The Bandwagon(1953)

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Famous musical movie star Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) fears his career may be on the skids, but his friends, Lester (Oscar Levant) and Lily (Nanette Fabray), have written a Broadway vehicle to kick-start his professional life. Tony is ecstatic -- until egotistical director Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan) joins the project and casts ballerina Gaby Gerard (Cyd Charisse) as the leading lady. Tony's second chance seems to be fading, but he may get more than he bargained for as the show goes on. -WWW

Initial release: 1 January 1953 (USA)

Director: Vincente Minnelli

Costume design: Mary Ann Nyberg

Music composed by: Arthur Schwartz, Howard Dietz, Alexander Courage, Conrad Salinger

THE BANDWAGON is one of my favourite musicals of all time.  I've always loved the songs and choreographies since I was very young, but after watching this again, even if I still love the songs and musical numbers, including the dancing, I realised that a lot of scenes are quite outrageous.  Thankfully, I don't really mind at all.

If this was set today, the transitions of the New York scenes in their performances for that city were plausible, but considering when this was shown, live performances with those kind of transitions were quite improbable, outlandish, and outrageous.  If one was watching a movie, which we were, but not the audience of the production, the scenes were very plausible, but they were supposed to be watching a live show.

Nowadays some of the scenes could be fixed by technology, but even so, the transitions wouldn't as smooth as they showed in this movie.  Sometimes the transitions could cause nausea because of all the rotations, but maybe they were trying to insinuate that the stage was revolving, but the props were too heavy, etc.  I know this was a Broadway Musical of the same title so it is possible to perform it live, but...

Anyways, thankfully this is NOT a thinker's movie.  It's supposed to be something enjoyable, and it surely was.  It still is.

One more thing, the dance numbers could be considered soft porn, but they were done so beautifully that nobody noticed... or did they?  Well, I think it's a Cyd Charisse trademark, or am I wrong?  There were people who called her dance with Gene Kelly in another movie, erotic, so I guess some people did notice it.  The poster alone is provocative, the lyrics of some of the songs are bizarre(including THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT), and let's face it, in their own little way, they were actually selling sex.

At least when people said for the sake of art before, it really was for the sake of art.

This movie has received a lot of accolades and is definitely a classic.

By the way, Cyd and Fred are twenty-three years apart, so there were a lot of dialogues pointing this out.

I think the crowd enjoyed their banters...their repartee etc. 

Anyways, may I just emphasise that mom and I really enjoy watching this again and again and again.

It surely isn't a waste of time to do so.

;-)




Main characters(Wikipedia):

• Fred Astaire as Tony Hunter
• Cyd Charisse as Gabrielle Gerard
• Oscar Levant as Lester Marton
• Nanette Fabray as Lily Marton
• Jack Buchanan as Jeffrey Cordova
• James Mitchell as Paul Byrd
• Emory Parnell as Man on Train (uncredited)
• Ava Gardner as herself (cameo)