That Was Entertainment

By Stefan Kanfer

In a chauvinistic moment Gene Kelly once asked, "What movie musical even worth noting has been produced under any auspices except Hollywood's?" There was no answer. There never has been. American movies learned to sing at the same moment they learned to talk: the first sound movie, The Jazz Singer, in 1927 starring Al Jolson, was a musical and a smash.

Thereafter, crime dramas, shipboard romances, even westerns were adopted by the new art form. The results were often ludicrous but invariably profitable. To survive, almost every studio learned to experiment with musicals, but no company ever duplicated the burnish and exuberance of the MGM product. The proof can be found in That's Entertainment!, a two-hour retrospective backed by the current owners of MGM. These are operators who have converted studio real estate and properties into the MGM Grand Hotel, a Las Vegas monument to brashness and vulgarity. Still, if they are contemptuous of the future, they are worshipful of the past--with sound reason. That's Entertainment! suffers occasional longueurs, but at its best it offers the kind of footage that can levitate an audience.

Columnar Thighs. Here are the classic bolts of melody: Judy Garland traveling the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz; the unfinished face of Frank Sinatra apostrophizing Manhattan in On the Town; Fred Astaire, the world's most sophisticated stick figure, dancing on the ceiling in Royal Wedding; Gene Kelly's soaking-wet aria in Singin'in the Rain.

The film is far more than a treasury of the familiar. Indeed, its wildest moments are from that forgotten cloudland of the '30s and '40s when every performer was expected to carry a tune. In Born to Dance, Jimmy Stewart reaches for a high note and almost pulls it down; Clark Gable gives Idiot's Delight its few moments of radiance; a klutzy but indomitable Joan Crawford steps her way up from The Hollywood Revue.

The film's funniest portions belong neither to Astaire nor Kelly nor to any of the meticulously choreographed clown scenes of the '50s. In clip after clip, they are outdone by unintentional comedy. The Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald epic Rose Marie (1936) offers the couple known to Hollywood as the Singing Capon and the Iron Butterfly in a Canadian Mountie scene that must be heard to be disbelieved. Even in the '40s, MGM knew that there were different strokes for different folks. Esther Williams could do them all, in a series of swimming-pool epics that for elaborate waste of money, have been unmatched since the days of the Regency. To watch Williams posing in gold lame, rising from red smoke and diving into a cerulean swimming pool is to understand the blessedness of color blindness. For saccharinity like mother used to make, the film offers a series of backyard musicals in all two dimensions-- always featuring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, always culminating in variants of the lines:

"We'll put on a show! I'll write the music and you'll sing! We can use your father's old hippodrome!"

That's Entertainment! offers a rich mulch for graduate students of the cinema. One can readily imagine the doctoral theses--Descent into Fantasy: The Importance of the Staircase in the MGM Musical; The Columnar Thigh Fetish: A Comparison of Ann Miller, Esther Williams and Eleanor Powell; Lyrics with Bite: A Study of the Capped Tooth in Mario Lanza and Howard Keel.

Perhaps the most serious paper could be reserved for a melancholy analysis of the film makers--persons whose style seems closer to television than to the product they profess to admire. Many of the songs are unreasonably curtailed as if the audience's attention span could not endure anything longer than a glimpse. Moreover, the film devoted to glories of the MGM musical slights their mainsprings--composers and lyricists. For all the viewer knows, performers might have made up words and music as they went along. Jerome Kern? Never heard of him. George and Ira Gershwin? Harold Arlen? Nobody by that name at these numbers.

In a way, this combination of hustle and amnesia is to be expected. It takes no ironist to imagine evenings in the MGM Grand Hotel when a weary gambler idly flicks on the set--to an old MGM musical. When he asks himself why they don't make movies like that any more, all he has to do is look around the room. At MGM in 1974, that's entertainment.

Stefan Kanter

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