ON THE TOWN
MGM, 1949 | COLOR (TECHNICOLOR), 98 MINUTES
DIRECTORS AND CHOREOGRAPHERS: STANLEY DONEN AND GENE KELLY PRODUCER: ARTHUR FREED SCREENPLAY: BETTY COMDEN AND ADOLPH GREEN, BASED ON THEIR MUSICAL PLAY SONGS: LEONARD BERNSTEIN (MUSIC), ROGER EDENS (MUSIC), AND BETTY COMDEN AND ADOLPH GREEN (LYRICS) STARRING: GENE KELLY (GABEY), FRANK SINATRA (CHIP), BETTY GARRETT (BRUNHILDE “HILDY” ESTERHAZY), ANN MILLER (CLAIRE HUDDESON), JULES MUNSHIN (OZZIE), VERA-ELLEN (IVY SMITH), FLORENCE BATES (MADAME DILYOVSKA), ALICE PEARCE (LUCY SHMEELER), GEORGE MEADER (PROFESSOR)
Three sailors find love during a hectic twenty-four-hour leave in Manhattan.
Exuberant and significant and joyful, On the Town forms a dynamic bridge between two eras of moviemaking. The older-style studio-bound musicals, with their backstage plots, choruses, and specialty artists had been successful for a long time. In On the Town, the genre began to explore different, often innovative ways: shooting outside the studio, less formulaic scripts, allowing dance to propel the plot instead of diverting from it. There had, of course, been all sorts of predecessors, and it must be said that On the Town occasionally carries a whiff of older styles. Nevertheless, it remains a true groundbreaker, a dazzling tour of New York which seldom flags and never disappoints. This is all fortunate, since On the Town is also a blatant example of a time-dishonored movie trope: a hit show making it onto film with nearly all its original songs replaced by new ones that aren’t as memorable. This change was made at the behest of producer Arthur Freed, who disliked the original Leonard Bernstein songs and thought them too complex for movie audiences. Only three were retained, plus some ballet music, and in came new songs with music by MGM’s Roger Edens and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Vera-Ellen, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett
Gene Kelly (with Vera-Ellen)
Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, directing their first film, wanted to follow the new postwar trend toward location shooting and do the entire picture in New York. This was judged technically and financially impossible, so as a compromise they shot the indoor scenes in California, then the exteriors in New York. It wasn’t, as has been claimed, the first movie musical filmed on location, since musicals had been doing that since 1929. It was, however, the first one to make extensive use of New York locations. Between crowd control, cloud control, and music playback, the Manhattan/Brooklyn shoot was a logistical nightmare, and in the finished film (notably around Rockefeller Center) eager flocks of civilian spectators can be glimpsed standing behind studio barricades.
“Prehistoric Man”: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Betty Garrett
“On the Town”: Betty Garrett, Frank Sinatra, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen, Gene Kelly
“New York, New York”: Frank Sinatra, Jules Munshin, Gene Kelly
It’s not simply the use of real locations that gives On the Town its special zip. Whether or not Donen and Kelly were deliberately trying to take the musical in a different direction, their instincts constantly led them down new paths. Contrast their work with the previous Kelly/Sinatra sailor movie, Anchors Aweigh (1945). Although a massive hit that nabbed Kelly an Oscar nomination, it was conventional and studio-bound, its only innovation being Kelly’s famous cartoon dance with Jerry the Mouse. On the Town, by contrast, starts hot and keeps going. Few previous musical sequences matched the open-air exuberance of “New York, New York,” with its rapid pace and quick cutting and constant forward momentum, and Kelly’s “A Day in New York” ballet with Vera-Ellen sums up a romance as astutely as the “Alter Ego” number in Cover Girl had depicted Kelly’s conflicted thoughts. In a lesser film, the pairing-off scenes with Munshin, Miller, Sinatra, and Garrett would seem merely ordinary. Here, there’s that propulsive energy once again: these sailors have only twenty-four hours, and we feel their urgency to do as much as they can in as little time as possible. It also helps that the cast is so likable, even with Sinatra (still in the early phase of his movie career) as a wallflower instead of a swinger. And thank heaven for Alice Pearce, as hysterically funny here as she would be in later years on TV’s Bewitched, and even oddly touching.
Far from being representative of the original play, On the Town is virtually a new work, or at least a reimagined one. It’s also, with its imagination and endless high spirits, a genuine delight.
“A Day in New York” ballet: Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen in a scene cut from the final version
WHAT’S MORE
Although his career was in decline by 1949, Frank Sinatra still had quite a large, and sometimes vociferous, fan base. Fearing possible riots, MGM did its best to keep secret the fact that he would be doing a short scene in Little Italy, but word leaked out anyway. It was all the NYPD could do to keep thousands of devotees at bay long enough for Sinatra to do his scene, then run to a patrol car and speed away.
The gigantic Tyrannosaurus rex in the “Prehistoric Man” number was an entirely made-at-Metro creation, fabricated out of corrugated paper and meticulously wired so that it could be reassembled, after its climactic collapse, to permit retakes. As it worked out, the first take was the charm, and Rex did not need to be put together again.
“You Can Count on Me”: Alice Pearce, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Gene Kelly, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin
MUSICALLY SPEAKING
“New York, New York,” the best-known song from both the show and the film, required toning down for the big screen. Instead of “a helluva town,” it became merely a “wonderful” one. (Perhaps coincidentally, Wonderful Town became the title of the next hit show written by Bernstein, Comden, and Green.) The censors also had a problem, in “Prehistoric Man,” with the word “libido.” While Ann Miller was not permitted to say or sing the word, the argument could certainly be made that she was able to dance about it!