The best thing about Royal Wedding is Fred Astaire, still spry at 52, but one of the worst things is the choreography by Nick Castle, which is mostly gimmicky in an attempt to cover up Astaire's aging: Astaire dances with a coat rack, on the ceiling and on a rolling boat going across the Atlantic so Astaire as Tom Bowen can dance with his sister Ellen Bowen (Jane Powell) in a show in London during the 1947 celebration of the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh. This is perhaps an attempt to remind us of Astaire's original dance partner, his sister Adele, who retired from the stage in 1932 to marry a lord. Of course this means that Tom has to have a romance with Anne Ashmond (Sarah Churchhill), who can dance a little, and Ellen has a romance with Lord Brindale (Peter Lawford), who apparently can only dance a bit of ballroom; this eliminates the sexual tension that was one of the reasons for the effectiveness of the Astaire relationship with Ginger Rogers in the 30's.
Not only does one miss the Hermes Pan choreograpy of Astaire's films with Ginger Rogers, one also misses the lovely black-and-white cinematography of those films; the garish color of Royal Wedding is another distraction from Astaire's dancing. That Astaire's co-star Jane Powell is thirty years younger than Astaire doesn't bother me as much as her limited dancing ability and her Jeanette-MacDonald- operetta style of singing, though Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner's songs are hardly the equal of those by the Gershwins and Irving Berlin in the Astaire/Rogers RKO films.
Alan Jay Lerner also wrote the unamusing screenplay for this first directorial effort of Stanley Donen, after Donen co-directed On the Town with Gene Kelly in 1948. I have to admit that I have never been a big fan of the dancing in the Donen and Kelly films, where athleticism is more important than subtlety and grace.
No comments:
Post a Comment