Bob Fosse – The Magnificent 60s

You probably haven’t heard of Judy Holliday. She had just broken through with an Oscar for Born Yesterday (1951) when her career hit the rocks after facing accusations of Communist sympathy in the HUAC trials early in that decade. That was the high point of her career and she only made six other movies. The Bells Are Ringing was the last and she died prematurely a few years later.

Holliday was odds-on to play on film the part she had originated on Broadway, and won the Tony for Best Actress (Musical). The musical ran for over two years on Broadway clocking up 924 performances. It was a class act, involving composer Jule Styne (Funny Girl, 1968), lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green (Singin’ in the Rain, 1952) and choreographers Jerome Robbins (West Side Story, 1961) and Bob Fosse (Sweet Charity, 1967).

Movie audiences would have heard about the musical and especially if they hadn’t been able to reach Broadway would have salivating at the prospect. Dean Martin (Bandolero, 1968) at that point in his career had lost the top-billing he’d enjoyed as part of the Martin-Lewis comedy partnership and the Rat Pack was yet to make its screen debut, so he was far from the main attraction. If this film was going to work, it depended on Holliday’s performance.

This was also a bit of a swansong for director Vincente Minelli (Gigi, 1958) and he’d only make one more musical, spending the rest of the 1960s knee deep in heavyweight dramas like The Sandpiper (1964). Minelli was a fresh pair of eyes for the musical as he hadn’t been involved in the Broadway show, but he doesn’t do much tinkering with the original set-up. About the only criticism you could make was that it doesn’t break out of the stage settings.

Like many musical confections of the period, the story is lightweight. Ella (Judy Holliday) works in a telephone answering service but becomes too attached to her clients, in particular struggling playwright Jeffrey (Dean Martin). She wants to help clients achieve their dreams.

A couple of subplots get in the way of a happy ending. A vice cop, Inspector Barnes (Dort Clark), is convinced the operation is a front for an escort service. The cop doesn’t spot the actual illegal activity taking place on the premises when music distribution boss J. Otto Prantz (Eddie Foy Jr.), romancing business owner Sue (Jean Stapleton), sets up a gambling racket.

There’s a further complication because Jeffrey thinks the person who answers his phone is 60 years old, so Ella has to use an assumed name to get close to him. But these complexities are of a light, frothy, comedic nature and luckily the star excels in just those departments.

To succeed, a musical needs more than hummable songs, it requires a star. As it happens, the star, if male – as proven by Yul Brynner in The King and I (1956), Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady (1964) and Lee Marvin in Paint Your Wagon (1969) – doesn’t have to even have a good voice or even be able to sing at all (they can talk their way through their songs).

But the voice of the female equivalent has to capture an audience, even if it’s not her own voice and her singing is dubbed. One of the joys of having the Broadway star in your film is the guarantee that she’s using her own voice, she can’t possibly be dubbed on a stage show, and if her voice took a theater by storm it’s going to electrify a cinema.

Judy Holliday has such a voice. But she also has terrific comedic skills. She’s an impressionistic par excellence, inventing voices to go with the characters her clients think they’re conversing with, and she’s wonderful with physical comedy, the flailing of arms and butting of heads. We’re not in Pink Panther territory, but we’re not far off, and director Minnelli has the sense not to over-egg the pudding. There’s a wonderful scene in a restaurant where the climax is her dress catching fire. We see the flames just starting to appear around her derriere. But then we cut to her sneaking into her apartment, hiding the damage.

The songs are terrific. The lyrics work both as interior monologue and identifying dilemma. I’m not sure the score has survived so well as some of Styne’s other musicals, but I found the music very appealing.

The plot works, there’s a happy ending, and the whole effort results in an endearing confection. You won’t go away thinking Dean Martin was going to resuscitate his career but you will wonder why Holliday, even in her brief lifetime, never made more movies.

An unexpected delight.

Never mind Bob Fosse’s debut, this was unusual for a number of reasons: a hilarious meet-cute, a raft of one-liners and being based on Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria (1957). So it could easily have been remembered mostly as a quiz question. But with Fosse at the helm it was a lot more than the sum of those particular parts and introduced a new-style director whose verve, choreography, stylistic flourishes and adult subject matter had wowed Broadway audiences.

Star Shirley MacLaine (Gambit, 1966) adds another layer to her trademark portfolio of losers in love. Hope Valentine Charity (MacLaine) is overly optimistic given her circumstances, robbed of her savings by her fiancé, nearly drowning in the process, the prospects of her switching from a career as a dance hall hostess severely limited by her lack of formal education and basic office skills.

So it’s just as well that she lands millionaire Vittorio (Ricardo Montalban) and might have enjoyed an indulgent romantic interlude had their evening not been interrupted by his wife Ursula (Barbara Bouchet), Charity condemned to spend a humiliating night hiding in the closet.

A chance meeting with the claustrophobic Oscar (John McMartin), doom-laden and intensely shy, appears to lead to unlikely redemption. Her presence cures him of a bunch of neuroses and marriage is on the cards until reality raises its ugly head, and the movie ends on a surprisingly negative note for a musical.

A dance hall hostess – taxi dancer in the parlance because she is hired by the half hour – is equivalent to the modern laptop dancer except that there is no nudity involved. On the other hand, there is none of the hands-off policy exercised in such contemporary operations, and men buying her time believe that she should accommodate their straying hands. So it’s somewhat unexpected that her colleagues remain so good-tempered and backstage is presented as a bitching-free zone, some accepting their reality, others, like Charity, inclined to the fantasy that a Prince Charming will rescue them.

In terms of song quality it’s not in The Sound of Music (1965) league, boasting only two numbers – “Hey Big Spender” and “If My Friends Could See Me Now” – that you were likely leave the cinema humming. And it certainly suffers by MacLaine not having the voice of a Julie Andrews or Barbra Streisand, or the dance skills of Gwen Verdon who originated the part on Broadway, but otherwise she invests the character with enough believability and exudes charm by the bucketload. She has to be applauded for taking on such a gritty role in the first place.

Of course, the movie belongs to the director, the embryonic Fosse, who brings a new look to the movie musical, from the bored dancers draped in unexpected physical shapes during “Hey Big Spender” to the finger-snapping, angled choreography and the celebration of the seedy, the opposite of the glossier Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loew vehicles. A few years later, further acceptance of permissiveness would allow him to explore such worlds in more realistic depth, check out Cabaret (1972) and All That Jazz (1979).

There’s a great turn from Sammy Davis Jr (Ocean’s Eleven, 1960) as a snake-hipped hippie preacher, his appearance somewhat out of place though offering contemporary comment, Oscar taking Charity to this literally underground service because he belongs to a Church-of-the-Month Club.

There’s a goodly number of laughs courtesy of the original Neil Simon book for the musical and the meet-cute of the couple trapped in an elevator is very funny.

John McMartin, in a rare movie leading role, is good as the hapless romantic, Ricardo Montalban (Sol Madrid, 1968) as his opposite, and there’s sterling support from Stubby Kaye (Cat Ballou, 1965), Barbara Bouchet (In Harm’s Way, 1965) and Chita Rivera in her debut.

It was probably too much to ask that this hit the ground running, what with Hollywood in financial meltdown in part as a result of budgetary excesses like this (it cost $10 million), a movie that never quite extended a grip on the roadshow audiences necessary to turn it into a hit, a star lacking an exceptional voice, and a storyline that appeared to alienate musical lovers. Most people who viewed it on initial general release saw a heavily truncated version.

It stands up much better today, mostly thanks to Fosse’s direction, but also due to the sleazy background, and it has to be said, setting aside any vocal deficiencies, this is one of Shirley MacLaine’s best performances.

Of course, I saw it at its best, on the big screen at the Widescreen Weekend in Bradford, so I might be slightly biased, but it does have genuine vigor and a refreshing originality.

Tag: Bob Fosse

The Bells Are Ringing (1960) ****

Sweet Charity (1969) **** – Seen at the Cinema