(Anthem Art and Culture), by Gary Morris (Editor), Bert Cardullo (Introduction), Jonathan Rosenbaum (Foreword). London and New York: Anthem Press, 2009.
— David Hudson, IFC.com
The script for The Barkleys of Broadway was written by quintessential Broadway babes Betty Comden and Adolph Green, for whom show business was not just everything, but the only thing.
3 Working on a story originally intended
for Fred and Judy, they came up with a near sequel of Easter Parade — the
happy couple ten years after, with Fred still acting as a bit of a Svengali4 for
his protégé. They also seem to have filched a page from Kiss
Me Kate, then very big on Broadway, portraying the leads as a husband-and-wife
song-and-dance team who shine when they're on-stage but snap and snarl when they're
off.
When the number's over we learn that Fred and Ginger are Josh and Dinah Barkley, the toast of Broadway, wowing the crowd at the opening night of their latest smash, with a score from their favorite composer, Ezra Miller (Levant). They seem to be walking on air, but as soon as the applause dies they're at it like dogs and cats, Fred taking all the credit and Ginger wishing she could prove herself on her own. And, at an elegant after-theatre party, Ginger meets an elegant Gallic snake-in-the-grass, "Jacques François" (Jacques Pierre Barredout), who's got just the apple she's been looking for, the lead in his new play, based on the life of the young Sarah Bernhardt.8
There are times when the plot of The Barkleys of Broadway achieves lift-off but it never stays airborne for long. Although Comden and Green's script is drenched in Broadway and show biz attitude, it's too tame for real laughs. Presenting Fred and Ginger as real theatrical egomaniacs would be entertaining, but, as Richard Nixon liked to say, "it would be wrong." Ginger wouldn't really cheat on Fred, would she? Fred wouldn't really jump into bed with those cheap southern floozies the script keeps tossing his way, would he? Comedy, as Aristotle liked to say, shows us people who are worse than we are — vainer, shallower, more selfish, and more lecherous — and there's no way that Fred and Ginger would let themselves stoop so low.
"My One and Only Highland Fling," a Scottish dialect bit, finds both Fred and Ginger in kilts and gives Ira Gershwin his only real opportunity to demonstrate his way with a rhyme. Ginger is awfully cute in this one.
The Barkleys of Broadway is part of a five-film Fred & Ginger set, finally letting us see Top Hat, Follow
the Fleet, Swing Time, and Shall We Dance? in digital restoration. Unless you're totally compulsive (like me), they look great, and even I will confess that the Silver Sandal (the nightclub in Swing Time) looks fantastic. In addition, the sound is much better than ever before. Unfortunately, we'll have to wait until next year for Flying Down to Rio, The Gay Divorcee, and Roberta.12 I've written reviews for all these films for Bright Lights, here.
The Barkleys did not do well at the box office, and reports from the set suggest that neither Fred nor Ginger found the reunion invigorating. Unsurprisingly, they never worked together again. Ginger mostly worked in black-and-white films after The Barkleys, while Fred continued in glossy color musicals. By 1953, Ginger was playing over-the-hill actresses, in Forever Female and Black Widow. She retired from pictures in 1957, the same year Fred stopped making musicals, though she came back for a few "mature" roles in the early sixties. 1957 was a bit of a watershed year in American culture — the year Hollywood gave up trying to hold onto the mass audience that was flowing to television, and the year that rock and roll overwhelmed popular music.13
1. Levant had a remarkable career in the thirties, forties, and fifties, as a Broadway wit and man about town, a sardonic Sardi's habitué who spent a great deal of time publicly bemoaning the fact that he had abandoned a career as a "great" concert pianist in pursuit of cheap popularity. He had a popular TV talk show in the early fifties, broadcast live, which came to an abrupt end when, remarking on Marilyn Monroe's conversion to Judaism prior to marrying Arthur Miller, he said that "now that Marilyn's kosher Arthur can eat her."
2. It's hard to believe that Ginger felt sentimental about appearing with Fred again. Although she worked steadily in pictures through the forties, and well into the fifties, none of her films after Kitty Foyle had much buzz. Still, in 1945 she was the highest-paid actor in Hollywood, with earnings of almost $300,000.
3. I've never understood the Thomistic distinction propounded by Coach Lombardi. What are we talking here, denumerable versus non-denumerable infinities, the absolute versus the manifold, natura naturans versus natura naturata? No wonder I never made the cut at Notre Dame!
4. Svengali, referred to in the film, is a bit recherché for anyone under seventy. Back in 1931, John Barrymore played the lead in Svengali, based on George Du Maurier's once-famous novel Trilby, using hypnosis to turn Marian Marsh into a great singer. I recall James Thurber writing a bit about how one of his family's maids became hypnotized while watching the film and for a while the Thurbers thought they would have to hire Barrymore to dress up as Svengali and un-hypnotize her. Trilby has been the source of close to a dozen films, starting in 1896 (not a typo). In 1983 Peter O'Toole and Jodie Foster starred in a version made for television.
5. Warren wrote the music for both 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933 (when Ginger sang "We're in the Money" in pig Latin, right).
6. According to John Mueller in Astaire Dancing, Freed compounded the offense by inviting Gershwin, but not Warren, to lunch with the big shots during the shoot.
7. And an additional "Bravo!" for the idiot restorers who, when putting this film on DVD, didn't bother to give us the opener with the credits stripped out. Instead, they fill out the disc with a sappy "Making of The Barkleys of Broadway" documentary that, naturally, tells us virtually nothing about what really took place when the film was being shot.
8. With Ginger replacing Judy, the role seems almost too much of a fit. Not only did Ginger want to leave Fred and musicals for straight dramatic roles back in the thirties, but in the forties she began to show a tendency to "work young." In The Major and the Minor (1942), she plays a young woman trying to pass herself off as a twelve-year-old so that she can get a reduced price on a train fare. Four years later in Heartbeat she played "Arlette Lafron," an eighteen-year-old escapee from a French reform school. Comden and Green might have reworked François's masterpiece to make it more accommodating for an actress in her late thirties.
9. This strange shtick was possibly inspired by the scene in Casablanca where the Frenchies express their patriotic hatred of the Nazis by singing "La Marseillaise." The film helped make the song a symbol of European resistance to Hitler Germany.
10. Harry Warren couldn't have been happy about this, but there's no denying that the score could stand some punching up.
11. Also, as Mueller points out, she holds her torso quite stiffly and, unsurprisingly, can't do the sort of back bends she did in their earlier films.
12. Also Carefree and The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.
13. Fred's last musical, Silk Stockings, contains the seriously awkward "The Ritz Rock and Roll," the last number he ever performed.
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