As for Donen's relatively personal musicals, Royal Wedding and Give a Girl a Break are peculiarly somber affairs with only intermittent flashes of inspiration. --Andrew Sarris
One of the reasons why I prefer Donen's more personal musicals -- i.e, the ones he did not co-direct with Gene Kelley, who co-directed On the Town and Singing in the Rain -- is because I am not particularly charmed by Kelley's overbearing dancing. Give a Girl a Break has at least one dance that is particularly beautiful, as Marge and Gower Champion dance on rooftops to "It Happens Every Time" by Burton Lane and Ira Gershwin. The other dances and dancers in the film, especially Bob Fosse (who did his own choreography) and Debbie Reynolds, have some lovely dancing somewhat burdened by Fosse's hat and some bizarre special effects.
Susan thought that Give a Girl a Break was claustrophobic and nightmarish and to a certain extent I agree with her: this is a "musical comedy" without much comedy and I don't think Eric Blore would have helped. The theatre where a musical is being staged and the small apartments where dancers live are cut off, just as the dancers are, from the outside world, as the women competing for a part in the musical -- Debbie Reynolds, Marge Champion, Helen Wood -- spend all their time studying for auditions and depend of the support of the men in their lives. This intriguing musical is a vivid combination of surreal fantasy images and a somewhat dreary realism.
No comments:
Post a Comment