The band wagon 1953 - Last of the great Hollywood musicals

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IMDB Rating: 7,6

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Main Cast: Fred Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabray, Jack Buchanan

"Made towards the end of MGM producer Arthur Freed's peak period of musical productions, at a time when movies, theater, and other forms of entertainment were all feeling the heat from the rise of television, preeminent musical director Vincente Minnelli's backstage story celebrates the musical itself and its brand of pop entertainment. Pitting Fred Astaire's washed-up movie hoofer against Jack Buchanan's high-falutin' artiste and Cyd Charisse's transplanted ballerina, The Band Wagon reflexively pokes fun at the musical's excesses and delves into the question of what an audience really wants, implicitly defending traditional forms of entertainment at a time when Hollywood was in decline and consumers were turning to new form of recreation. As with Freed's Singin' in the Rain (1952), the sophisticated comedy of show business manners becomes a showcase for the Freed Unit's sparkling production values and musical acumen, as well as Minnelli's stylistic virtuosity. While numbers such as Astaire's 42nd street dance 'Shine on Your Shoes' and Astaire's and Charisse's 'Dancing in the Dark' reveal Minnelli's mastery at integrating dance and story, the final 'Band Wagon' revue is a peerless sequence of pure musical entertainment, with 'The Girl Hunt' deftly mixing the high and low arts of ballet and jazz in a parody of Mickey Spillane's detective yarns. Though not one of Minnelli's Oscar winners, The Band Wagon has come to be considered his best musical, and a wise elegy to the form." - www.allmovie.com

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Singin' in the rain 1952 - One of the greatest Hollywood musicals ever made

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IMDB rating: 8,4

Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Main Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Cyd Charisse

"Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain is usually lumped together with the other MGM "songbook" musicals of its era, An American In Paris and The Band Wagon. In contrast to those two outstanding works of music and motion, however, Singin' In The Rain had an additional layer of importance and appeal as one of Hollywood's relatively rare feature films about itself. The Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown songbook is on one level the center of the movie, but it's also a backdrop for a humorous and delightfully stylized look back at the crisis that engulfed the movie mecca and its inhabitants once synchronized sound came to films. The musical was made in 1952, only 25 years after the beginning of the series of events depicted and satirized in the script, so recent in time that there were still plenty of old studio hands (including sound department head Douglas Shearer) who had firsthand memories of the actual events.The film is full of delightful in-jokes about its subject and the people who lived through the era: Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont is a burlesque of silent-movie sex symbol Clara Bow, whose decidedly urban style of diction never really fit her image or what the public wanted, while Millard Mitchell's R.F. Simpson was a gently jocular satire of Freed himself, who could never quite visualize the elaborate musical numbers whose scripts and budgets he was approving as producer. Donald O'Connor's Cosmo Brown was an onscreen stand-in for men like Franz Waxman and dozens of other musicians, who moved from writing arrangements or conducting the major theater orchestras to heading the music departments of the studios. The resulting musical, in addition to offering a brace of memorable songs and performances (with a startlingly sultry featured spot for Cyd Charisse in the "Broadway Melody" sequence, as a bonus), gave audiences a short-course pop-history lesson about how the movies learned to talk, sing, and dance." - www.allmovie.com

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