Tuesday Minute
Entr’acte | August 24, 2010

“Sympathy for the Devil”

from Gimme Shelter

This week, selections from concert films worth remembering.

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Gimme Shelter (1970)
Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, directors
“Sympathy for the Devil”
Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, songwriters
The Rolling Stones

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…58…59…60.

Monday Minute
Entr’acte | August 23, 2010

“Suite:  Judy Blue Eyes”

from Woodstock

Most musical films feature performances staged specifically for the movie audience.  Concert films are something else altogether.  The music is performed for the live audience, and the filmmakers’ job is to capture the essence of the event.  Sometimes the focus is on center stage, sometimes on the periphery.  Concert films are documentaries in the most basic sense, capturing for the record what happened and ensuring it will not be forgotten.

This week, selections from concert films worth remembering.

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Woodstock (1970)
Michael Wadleigh, director
“Suite:  Judy Blue Eyes”
Stephen Stills, songwriter
Crosby, Stills & Nash

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…58…59…60.

Friday Minute
No. 151 | August 20, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

 

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)
Tuesday         —   “Begin the Beguine” / Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
Wednesday    —   “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” / The Sky’s the Limit (1942)
Thursday        —   “You’re All the World to Me” / Royal Wedding (1951)

“Puttin’ on the Ritz”

Fred Astaire was neither the first nor the last to record Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz,” but he’s the performer most closely associated with the tune.  His performance comes in Blue Skies, the Paramount musical that was billed as “Astaire’s last picture.”  After performing for the public for forty years, the actor-singer-dancer had had enough.  At the age of 47, he called it quits.  “Puttin’ on the Ritz” was his “last dance.”

It didn’t work out very well.  Retirement, that is.  Fred Astaire continued to make movies into the 1980s.

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Blue Skies (1946)
Stuart Heisler, director
Irving Berlin (story), Allan Scott (adaptation), Arthur Sheekman (writer)
“Puttin’ on the Ritz”
Irving Berlin, music and lyrics
Fred Astaire, Hermes Pan, Dave Robel, choreographers
Fred Astaire

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Quote of note
“No dancer can watch Fred Astaire and not know that we all should have been in another business.”
—Mikhail Baryshnikov

…58…59…60.

Thursday Minute
No. 150 | August 19, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)
Tuesday         —   “Begin the Beguine” / Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)
Wednesday    —   “One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)” / The Sky’s the Limit (1942)

“You’re All the World to Me”

The story borrows from Fred Astaire’s real life.  He and his sister, Adele, were dance partners before she went to England and married a duke.  In Royal Wedding, Astaire and Joan Powell play a brother-and-sister dance duo who take their show to London, where he meets another dancer (Sarah Churchill) and she meets an aristocrat (Peter Lawford).  Love is all around, as the town is buzzing with preparations for a royal wedding.

The film has a memorable sequence with Astaire dancing solo with a hat rack to “Sunday Jumps.”  A dancer like Astaire makes any partner look good.  The showstopper is “You’re All the World to Me,” seen in the clip below.  I showed it to my four-year-old son and asked him what he thought of Astaire’s dancing.  He said, “It looks hard—super hard.”  Indeed.

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Royal Wedding (1951)
Stanley Donen, director
Alan Jay Lerner, writer
“You’re All the World to Me”
Burton Lane, music; Alan Jay Lerner, lyrics
Fred Astaire, Nick Castle, choreographers
Fred Astaire

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Quote of note
“Your paltry, unconscionable commercials are the antithesis of everything my lovely, gentle father represented.”
—Ava Astaire, criticizing the company that made Dirt Devil, for digitally replacing a hat rack with a vacuum cleaner in a TV ad campaign in 1997

…58…59…60.

Wednesday Minute
No. 149 | August 18, 2010

Hoofing It

Our theme this week
The incomparable Fred Astaire

 

Featured this week (theme introduction)
Monday         —   “Cheek to Cheek” / Top Hat (1935)
Tuesday         —   “Begin the Beguine” / Broadway Melody of 1940 (1940)

“One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)”

The Sky’s the Limit is another RKO musical, this one a wartime story that takes a darker turn.  Fred Astaire plays Fred, a pilot AWOL from the Air Force who ends up in New York.  There he meets and falls in love with Joan, a photographer played by Joan Leslie.  Astaire forgoes his usual role of the happy-go-lucky charmer, paying a price for it with critics and audiences of the time.  Yet his performance offers an interesting side to his persona, demonstrating a range he’s sometime not given credit for.

Late in the film, when he thinks he’s lost Joan for good, he’s drunk and angry and spits out a rendition of “One for My Baby” unlike anything he’d done before.  Please stand clear of the bar.

Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer wrote the song especially for Astaire, though it’s been recorded many times by others, included several times by Frank Sinatra.  The song, famously, was Bette Midler’s farewell to Johnny Carson, on his next-to-last night hosting “The Tonight Show.”

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The Sky’s the Limit  (1942)
Edward H. Griffith, director
Frank Fenton, Lynn Root, writers
“One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)”
Harold Arlen, music; Johnny Mercer, lyrics
Fred Astaire, choreographer

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Quote of note
“If Fred Astaire is the Cary Grant of dance, I’m the Marlon Brando.”
—Gene Kelly

…58…59…60.