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American popular culture changed dramatically during World War II. It became much more democratic, middle-class, and sentimental. The great symbol of this change, of course, was Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma, which hit Broadway in 1943. Instead of endless drawing-room comedies about the idle rich, Broadway audiences were now entertained by the trials and tribulations of ordinary gals and fellas.
But Broadway was still the source of popular culture. Like his competitors, Berlin was able to adapt to the change. He had his greatest Broadway show ever in 1946, Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, which was made into a hit movie in 1950 with Betty Hutton in the lead. He had another hit show in 1950 on Broadway, Call Me Madam, again with Ethel Mermen, made into a successful film in 1953, with Merman as the star.41 Back in the forties, Fred Astaire had starred in two Irving Berlin compendium films, Blue Skies (1946) and Easter Parade (1948), which both made piles of money. The success of all these films set the stage for another Berlin compendium, White Christmas, in 1954.
Danny Kaye and
Bing Crosby in
White Christmas
White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye, dancer Vera-Ellen, and pop singer Rosemary Clooney, is a good, old-fashioned slice of wholesome fifties family entertainment.42 Despite that fact, it’s surprisingly watchable, thanks almost entirely to the efforts of Vera-Ellen, who shines in four dance segments.43 Danny Kaye, a hoofer rather than a dancer, partners her nicely in "The Best Things Happen When You're Dancing." Kaye also takes some nice flying spins around a pole in the number, showing some impressive athleticism for a man in his thirties. In more demanding numbers, including "Mandy" and "Abraham," Vera-Ellen appears with dancer John Brascia. In the less-than-witty "Choreography," an attack on Martha Graham-style seriousness, Vera-Ellen and Brascia represent good old-fashioned hoofing (and dance nicely) while Kaye goes through some clumsy contortions to parody the "bad" new styles of dance.
The one vocal highlight of the film is provided by Rosemary Clooney, who does a very nice job with "Love, You Didn’t Do Right By Me," a song Berlin wrote especially for the film. Clooney’s performance has a definite "progressive"44 flavor to it, a dissonance that suits the song’s mood. She’s accompanied by a quartet of overly intense young men in black tights and turtlenecks (including a youthful and aggressively coiffed George Chakiris) who look like they’ve stepped right out of "Choreography." They’re funny, but they detract a little from Clooney’s efforts.
The plot of White Christmas is a shameless rip-off of Holiday Inn (1942). Crosby and Kaye play two ex-GIs who put on a show to save a ski resort opened by their beloved general. The tone of the film is quite respectful and solemn. During World War II, Berlin seems to have developed an almost worshipful attitude toward General Eisenhower, and this almost certainly influenced the film.45 White Christmas glosses right over the atomic bomb, McCarthyism, and the Korean War, among other things, and is really a salute to the peace and prosperity of the Eisenhower years.46 But after all that Irving Berlin and America had been through, they deserved a little peace and prosperity.
Hollywood, of course, makes movies on the basis of profitability, not aesthetic completeness. White Christmas proved to be perhaps the biggest Irving Berlin money maker of them all, so MGM decided to go to the well one more time with another compendium film. There’s No Business Like Show Business is a sometimes awful, sometimes delightful Cinemascope extravaganza starring Ethel Merman and Dan Dailey47 as the leads, with Donald O’Connor,48 Johnnie Ray,49 and Mitzi Gaynor50 as their children, and Marilyn Monroe more than along for the ride as a (guess what?) blonde bombshell.
Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey,
Mitzi Gaynor, and Johnnie Ray
in There’s No Business
Like Show Business
Like White Christmas, There’s No Business Like Show Business is a classic "anti-TV" picture, the sort of film that flourished from about 1950 to 1957, when it became clear that the goddamn tube was not going to go away. The purpose of these films was to give audiences everything they couldn’t get at home — Big stars! Big screens! Full color! Huge production numbers! Ultimately, such pictures collapsed of their own weight, and, without the modern miracle of fast forward, watching There’s No Business Like Show Business would be something of a chore. With it, however, we can weed out the seriously lame plot and revel in the numerous production numbers.51
The best thing about There’s No Business Like Show Business is its consistently raucous tone, a welcome relief from all the good taste of White Christmas. Both Merman and Dailey were loud, brassy "There’s no business like show business" performers, while Marilyn holds back very little indeed.52
We start off with an agreeably unsubtle rendition of the agreeably unsubtle "When the Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam" by "The Two Donahues" (Dailey and Merman). The number concludes with Dailey costumed as a steam engine and Merman as the caboose, with the back door open so we can see her wiggling her caboose.53 Next up is "Play a Simple Melody," one of the two Berlin two-parters on film.54 The lyrics of the two melodies illustrate how the melodies fit together. Merman, who handles the flowing "legato," asks for a "simple melody, one my mother used to know," while Dailey says "if you can copy a tune that is choppy, you’ll get all my applause."
When the three kids are grown up (this takes awhile), we get "The Five Donahues" and a massive production number based on "Alexander’s Ragtime Band," an exercise in aimless excess. Merman and Dailey are first up, with a Swiss version. (God knows why; there was a special maybe on liederhosen?) O’Connor follows in a Scottish twist, dancing bravely in a kilt, followed by Mitzi, providing a little ooh-la-la from gay Paree.55 The film saves the worst for last, a grossly grinning Johnny Ray, pounding away on a Steinway in white tie and tails.56
We get a needed break from the Donahues with a heavy dose of Marilyn, a walkin’, talkin’ oxymoron in "After You Get What You Want You Don’t Want It."57 The girl’s clearly in a teasin’ if not pleasin’ mood, dressed for success in a pre-Bob Mackie Bob Mackie, with a swirling lace flower over each breast, just in case you weren’t paying attention. She follows that with her big production number, "Heat Wave," entering in a burlesque queen outfit and riding on a litter borne by her "boys," as she calls them.58 She sings the song in the first person ("I started a heat wave, a tropical heat wave") but instead of singing "I started a heat wave by letting my seat wave" she actually waves her seat, in an exaggerated dip and sway — not exactly a bump and grind, but not bad, either.
O’Connor falls in love with Marilyn (why not?), and a date with her sends him into his big solo, "A Man Chases a Girl." O’Connor, too short to play a leading man, was an astonishingly light-footed dancer, and his superb abilities are on full display here. The production gets a little elaborate at the end, with statues coming to life and fountains squirting water, but O’Connor triumphs over all the artifice.
O’Connor, Gaynor, and Monroe all combine for another first-rate number, "Lazy." Marilyn, irresistible and unapproachable in basic black, lolls on a couch in her penthouse, fending off endless phone solicitations from suitors, while O’Connor and Gaynor offer sardonic, rat-a-tat-tat counterpoint. (Mitzi, in skin-tight slacks and a midriff-baring sweater, looks pretty damn irresistible herself.)
This is followed by the strange "A Sailor’s Not a Sailor Until He’s Been Tattooed," which Berlin wrote especially for the film, with Mitzi and Ethel in drag. Neither the song nor the production number have much to offer, unless you’re dying to see Mitzi Gaynor get tattooed.
There’s No Business Like Show Business concludes, appropriately, with Ethel Merman singing "There’s No Business Like Show Business." (The ponderous production number that follows is much more predictable than appropriate.) Irving and Ethel were two of a kind, indefatigable troupers who simply never wanted to get off stage. Berlin’s last blaze of glory came in 1966, when Merman appeared on Broadway in a revival of Annie Get Your Gun, 20 years after the premiere. In 1955, neither of them could have guessed that the Broadway-centered world that had defined show business for both of them was on the verge of collapse.
The agent of this destruction was already at work. Down in Memphis, Tennessee, the first recordings of an unknown singer named Elvis Presley had just gone on sale. In 1956, Presley would be the hottest act in show business. In 1957, Hollywood would release the last of the great "Broadway" musicals, Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire and Les Girls with Gene Kelly.59 While Astaire was ready for retirement, Kelly must have expected to be working for another decade or more. But America no longer cared for Broadway elegance. Instead of watching the folks high up do the mean low down, she wanted to see the folks low down do the mean low down. Broadway’s, and Berlin’s, day was over. But it had been a great run.
AFTERWORDS
There are at least 34 CD collections devoted to Irving Berlin’s work listed on the Internet, and I haven’t heard them all. As always, Ella Fitzgerald is a safe place to start. A recent CD, "Irving Berlin in Hollywood," includes songs from many of the films described here, as well as a few outtakes.60
There are at least five "original cast" CDs for Annie Get Your Gun, including the original 1946 version with Ethel Merman (available in both budget and deluxe versions); the 1957 television version starring Mary Martin and John Raitt; the 1966 revival, which also starred Ethel Merman and which included Irving Berlin’s last song, "An Old-Fashioned Wedding"61 (written for the revival); a 1995 "Lincoln Center" operatic version (on two CDs) starring Judy Kaye and Barry Bostwick; and the 1999 revival starring Bernadette Peters. There are two recent "original cast" CDs for revivals of other Berlin shows, As Thousands Cheer (1933) and Call Me Madam (1950).
There is plenty of information about Berlin on the web, but I haven’t been able to find a site that pulls it all together, so you’ll have to do your own research. There are also numerous books about Berlin. As Thousands Cheer, by Laurence Bergreen, gives more detail than most readers will want. Irving Berlin, A Life in Song, by Philip Furia, is more manageable, although Furia never convinces me that he knows quite as much about popular songs as he thinks he does. If you want to play Irving Berlin, there is collected sheet music for his songs arranged for just about every instrument imaginable.
NOTES
41. For some reason, neither of these films is available on video.
42. As is well known, it was the first film shot in Vista-Vision.
43. Robert Alton, who directed all the production numbers for White Christmas (as well as those for the last Irving Berlin film, There’s No Business Like Show Business), also directed my favorite "all star" musical, Words and Music.
44. "Progressive" jazz was more or less what happened when white jazz musicians played bebop. The Swing Era came to a screeching halt with the end of World War II, but for a few brief years progressive big bands like Woody Herman’s (the best) and Stan Kenton’s (the most pretentious) enjoyed a considerable success. Girl singers influenced by this music, like Peggy Lee, Chris Connors, Anita O’Day, June Christy ("The Misty Miss Christy"), Blossom Dearie, and Clooney herself, were favorites of urban sophisticates during the fifties (What Sort of Man Reads Playboy?). Sid Caesar’s "Progress Hornsby" character was a not-too-intelligent satire on the progressive jazz scene.
45. Eight years as president made Eisenhower a partisan political figure, but in the years immediately following WW II the simple Kansas farm boy who broke the Nazis’ pride was an unquestioned national hero. Berlin wrote a number of songs about generals during this period, and he also wrote "I Like Ike," which was used as Eisenhower’s campaign song in 1952.
46. Trivia buffs may be interested to know that Barrie Chase is one of the dancers in White Christmas. She later enjoyed at least two hours of fame as Fred Astaire’s last partner in the two TV specials that Fred did in the late fifties as his farewell to dancing. Also appearing in a bit part (though not as a dancer) is Grady Sutton, one of W. C. Fields’s favorite sissies, and perhaps the most testosterone-challenged man in show business. Sutton had been in pictures for almost 30 years when he made White Christmas (he appeared in Harold Lloyd’s 1925 classic The Freshman) but had another 25 to go, calling it quits in 1979 with Rock and Roll High School.
47. Dailey was a hard-working song-and-dance man and actor who made it into big musicals just as the genre was falling apart. In 1970 he was still enough of a name to appear in a "Lucy" episode as "Himself."
48. O’Connor was a terrific song-and-dance man, best known for his role in Singing In the Rain. O’Connor must have been a worrier. At the same time he was appearing in big-budget musicals, he was knocking out a series of low-budget, black-and-white comedies, playing the sidekick of "Francis the Talking Mule."
49. Ray, an early fifties pop sensation, is often cited as a halfway point between Sinatra and Elvis. He had a huge hit with "Cry," which consisted largely of him sobbing. Ray’s fans are apparently all dead, because I’ve never read anything kind about him.
50. Gaynor was an excellent dancer who starred in many fifties musicals. Catch her in particular in Les Girls (1957), really the last of the great Hollywood musicals.
51. Cinemascope was the most exaggerated of all the giant-screen processes devised by Hollywood to crush the tube. Unfortunately, TNBLSB is only available on video in a pan ‘n’ scan format, so that almost half the screen is missing. In another and better world, TNBLSB will be available on letterbox DVD and we will all have big-ass widescreen TVs, so we can watch this shaggy monster in all its untrammeled glory.
52. O’Connor and Gaynor, both trained dancers, were a little too sleek and restrained to be garish. Johnnie Ray, on the other hand, was in a class by himself.
53. Later in the film, O’Connor and Gaynor do a parody of this number. Mitzi puts a wire wastebasket on her tush, whose bottom (the wastebasket’s, not hers) bears the legend "That’s All, Brother."
54. The other is the wonderful "I’ll See You in C-U-B-A," wonderfully sung by Bing Crosby and Olga San Juan in Blue Skies.
55. In the fifties, Paris was the capital of sex rather than attitude.
56. In an exceedingly welcome plot twist, Ray enters the priesthood shortly after this number, and sings only one more song, the dreadful "If You Believe." Ray could not act at all, which is probably why his role in the film is so limited.
57. Marilyn, of course, was not a dancer, but in the early days of her career she was quite willing to work hard to look good, and she moves confidently here in all her numbers.
58. "I’m working with some boys," she tells O’Connor. The boys are swarthy Caribbean types, but her comment doesn’t seem racist because she later kisses one of them on the mouth.
59. Of course, Hollywood has made films from dozens of Broadway shows since 1957. But they all lack the style and polish of Broadway’s great era.
60. For unrestrained Judy Garland fanatics, the CD has Judy singing "Anything You Can Do" with Howard Keel from Annie Get Your Gun. Garland, who was slated to star in the film version, recorded the entire soundtrack and then bailed.
61. Appropriately, "An Old-Fashioned Wedding" is a counterpoint song. In contrast to Berlin’s best two-parters, the two melodies are pretty bland when sung alone, but they fit together nicely. Not bad for a 78-year-old man!
October 2000 | Issue 30
Copyright © 2000 by Alan Vanneman
ALSO: More musicals
