A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC (1977)

(1977, Color) 124m. / Directed by Harold Prince / Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim / Screenplay by Hugh Wheeler / Starring Elizabeth Taylor, Diana Rigg, Len Cariou, Lesley-Anne Down, Hermione Gingold, Laurence Guittard, Christopher Guard, Lesley Dunlop, Chloe Franks

In 1955, Ingmar Bergman's comedy Smiles of a Summer Night gained him both his first international success, and his rise to prominence. Now, Bergman is widely regarded as one of the finest filmmakers of all time. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the worldwide embrace of the film helped to pave the way for the innovative Swedish director to gain the carte blanche to continue to create such further masterpieces as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander, Persona, and so many others. Though almost all his films are imbued with comic touches, Smiles of a Summer Night is Bergman’s only outright comedy, a bedroom farce laced with wit and style. A case could be made that his television film of Mozart's The Magic Flute would qualify, but it is equal parts opera and a filmed stage performance.

For their third collaboration as director and composer respectively, Harold Prince and Stephen Sondheim turned to the film as the inspiration for what would become A Little Night Music. Bergman's film would seem a natural source, in keeping with the sophistication they brought to Broadway in their previous efforts, Company and Follies. For the score, Sondheim decided to keep all the songs in waltz time (3/4) or variations thereof, and there is no percussion in the orchestra, in keeping with chamber orchestras of the early 20^th century.

The plot remains close to that of the film: In Sweden, in 1900, Fredrik Egerman, a middle-aged lawyer, takes his young, virginal second wife Anne to the theatre to see a play featuring a famous actress, Desiree Armfeldt, who had also been the lawyer’s mistress prior to his recent remarriage. When Anne learns of this affair, she flees home. Egerman rekindles the flirtation with Desiree. Complicating matters are the presence of Desiree’s current lover, a jealous Count, his spurned wife, and Fredrik’s young adult son, home from college, not to mention their bawdy maid, Petra, and Desiree’s young daughter Fredrika. A “Greek chorus” chamber quartet offers wry commentary through songs like “Remember?” and “The Sun Won’t Set.”

The original cast featured Len Cariou as Egerman, Glynis Johns (most well known as Mrs. Banks from Disney’s Mary Poppins), and Hermione Gingold as Desiree’s mother. The show premiered on February 25, 1973, and ran for 601 performances. It won the Tony Award for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (Hugh Wheeler), Best Actress in a Musical (Johns), Best Featured Actress in a Musical (Patricia Elliott), and Best Costume Design for a Musical (Florence Klotz). Boris Aronson and Tharon Musser were nominated for Scenic Design and Lighting, respectively, and Gingold lost the Tony to co-star Elliott. Len Cariou was nominated for Best Actor in a Musical, but lost to Ben Vereen that year’s Pippin, for which Bob Fosse won Best Director of a Musical.

Song List

Overture

Night Waltz

Now

Later

Soon

The Glamorous Life

Remember?

You Must Meet My Wife

Liaisons

In Praise of Women

Every Day a Little Death

A Weekend in the Country

The Sun Won’t Set

It Would Have Been Wonderful

Perpetual Anticipation

Send in the Clowns

The Miller’s Son

Finale

BLUE indicates Broadway songs removed for the film version, RED indicates songs altered considerably from their original form, GREEN indicates songs added specifically for the film version

Smiles of a Summer Night is such a perfect example of the bedroom farce that its most astonishing attribute is that it’s not French. A Little Night Music, onstage, is more a thoughtful rumination on its themes rather than a direct retelling of Bergman’s film. In musicalizing the film, Sondheim gets inside the characters’ heads and plays out their foibles and eccentricities in ways that only the theatre can get away with.

A prime example can be found the early musical triptych of “Now” (sung by Egerman), “Later” (sung by his son Henryk), and “Soon” (sung by the 18 year-old Anne). In Bergman, the entirety of the events enacted in this trio of songs (becoming a fugue in the last portion) takes less than a minute (the son is unhappy, Egerman suggests he and his wife take a nap before attending the theatre, and he accidentally whispers Desiree’s name as he’s falling asleep). In Sondheim, the same sequence is an exquisite musical montage that goes on for more than ten minutes.

This goes toward explaining why the film version of A Little Night Music feels supremely long and tedious. Every interior moment is procrastinated into song. Even jettisoning numbers like “The Miller’s Son,” “In Praise of Women,” and all of the Greek chorus numbers, the film runs nearly twenty minutes longer than the breezy Bergman original (yes, “breezy” and “Bergman” in the same sentence). Also gone (and largely absent from the stage play) are the small touches of peasant life that serve as a counterpoint to the middle and upper-class characters, leavening the farce with some well-placed satire.

Even more conspicuously absent is Sweden – the film has transplanted the action to Austria for some reason (it certainly isn’t for the scenery – the film is trapped almost entirely on some embarrassingly chintzy looking sets and a faded park). For good measure, Egerman’s son’s name has been changed from Henryk to Eryk.

If these alterations indicate a sea change, the entire enterprise is ultimately torpedoed as a result of the casting of the film’s Desiree, Elizabeth Taylor. The casting of a Movie Star in the role shifts the cast dynamic drastically, particularly since Prince seems unwilling or unable to incorporate Taylor into the ensemble nature of the rest of the cast; she remains a singular presence, akin to watching a production of A Chorus Line starring Ethel Merman. As a result of Taylor's status, the film is forced to begin with a lengthy discussion of her attributes, as Fredrika sings a newly rewritten version of “The Glamorous Life.” A Little Night Music now becomes about Desiree without justifying such a change.

Sondheim produces a minor masterpiece in the newly rewritten song, but it’s an unwise shift in focus away from the other characters so early on. Taylor also now barges her way into the one large number in which Desiree should be heard of and not seen, the film’s closest thing to cinema, “A Weekend in the Country.” What should be a galvanizing song seeing all the diverse cast converge on the Armfeldt family estate (invited or not) gets unnecessarily protracted by interruptive interludes positing Desiree’s stiffly delivered treatise on how to break up a marriage to the not-at-all-appalled Fredrika. One wonders if the oft-divorced Taylor had any special insight into this particular aspect of a famous actress scheming to shatter a family – but she’s above sharing such insights with the audience.

Of all the actors who acquit themselves admirably to this leaden affair, Rigg and Downs come off the most naturally, which makes sense in that they (Taylor aside) had had the most on-camera experience. Gingold, usually a vivacious presence onscreen (Gigi, The Music Man) is given little to do but spout portentous quotations at odd intervals, since she’s been robbed of her solo number, “Liaisons,” which would have stopped the movie even deader in its tracks, at any rate. It’s particularly painful to see her during the oddly abbreviated dinner sequence, in which characters arbitrarily bicker, shout at one another, and throw drinks, without the slightest awareness that their esteemed hostess is sitting at the table with them.

Which brings us to the most glaring omission the film version of A Little Night Music contains: gone is the central catalyst to the characters' loss of inhibitions as the night "smiles" upon the gathered guests. A toast made using the specially saved (and possibly magical) wine that Madame Armfeldt makes. The bottle is brought out, but Eryk (Henryk?) storms away from the table, and takes the camera with him, apparently.

The rest of the movie collapses upon itself distressingly, as director Prince fumbles through the rest of the plot points as carelessly as if he’s flipping through a deck of playing cards. The less that can be said of Taylor’s particular rendition of “Send in the Clowns,” the musical’s big breakout hit and Sondheim’s most famous song, the better. Taylor acquits herself better in the slight duet "You Must Meet My Wife," earlier on, but the later portions of the score are a bit beyond her range. To be fair, though, everyone involved should have been aware that this would be the case, as nobody has ever considered Taylor a musical performer.

Cariou, in the leading role, is a fine singer and actor, but he's done no favors by leaden dialogue, stiff-looking costumes, a romantically disinclined leading lady, and the fact that his character spends a good deal more time reacting to events than he does instigating them. 

Prince shoulders the primary responsibility for the film's inertia, although the source material itself (the musical, not the Bergman film) consistently proves resistant to adaptation. Upon examination, the musical A Little Night Music is less a faithful retelling of the Bergman film than it is a deconstruction of it -- as mentioned earlier in considering "Now / Later / Soon", the musical numbers are generally introspective examinations of moments, rather than narratively propulsive songs. This is why "A Weekend in the Country" seems so much more dynamic -- it is about an action that is happening, rather than something recounted or an emotion experienced. 

The very theatrical nature of Sondheim's scores frequently present these sorts of dilemmas for film. To take a more recent example, similar narrative problems pop up in the film adaptation of Into the Woods (2014), most strikingly in "The Steps of the Palace," where a few awkward changes of past-to-present tense in the lyric does less to alleviate the song's ruminative nature than it does to turn the scene (Cinderella fleeing the ball) into a moment of a character inexplicably narrating her own actions.

Is A Little Night Music worth seeking out? If you are already a Sondheim fan, then probably, if only for the opportunity to see the rarely staged musical. Or a Sondheim musical itself -- America's premier Broadway composer has remained consistently difficult to adapt for film, and A Little Night Music unfortunately represents a glaring example of why this is the case. Most of the remaining music is performed well, especially Downs and Riggs in their duet "Every Day A Little Death." The print circulating now on DVD appears to be taken from the same ½” video master used to create the Magnetic Video release in the 1980s, and is a dreary, faded affair that only exacerbates the colorless art direction and lackadaisical cinematography. 

Of more interest is Prince's oddball black comedy Something For Everyone (1970), but good luck finding a copy of that anywhere.

DREAMGIRLS (2006)

Originally published August 3, 2007

(Colour, 2006) 130m. / Directed by Bill Condon / Music by Henry Krieger, Lyrics by Tom Eyen / Starring Jamie Foxx, Beyonce Knowles, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Hudson, Danny Glover, Anika Noni Rose (DreamWorks / Paramount)

The musical that eventually became Dreamgirls began its existence as a vehicle for Nell Carter, who had earlier appeared in The Dirtiest Show In Town for writer Tom Eyen and composer Henry Krieger.  In 1978, a workshop was held for the Public Theatre’s Joseph Papp, and Carter was joined by Sheryl Lee Ralph and Loretta Devine, but ultimately Carter became unavailable when she joined the cast of the daytime drama Ryan’s Hope.  The project became renewed with the interest of Michael Bennett, who saw in the show a perfect vehicle for his film-like direction and choreography.  The history of Bennett’s involvement with the show and its subsequent workshops and drastic re-workings through to the triumphant opening night are well documented, and would take up too much space to recount here with any accuracy.  Gospel singer Jennifer Holliday  was eventually persuaded to take on the role of Effie (after the part was expanded to suit her), and the show opened on December 20, 1981.

For Dreamgirls, Michael Bennett engineered the show to utilize his trademark fluid staging and the almost intuitive-seeming choreography of his earlier work (most especially evident in Follies, Company, and A Chorus Line) and here Bennett created a truly near-cinematic experience.  Massive moving light scaffolds onstage were incorporated into the choreography, enabling scene changes and, in one case, a full costume change in mid-scene, to mirror the effects of fade-outs, camera moves and cuts.  The evening was almost entirely through-sung, and Bennett’s dynamic staging kept the show in constant motion, only stopping for intermission.

In its initial run, Dreamgirls ran 1,521 performances and scored a whopping 13 Tony nominations, taking home wins for Best Book (Tom Eyen), Best Actor (Ben Harney), Best Actress (Jennifer Holliday), Best Featured Actor (Cleavant Derricks), Best Lighting Design (Tharon Musser) and Best Choreography (Michael Bennett and Michael Peters).  The 1981 season was also the year of another choreographer/visionary, and Tommy Tune’s production of Maury Yeston’s Nine, a musical based loosely on Federico Fellini’s 8 ½, ran away with the awards for Best Musical, Best Score and Best Director, among others.  Other musicals in the running for the major awards of note that year were  Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and the flops The First (with a book by film critic Joel Siegel) and the abortive 14th century-set rock opera Marlowe.

In both its stage and screen incarnations, Dreamgirls is the story of the rise of the girl group The Dreamettes, led by the outspoken Effie White (Holliday), backed by the beautiful Deena Jones (Sheryl Lee Ralph) and their friend Lorrell (Loretta Devine).  After losing the amateur night contest at the Apollo Theatre due to the machinations of Cadillac salesman Curtis Taylor, Jr. (Harney), the girls get their big break singing backup for soul singer James “Thunder” Early (Derricks).  The show tracks the rise of the girls as they break off to become a solo act and, due to Taylor’s desire to “cross over” onto the mainstream pop charts, force Effie to cede the microphone to Deena.  After a tumultuous scene which culminates in the rafter-rattling declaration “I Am Telling You I’m Not Going,” Effie leaves the group, now called The Dreams, and the second half of the show follows the leads as they pursue their own dreams of career and relationships.

Song List:

I’m Looking for Something, Baby

Goin’ Downtown
Takin’ the Long Way Home
Move (You’re Steppin’ on My Heart)
Fake Your Way to the Top
Cadillac Car
Big*
Steppin’ to the Bad Side
Steppin’ to the Bad Side
Party, Party
Love You I Do**
I Want You, Baby
Family
Dreamgirls
Press Conference
Heavy
Walkin’ Down the Strip
It’s All Over
And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going
Dreams Medley
I Am Changing
Vogue Sequence
When I First Saw You
Patience***
Ain’t No Party
Perfect World**
I Meant You No Harm
The Rap
I Miss You, Old Friend
One Night Only
One Night Only (Disco Version)
Listen****
I’m Somebody
Hard to Say Good-Bye
Dreamgirls (Reprise)

*The intro recitative and opening lines of “Cadillac Car” have been reduced to a jazzy background instrumental.

** Lyrics by Siedah Garrett

***Lyrics by Willie Reale

**** Additional music by Scott Cutler & Beyonce Knowles, and lyrics by Anne Preven

BLUE indicates Broadway songs removed for the film version; RED indicates songs altered considerably from their original form; GREEN indicates songs added specifically for the film version.

The long-gestating film version of Dreamgirls finally started to become a reality in the wake of the popular and critical success of the film version of Chicago (2002).  Producer David Geffen, who had been involved with the original Bennett production (and who historically has received the brunt of the criticism for producing the savagely-cut original cast recording), was reportedly holding out the go-ahead for the film until he found the right vision for capitalizing on the show’s possibilities.  There had also been long-circulating rumors that Diana Ross, who rose to fame as the lead singer of The Supremes and was supposedly angered at the parallels between her story and that of the musical, was using her considerable influence to ensure that Dreamgirls would never reach the screen.

Geffen found his creative voice in the screenwriter of Chicago, Bill Condon, who had also directed the respected and moderate successes Gods & Monsters and Kinsey.  A name-brand cast of prominent actors was quickly lined up, with Jamie Foxx as shifty Cadillac dealer-turned-manager Curtis Taylor, Jr., former Destiny’s Child singer/aspiring actress Beyonce Knowles as Deena, Tony-winning actress Anika Noni Rose as Lorrell, Eddie Murphy as James “Thunder” Early and Danny Glover as his long-suffering manager/friend Marty.  A much-ballyhooed talent search went underway to find the “perfect” Effie White, a search that finally ended when the most commercially-obvious choice was made.  The part went to Jennifer Hudson, who had achieved popularity (if not the prize) on television’s insanely over-watched celebration of musical mediocrity, “American Idol.”

Dreamgirls was well-received critically, and was a moderate box office success, but was hardly the breakout hit that many industry insiders had predicted.  The film received eight Academy Award nominations:  Supporting Actor (Murphy), Supporting Actress (Hudson), Best Costumes, Best Art Direction, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Song nominations for “Listen,” “Patience,” and “Love You I Do.”  But the film walked away with only one win, for Hudson.  Despite some talk of a backlash against the film and its hard-hitting Oscar voting campaign, the general consensus (even including Condon, according to comments he made to The New York Times) was that the film got what it deserved.  Many believed that Murphy, who had seemed a sure thing going into the awards, sabotaged his own campaign by allowing his upcoming release Norbit (featuring the actor in grotesque drag) to be heavily promoted during the voting period.  In the end, Dreamgirls, which had been eagerly awaited by theatre lovers for over twenty years, played in cinemas and was quickly relegated to home video.

To anyone who has experienced the stage version, Dreamgirls offers a number of difficult challenges to adaptation, and perhaps no film version save one involving all of the original talents combined could have come close to recapturing that same experience on film.  Unfortunately, at the time the show was packing the aisles every night, the American movie musical was truly on the skids, having suffered a string of high-profile disasters in the wake of the phenomenon that was Grease.  Eager studios, hoping to cash in on what they hoped would be a wave, instantly crippled the genre with disco duds and theatrical misconceptions like The Wiz, Grease 2, Stayin’ Alive and Xanadu.  Not that these films are without merit, but their failure at the box office could hardly have been misread.  

After Chicago scored with both movie audiences and critics, however, the hunt was on for the next big-budget class act musical, and Dreamgirls would, on paper, look to be a most obvious candidate.  Particularly attractive to producers still uneasy about how a true musical (with spontaneous integrated singing and dancing in a non-performance setting) might be perceived by modern audiences is Dreamgirls’ mostly stage-bound story.  With every character existing either onstage or backstage, there seemed little risk in “opening up” certain aspects and keeping the musical moments strictly tied to realistic performances by the characters.  Hence, the Dreamgirls finally got their shot at the big screen.

Condon’s Dreamgirls hits major snags right out of the starting gate (not including the error of allowing the treacly DreamWorks logo music to open the film instead of the show’s distinctive cowbell).  The stage show opens with the “legendary talent contest” at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, and our three heroines are late because they have missed a train from Chicago.  For the film, we are at the fictional Detroit Theater (in, one assumes, Detroit), and the girls are late because Deena couldn’t sneak out until her mother fell asleep.  This renders Effie’s complaint about being tired not only completely nonsensical, but also plays into the Deena-centric version of the story the film is going to run with for the next two hours.  Which also raises another point:  on stage, Effie’s diva-like behavior and huge personality dominated the show, even though she remains off stage for a good portion of the second act.  In the film, when Effie is off-screen, she is forgotten.  

With the introduction of Marty (Glover) chasing the fleeing backup singers for “Thunder” Early (Murphy), the film tosses out the first of the musical score’s through-running recitatives and musical dialogues, all of which offer a counterpoint to concurrently performing “on-stage” moments.  Here Condon lays out the track he intends to follow for this adaptation – rather than offering us the “wall of sound” approach of the stage play, where all of the musical moments overlapped and fed into each other, Condon will stop the music and drop in straight dialogue scenes as exposition for what even on stage seemed a bit hackneyed and clichéd.  

This approach to Dreamgirls leaves the film wide open to the two very valid criticisms leveled against it:  (1) this is not a new story (see the vibrant, low-budget Sparkle, for one example of how this tale’s been told before) and (2) these songs in no way approach the authentic style and resonance of their true-life Motown counterpoints.  What made these scenes and songs work onstage was not the quality of the music (which is fine), but the energy and flow of the performances, which hardly stopped except for a handful of dialogue moments.  Condon threatens to echo the fatal errors of Sir Richard Attenborough’s depressingly misguided adaptation of another Michael Bennett triumph, A Chorus Line, which also relegated musical moments to the background in order to “flesh out” the most obvious and least interesting bits of dramatic action.

This decision also introduces new flaws into the musical as a whole, in that Condon has now denied a musical voice to a major character, that of Curtis (Foxx).  Reducing him to a purely speaking presence obliterates anything remotely appealing about a character who exists only to cause conflict between Effie and Deena, and also makes for an awkward moment late in the film when he must (because there’s nobody else who can) inexplicably sing “When I First Saw You.”  The opening lines of “Cadillac Car,” and what makes the number a galvanizing experience, are boiled down into tedious banter, and the number’s big laugh, the co-opting of the song by a white bubblegum pop group, comes across as an afterthought.

With Knowles the top-billed actress in the cast, Condon is forced to unwisely shift the focus (especially during the flaccid second half of the movie) toward Deena, and the film attempts to ennoble her character in order to make her more sympathetic to the audience.  Ironically, this robs Knowles of the chance to create a more interesting (i.e., flawed) character, and spoils what is arguably her finest performance to date by letting her run away with the film just when the audience’s focus should be entirely on Effie’s plight.

These are just a few examples of why the film never truly takes flight.  Murphy delivers a strong and moving performance as Early, but his musical through-line of predestined tragedy has been removed, along with the haunting “Show biz… that’s just show biz” refrain that runs through the Broadway score.  Rose, an outstanding performer who won a Tony for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her work in Caroline, Or Change, is robbed her big emotional moment, the pay-off to her unfulfilled relationship with Early (and a guaranteed show-stopper) “Ain’t No Party,” and all she’s left with the hollow single refrain from the song:  “Lorrell and Jimmy are through.”  Hudson, the film’s newcomer, earned media attention for her powerhouse vocals as Effie, no big surprise to anyone who had seen her television performances.  But Hudson never truly inhabits the character, and when she is left adrift in speaking scenes, the lack of direction given to her acting performance (of which this is one of her first) is impossible to ignore.

It is here that I want to digress a bit to discuss a trend that's been emergent in movie musicals post-Chicago. In adapting Kander and Ebb's retelling of the Roxie Hart story, the decision was made to confine all the musical numbers to a stage environment, whether actual (the nightclub of the opening sequence) or imagined, as various characters imagine the songs as part of their own respective star turns. Having musical numbers that expressly take place inside a character's imagination is hardly a new innovation (a notable early example of this is the sprawling "Broadway Melody" sequence of 1952's Singin' in the Rain). Ken Russell's film of Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend makes extensive use of the device, giving us reinterpretations of what's being performed in the ramshackle titular production through the points of view of many of the performers, as well as a Hollywood movie director in the audience.

In these earlier instances, this was being used for narrative novelty, providing added variety and production value to numbers and to justify unusually expansive staging beyond the parameters of the established scene. Nowadays (to borrow an expression from Chicago), this sort of storytelling gymnastics is being used to underline a more troubling trend, which marks the emergence of what I like to call "the apologist musical."

The apologist musical sprang into existence as a result of nervous studio executives, clinging valiantly to the poor box office returns for The Wiz, Xanadu, et al. as an example that audiences "can't relate" to musicals any more, and find them "unrealistic" or stupid. They still want to make money off these properties, but hopefully without too much singing. Musicals like Dreamgirls and Les Miserables have made tons of money worldwide on their stage productions, and feature films offer the sweet promise of having that bankable show run forever with the same peerless cast-- all the studio has to do is reissue it again in every new media format that appears, but only if they can figure out a way to make them more realistic.

This concept, as mind-boggling as it is, explains the guiding force behind the decision to reduce Dreamgirls to a drama with some songs in it. It ignores the fact that what makes a show a hit is its ability to create its own world, with its own rules, including music that may or may not seem to come out of nowhere. Watching a musical tie itself into knots to justify the very existence of a song can be a tortuous experience, while a genuine musical embraces its own nature -- that's why nobody questions the validity of, say, something like South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut's "Mountain Town" opening number.

Which is all by way of saying that all of the omissions and hollow dialogue replacements are symptomatic of Dreamgirls being reduced to an apologist musical.  Once again, we are faced with a musical embarrassed of its own nature, awkwardly couching its musical moments into some sort of "realism" and cowering from the suggestion of any inner life.

The carefully orchestrated musical tapestry of the show has been cut away, leaving only a string of songs which can do nothing except reveal how sub-par they are to any audience inherently familiar with the true Motown sound.  The irrelevant “Patience,” a song devised to soften up Deena’s character even more, seems like something that might have been tuned in from the theatre next door, rather than anything relating to what should be the story of a girl group of the 1960s or 1970s.

This makes it sound as if there’s nothing to appreciate, musically, in the score for Dreamgirls, which is anything but the case.  The score is run through and through with the appropriated rhythms and beats of the sounds of the era, and several numbers (“Steppin’ to the Bad Side,” “I Am Changing,” “Hard to Say Good-Bye” and “One Night Only”) are exceptional in the way they serve as the characters’ performance songs and simultaneously comment on the action.  The songs are all fine Broadway songs, but no one will ever mistake them for anything the Supremes ever recorded.  This is why the score suffers without its supporting musical context; as a whole the show is a musical fable, and the film literalizes the score to a dangerous degree.

In the end, Dreamgirls is a serviceable film, with admirable talents involved in translating the story to the screen.  What it is not, however, is a great film musical.  In skirting the trappings of the genre and playing to perceived notions of what an audience will or will not accept from a musical, the movie fails to bring what was best about the show to life.  There is one moment, though, early in the “Fake Your Way to the Top” number, that hints at what the film could have been.  Early bangs out the intro to the song on a piano as the Dreamettes gather around to learn what they are going to have to perform.  As they’re rehearsing, the camera swings around them and suddenly they are on-stage, in front of the cheering crowd, performing.  It is a magical moment, serving the song and the story.  The scene then dissolves into a montage sequence of the girls on the road with Early, and we’re back to traditional film language again… but oh, for that moment, there were no apologies necessary.

Notes on a Matinee: MAMMA MIA! (2008)

(2008, Colour) 108 m. / Directed by Philida Lloyd / Screenplay by Catherine Johnson / Music & Lyrics by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus (some songs by Stig Anderson) / Starring Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard, Julie Walters, Dominic Cooper, Amanda Seyfried, Christine Baranski (Universal)

Originally published July 18, 2008, revised May 15, 2013

Riding the wave of nostalgia generated by the re-release of Swedish supergroup ABBA’s song catalogue in the mid 1990s and following the success of such ABBA-laced Australian films Muriel’s Wedding and The Adventures of Priscilla Queen of the Desert, it was perhaps inevitable that someone would stage an ABBA musical. Mamma Mia! debuted to overwhelming success in London in 1999.  

Despite critical notices ranging from dismal to bemused, the show became an instant phenomenon in its native United Kingdom, a success that was repeated on Broadway and touring the U.S., then worldwide.  So, of course, we needed a film version.

The plot is a tourism-minded retread of Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell (1968): as her wedding day approaches, a young girl (Seyfried) raised on a Greek isle by her mother (Streep),learns that her father is one of three men (Brosnan, Firth or Skarsgård) her mother once dated, and Seyfried invites all three of them to her wedding to discover the Truth.

As a stage show, Mamma Mia! was at times alarmingly amateurish, its slight, sitcom-level book essentially stringing together an evening’s worth of ABBA songs and choreography so unspectacular as to seem thoroughly improvised.  What it had going for it was boundless energy and blind commitment to a story so outrageous that a single well-asked question would easily topple the entire enterprise ("Hey, mom, who is my dad?").

Lloyd makes her filmmaking debut here after having helmed several iterations of the stage production, and the relentless banality of her theatrical staging has not been compromised by the addition of a top-flight cast and crew and cameras. 

Happily, the cast’s exuberance carries the day in most of the numbers, though when left handling scenes involving anything attempting to advance the nonsensical plot, Lloyd’s camera seems as embarrassed by what's going on as the performers having to mug through the witless dialogue. 

The choreography of the stage show has been regrettably maintained as well, and what barely passed as "dancing" onstage sees the larger chorus numbers translated to a level of arrhythmic cavorting not seen on a big screen since the ill-fated Lost Horizon (1973). An unfortunate over-reliance on digital skies matted into certain shots also makes portions of the film come off looking as cheap as an Asylum SyFy movie.

Camera work overall is listless and grounded; the camera never sweeps into the numbers with the effortless expertise of, say, 2007’s much better Hairspray.

On the other hand, the cast is almost entirely up for the enterprise, and their commitment to the material ultimately makes the film much easier to watch.  While the singing voices range from surprisingly sweet (Seyfried) to the other side of passable (Brosnan), it’s great to see those with stage training (Streep, Firth and Baranski) applying some actual acting to the songs. 

A note of warning to potential viewers of Mamma Mia!:  if you don’t like ABBA now, this movie will not change that opinion.

GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (1953)

Originally published November 30, 2006

(1953, Colour) 97m. / Directed By Howard Hawks / Music by Jule Styne, Lyrics by Leo Robin / additional songs by Hoagy Carmichael & Harold Adamson / Starring Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Charles Coburn, Elliott Reed, Tommy Noonan (Twentieth Century-Fox)

Anita Loos was known primarily as a writer of silent films when she wrote Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a comic novel in 1926. The novel was a best-seller, and proved so popular that Loose and her husband John Emerson adapted it into a play, a Broadway hit in 1927, followed by a less successful silent film in 1928.  

The musical version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, with a buoyant score by Jule Styne and lyrics by Leo Robin, opened on Broadway on December 8, 1949, and ran for 740 performances. Most notably, the show made an overnight star out of the actress playing Lorelei Lee-- Carol Channing.

But that Broadway season belonged entirely to South Pacific, so there were no Tony Awards to spare for the show. Channing would finally get a nomination for her version of the character when the show was revived in 1974, though she lost the award to Virginia Capers in Raisin. The revival, retitled Lorelei (with several new songs by Styne), also added bookend sequences with an older Lorelei reflecting on her past.

The novel, play, silent movie and musical were all set in the 1920’s, and concerned themselves with the misadventures of friends brunette Dorothy Shaw and zany blonde Lorelei Lee as they traveled to Paris aboard the ocean liner Ile de France. Along the way, Lee gets involved with button magnate Gus Esmond, while Shaw finds herself falling for wealthy fellow traveller Henry Spofford.

Song List:

It's High Time

Bye, Bye Baby

Bye, Bye Baby (Reprise)

A Little Girl From Little Rock / Two Little Girls From Little Rock*
Anyone Here For Love?**
I Love What I'm Doing
Just a Kiss Apart
It's Delightful Down in Chile
Sunshine
In The Champ de Mars
Sunshine (Reprise)

I'm A'tingle, I'm A'glow
House on Rittenhouse Square
You Say You Care
Act One Finaletto
Bye, Bye Baby (Reprise)
Mamie is Mimi
Coquette
When Love Goes Wrong**

Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend

You Say You Care (Reprise)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
Homesick Blues
Keeping Cool with Coolidge
Button Up With Esmond
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Reprise)

Bye, Bye Baby (Reprise)

*This number was a solo for Lorelei Lee in the stage version; for the film, the lyrics were altered slightly to serve as a duet for Dorothy & Lorelei, which opens the film, and ends with a chorus of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” under the titles.

**Written for the film by Hoagy Carmichael & Harold Adamson.

BLUE indicates Broadway songs removed for the film version; RED indicates songs altered considerably from their original form; GREEN indicates songs added specifically for the film version.

As you can see from the list above's abundance of blue, almost all of the musical’s score went unused for the film version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. It’s a text book case of Hollywood’s standard approach to the Broadway musical into the 1950’s: take a pre-sold property, keep what the public likes most, and change the rest. This is why quite a few landmark Broadway shows have film versions that bear only a passing resemblance to what they were on stage (1956’s Anything Goes, retooled as a bland vehicle for Bing Crosby, is a particularly egregious example).

Fox acquired the rights to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, jettisoned all of the score except the most well-known numbers, and brought in Hoagy Carmichael and Harold Adamson to “juice up” the score with a couple of songs that could play on the Hit Parade on radio and spur record sales. Only “Bye Bye Baby” (and its first reprise), “A Little Girl From Little Rock” (now a duet, so “Two Little Girls From Little Rock”), and the show’s signature hit “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” remain in the score. Carmichael and Adamson provided a new solo for Russell’s Dorothy, “Anyone Here For Love?” and a jazzy duet for the girls, “When Love Goes Wrong.” While these numbers have nothing to do with the plot, they do aid in the most startling adaptation choice of the film.

That big change was the decision to update the story to contemporary times and abandon the 1920s setting. This probably had more to do with budgetary concerns than anything else, since as a rule period films are by their nature more expensive to produce. 

Surprisingly, the change has almost no effect on the story, and works fine for the retained songs, especially since Styne’s score isn’t tied to that era musically, unlike, say, Sandy Wilson’s pastiche score for The Boy Friend (1954). Also, whereas Dorothy snags wealthy playboy Henry Spofford in the stage version, for the film Mr. Spofford is played (hilariously) by child actor George “Foghorn” Winslow. Dorothy’s paramour for the film is private investigator Ernie Malone (Elliott Reid). Otherwise, the story remains focused on Lorelei’s attraction to diamonds and her misadventures involving the hapless Sir Frances “Piggy” Beekman (Charles Coburn) and the missing diamond tiara belonging to Lady Beekman (stalwart character actress Norma Varden, perhaps best known as Frau Schmidt in The Sound Of Music-- her career includes parts in dozens of films, including Strangers On A Train, Casablanca and National Velvet).

It’s impossible to discuss Gentlemen Prefer Blondes without discussing Marilyn Monroe, who finds her most appealing starring role in this film. In spite of the impression Carol Channing made in her star-making turn on Broadway, Monroe’s scintillating performance of “Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend” has become iconic. Still on the rise at this point, she’s second-billed behind Jane Russell, who by this time had earned notoriety as the pinup girl discovered by Howard Hughes.  

But it is Monroe who is at the center of the film, and it is her blithe and commanding performance as the smarter-than-you’d-think Lorelei that makes the movie what it is, and continues to draw audiences to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. For once, Monroe inhabits a character who is never at the mercy of the men surrounding her. Though Gus Esmond may threaten to call off their engagement, neither Lorelei nor we the audience thinks he has a chance in upsetting her plans. In fact, the only help she needs comes from Dorothy, who manages to restore the missing diamond tiara to its rightful owner when it appears stolen.  

Credit must also go to Russell, too, for sharing the spotlight with Monroe when she could very easily have insisted on making Dorothy more prominent. It’s easy to see why a friendship blossomed there in real life; when they are on screen together, it’s hard not to feel as if we’re being let in on the great time they seem to be having.

The steady hand of director Howard Hawks is not to be dismissed, either. Known primarily as a director of more male-driven films, it’s easy to forget what terrific comic performances he had already coaxed from actresses like Barbara Stanwyk (Ball of Fire), Rosalind Russell (His Girl Friday) and Katherine Hepburn (Bringing Up Baby).