The Band Wagon (1953)

 

The Band Wagon may be a backstage musical about the creation of a Broadway show called The Band Wagon, but it’s really a showcase for the professionals who worked for MGM’s musical division. The film stars Fred Astaire as Tony Hunter, a “washed-up” star once known for his dancing on stage and screen. (It must have been odd for Astaire, then already in his 50s, to take on this role given its implications.) His friends, Lester and Lily Marton (played with style by Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray), have a written a new show to revive his career and even lined up one of the hottest producers/directors/actors in New York to produce it. However, this pretentious hotshot, Jeffrey Cordova (Jack Buchanan), wants to transform what was designed as a light romantic comedy into a heavy-handed, metaphorical adaptation of Faust. They choose a co-star, a talented young ballerina named Gabrielle Gerard (the amazing Cyd Charisse), setting up an inevitable clash between the classical style of dance Gaby performs and the song-and-dance style of hoofing to which Astaire’s Hunter is accustomed. Of course, this just means that Tony and Gaby will inevitably fall in love; it’s just that this plays out against the development of a musical seemingly destined to fail, given how it just keeps getting larger and stranger and more monstrous in scope under Cordova’s direction. The initial tryout in New Haven is, naturally, a disaster. Hunter then takes over the direction of the show, and we get to see a series of production numbers that make it into the final version that appears on Broadway. To be honest, as wonderful as these performances are, they make absolutely no sense together in a single show: the very stylized “New Sun in the Sky” with Charisse and several male dancers; the more traditional tuxedo-and-tails number “I Guess I’ll Have to Change my Plan” performed by Astaire and Buchanan; a country-inflected “Louisiana Hayride” with Fabray and some quite talented singers and dancers; and one of the most famous numbers from the film, “Triplets,” with Astaire, Fabray, and Buchanan as infants. By the time the show has made it through Philadelphia, Boston, Washington, and Baltimore, another number has been finalized, the 12-minute “Girl Hunt Ballet: A Murder Mystery in Jazz,” based upon hard boiled crime novels like the ones by Mickey Spillane. The length of this number was perhaps designed as a way to capture the “magic” of the ballet that ended the Oscar-winning An American in Paris from two years earlier. The dancing and the singing throughout the film are certainly top-notch, with Charisse and Astaire evenly matched in their numbers together, and the songs (although many are from previous shows) were well-chosen to comment effectively on the action of the film. The MGM unit under producer Arthur Freed did add one new song that has certainly become a standard, “That’s Entertainment,” which gets a huge delightful production number of its own early in the film and a touching reprise at the end. The Band Wagon represents some of the best of what the so-called Freed Unit accomplished: great dancing, wonderful singing, astounding production numbers, and a great deal of fun.

Oscar Nominations: Best Story and Screenplay, Best Color Costume Design, and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture