up. I'm also fond of On the Town, in which he costarred with Frank Sinatra, and in which Ann Miller plays a dancing anthropologist. You can see Kelly's influences everywhere in film ... for example, I loved Jackie Chan's Singin' in the Rain tribute in the otherwise undistinguished Shanghai Knights.

Image from legs.free.fr

The word "sour" is often used to describe It's Always Fair Weather, the 1955 MGM wide-screen musical at long last released on DVD. Pauline Kael described this film's tone as "a delayed hangover...sour." In his review of the boxed set Classic Musicals From The Dream Factory, a 5 DVD set that includes It's Always Fair Weather, the estimable Steve Daly of EW calls this cult musical "sour, cynical."  In Ethan Mordden's 1981 book The Hollywood Musical, Fair Weather is listed under the chapter "The Energy Peters Out."  And Mordden zeroes in on the sequence of buddies Dan Dailey, Michael Kidd and Gene Kelly singing about their loathing of one another as more than just the dissolving of a partnership; to Mordden, it's a sign of the end of the line for the classic Hollywood musical. 


Sour? Savory is more like it. There's no disputing palates, but Betty Comden and Adolph Green-scripted musicals were never completely gossamer dreams. New York-based cabaret-trained performers that they were, Comden and Green always included some razory satire of the entertainment business. They made a comedy out of the tensions of staying afloat in short-memoried showbiz in The Band Wagon, where 1930s icon Fred Astaire adjusts himself to the gaudy post-war world of Times Square, pulp fiction, and "Technicolor and stereophonic sound."  Singin' In the Rain is similarly about future shock, as sound technology comes in to mess up the comparative ease and order of the silent film world. The Comden-Green It's Always Fair Weather uses elements that's all over noir: post-war dissatisfaction, the Kefauver report on organized crime, and the pressures of conformity on the returning GIs. Golden hindsight reduces the 1950s in today's imagination to a decade-long dance night at Jack Rabbit Slim's. Cop a look at Peter Biskind's Seeing is Believing, not just to unearth the true meaning of 1950s monster movies as symbols of the nuclear menace, but of also to study the political strife between the radical right and the centrists that gave those bug-eyed-monster attacks deeper textual significance.  (President Dwight Eisenhower was a compromise candidate between these two political extremes. No wonder Ike was brought back as a figure of compromise in Why We Fight.) And no wonder Jacques Demy soaked up the undertones of the MGM musical and recreated them in his films, figuring it was appropriate to use musical comedy tropes in a story of a drafted gas station attendant and his pregnant girlfriend.

Way back in my college days, before I was 100% sure that I loved each and every musical ever made, I saw On the Town in a class (Yeah, I went to a pretty awesome college.) and was sold on the genre forever. I mean, hello -- it's Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in sailor suits. Again! And Frank is in love with a bossy lady cabbie? And there's actually a character called Miss Turnstiles? Plus, New York, New York is a fantastic song. What's not to love? Sadly, today, for the first time, I found something to hate.

Sky News is reporting that Christian Slater's success in a musical (thanks to the commentors for correcting this -- reassuringly, my source was wrong on the "musical" detail), stage version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Yeah, the world was crying out for that one.) has led to talks about him starring in an On the Town remake. Could someone please shoot me when that happens? Because, even if Hugh Jackman IS in it (that's part of the rumor, along with -- choke -- John Travolta, who would doubtless put on his "I'm so adorably goofy!" hat and play Ozzie), that's something I never, ever want to see. The mere thought makes me a little queasy.