The picture’s finale, a reprise of “Strictly U.S.A.” (it is first sung at the clambake before Gene’s solo), was the only piece in the film that held no relevance to the story and bore no uniquely cinematic qualities. The routine ranks as the most bizarre ending of any Freed production. Apparently, the writers on the picture met for a number of fruitless sessions to discuss ways to conclude the film. Finally, Roger Edens wrote a new verse for “Strictly U.S.A.” to serve as a slapdash finish. The finale shows Shirley, K. C., Dennis, and Eddie dressed in red, white, and blue, all presumably having joined forces as a vaudeville team (what became of Goldberg is anyone’s guess). The scene is odd not only because the new stanza describes modern America in a film taking place roughly between 1909 and 1912 but also because the lyrics have the actors referring to each other by their real names:
Sinatra gets Garrett and Kelly gets Williams,
for that’s the plot the authors wrote . . .
Like a Ford or a Chevrolet,
like potato chips or comic strips, it’s strictly U.S.A.58
Betty Comden and Adolph Green were not responsible for those verses, but nonetheless, they were not proud of their work on the picture. “That’s one we’d like to forget,” Comden later stated.59 Shooting wrapped for Take Me out to the Ball Game in late September of 1948. The movie may have failed to find an ideal balance between story and song, but Freed saw that what saved the picture were Gene and Donen’s choreographic contributions and Comden and Green’s clever lyrics. As a reward, the producer announced his plans to give the duo a solo directorial project with Comden and Green as screen/songwriters.
On March 9, 1949, Gene and Donen saw their first (uncredited) effort as directors premiere at New York’s Loew’s State Theatre. Take Me out to the Ball Game received few accolades except in the area of dance and music. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times bemoaned the film’s “plotted humor” as “bush-league stuff” and claimed it “lacked consistency and style.” Only during the musical sequences did he feel that Frank and Gene were “on firm ground.”60 He singled out Berkeley’s only major contribution to the film, the first version of “Strictly U.S.A,” for the highest praise. Other critics aside from the almighty Crowther agreed that the musical numbers trumped any other aspect of the picture. Given that Gene’s and Berkeley’s individual contributions received praise, it appeared that both men’s styles still had their place in film. Berkeley’s biographer Jeffrey Spivak elaborated that Berkeley was not outdated in “the moviegoing public’s opinion. . . . Kelly got his chance to show what he could do (with Stanley Donen) . . . in [Take Me out to the Ball Game] . . . and he did an excellent job. Different from Berkeley? Yes. Better? No.”61
Take Me out to the Ball Game was an audience pleaser, yielding $4,344,000 at the box office. In response to the observation that his recent films had been popular rather than critical sensations, Arthur Freed remarked, “I think a critic too often rests on his own tastes and appetites. . . . It is mass tastes that determine our culture, and whether the culture is a good one or a bad one is not the issue. What counts is that it’s there.”62
Mass taste, it seemed, indicated that Eddie O’Brien in Take Me out to the Ball Game was the type of role in which audiences wanted to see Gene. Here was the Gene Kelly from For Me and My Gal and Anchors Aweigh—the Everyman, brash, all-American style.
Because the larger-than-life image he projected in front of the camera was so conspicuous, audiences identified Gene as the intense but essentially lightweight character they saw onscreen rather than the cerebral Renaissance man he really was. His grandson, Ben Novick, enumerated his other talents aside from singing, dancing, acting, and choreographing: “He liked fine art and could speak foreign languages and could speak with you very intelligently.”63 However, from his beginnings as a dance instructor in Pennsylvania, what Gene cherished most was the concentrated, intellectually demanding work he completed behind the scenes.
Gene held a unique place in the film industry; at this juncture, he was the only actor who was also choreographing, directing, and writing. He embodied everything MGM, but particularly the Freed Unit, sought to accomplish in pictures. He maintained a can-do attitude before and behind the camera, appealed to both mass and aesthete audiences, Democrats and Republicans, Americans and foreigners. As 1948 turned to 1949, Gene emerged as the undisputed leader of the Freed Unit—a highly creative group that had now earned the reputation of MGM’s royal family.
13
You Can Count on Me
“We made better pictures than that, but that was the apex of our talent. That was it,” Gene remarked. “I think [it was] maybe my biggest contribution to the film musical.”1 What picture did Gene grant such an honorific position? On the Town.
Few films evoke as much excitement in their first minutes. From the instant three sailors rush from their ship and announce in song, “New York, New York, it’s a wonderful town!” the picture’s momentum does not wane for a moment. On the Town, based on Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s Broadway hit of World War II, took on new life in the hands of Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, and the Arthur Freed Unit. The film could not have gone into production at a more opportune time. Indeed, the Freed Unit and MGM as a whole were enjoying an unparalleled renaissance.
“MGM studio in the year 1949 was the most glamorous, most glorious place in the motion picture industry,” Debbie Reynolds recollected.2 In the course of that year, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers reunited after a decade in The Barkleys of Broadway, Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban sang “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in Neptune’s Daughter, and Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn starred in one of their most successful collaborations, Adam’s Rib. Additionally, 1949 marked the triumphant return of Vincente Minnelli as one of the studio’s top directors through his artful rendering of Gustav Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.
MGM’s boost in creativity was in part triggered by the emerging medium of television. With more Americans living in the suburbs, home entertainment held vast appeal for men and women exhausted after an eight-hour workday. From 1946 to 1949, the number of television set owners skyrocketed from 44,000 to 4.2 million. However, the small, grainy black-and-white screens and static live programs could not compare to the Technicolor, exciting locales, special effects, and impeccable scoring of motion pictures. Yet television, like film, could evolve. Thus, studios continually increased their efforts to give audiences novel and vibrant products. On the Town promised to be both. “I really believed it would be a masterpiece because I set out to make it so,” Gene commented in 1993.3
Gene had been hoping to bring On the Town to the screen since he himself was a sailor. While in the navy, he had phoned Arthur Freed about his wish and the producer “said that MGM [already] owned the rights to the play. I told him I wanted to make it as soon as I got out of the service.”4 It is easy to see why Gene, with his passion for ballet, so loved the show. The 1944 production was inspired by a ballet produced in spring of the same year entitled Fancy Free with choreography by Jerome Robbins and a score by Leonard Bernstein. Comden and Green’s comedic two-act play married ballet, hoofing, and American musical comedy into a cohesive whole—something Gene hoped to retain and perfect in his film adaptation.
Louis B. Mayer and other MGM executives did not share Gene’s enthusiasm for the project; rather, they had a case of buyers’ remorse. Gene gave an idea for the reasons behind the executives’, particularly Mayer’s, regrets: “Here was this play set in New York City with . . . chorus people representing blacks and Japanese and whites and Hispanics. . . . I found out later that Louis B. Mayer had gone to see it and didn’t like the melting-pot idea. . . . All these people touching and dancing with each other.”5 Mayer also disliked the suggestive content of many of the songs, especially “Come Up to My Place” and “I Can Cook, Too.” Distasteful as well to Mayer was the use of helluva in the play’s opening—and most famous—number, “New York, New York, It’s a Helluva Town.”
Nonetheless, F
reed told Gene and Donen to forge ahead. Because On the Town was decidedly a Gene Kelly picture, Comden and Green knew that their primary task in adapting the play for the screen was to make his character, Gabey, more prominent in both musical and nonmusical scenes. In the stage show, another sailor, Ozzie (portrayed by Adolph Green himself), far overshadowed Gabey. Betty Comden noted that “with Gene as the leading character . . . he couldn’t be a helpless, naïve type.”6
Though Gene approved of the shift in character emphasis, he argued that more of Bernstein’s score should be kept. But Freed considered the music too avant-garde and claimed it included nothing that resembled a hit. The producer also felt the stage show had “been done in a campy manner, which he felt would be offensive to movie audiences.”7 Camp, even when executed with wit (as evidenced in Gene and Vincente Minnelli’s The Pirate), might have impressed highbrow critics, but it failed to click with average American moviegoers.
Gene may not have had his way when it came to the score, but he proved influential in the process of adapting the new music and altered script for the screen. Adolph Green explained, “If they [Gene and Donen] were going to change a number . . . then of course there’d have to be a different lead-in to the scene. We had to stay very close in touch on those things. . . . We were . . . fortunate to have a guy [at MGM] as ambitious as Gene, who had real feelings about the dance and the movies.” Stanley Donen, as Gene’s co-director, rivaled Gene in ambition as well as, in Green’s words, “taste and intelligence and feeling for show business.”8
On the Town had to embody all of these characteristics, for its success or failure would determine the futures of Comden and Green as lyricists and writers in Hollywood and of Gene and Donen as directors and choreographers. In spite of the high pressure surrounding the film, Comden and Green fondly termed it a “comfortable” experience. After all, two of their closest friends were directing it and were in the same boat, so to speak, as the writers. “We knew we all understood each other. . . . We put things in the script that might have puzzled a lot of other directors, but knowing us as well as they did, they knew exactly what we wanted. . . . They knew our kind of humor, our craziness,” Comden recalled.9
Comden and Green felt lucky to be members of the Freed Unit, which by 1949 was firmly established as an exclusive club that rarely had “creative exchange” with other MGM writers. Betsy Blair described the Freed Unit as a world unto itself. In her estimation, the insidious blacklist had taken a “blithe confidence” away from Hollywood that was “never to reemerge.”10 Yet the Freed Unit had remained virtually untouched.
“One day in particular comes back to me. Nothing extraordinary happened. . . . Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Stanley Donen, and Roger Edens were arriving [at the Kelly home] to work with Gene. Bertha, the housekeeper, provided orange juice and coffee and tea,” Betsy reminisced. “Adolph, as always was irrepressible. There were jokes and laughter. They went into the study to work. . . . As I left they were all in the living room with Roger at the piano. . . . I walked to Santa Monica Boulevard. . . . As I waited [for a trolley] in the sun, I had a moment of that special bliss. I’d just left a perfect place, where talented people that I loved were doing great work. . . . Gene was wildly successful and at the height of his creative life.”11
By 1949, the adventures and misadventures of amorous sailors on leave had been the basis of countless motion pictures. Even Gene claimed that with On the Town, he and his colleagues “took a lot of the clichés” from previous movies. Why, then, was On the Town, in the words of film writer John Cutts, unequalled in its “invention and ingenuity”? The answer lay not only in its execution but in its warm, honest characterizations. Cutts explained that the picture “was about people rather than puppets. It proved Kelly and Donen could work wonders with a tired old formula and [add to it] an abundance of ideas.”12
The picture follows three carefree sailors, Gabey, Chip, and Ozzie, on their twenty-four-hour leave in New York City. When the boys ride on a subway, Gabey sees a poster featuring Ivy, the winner of that month’s “Miss Turnstiles” contest. Immediately, he makes it his goal to find the girl before his leave is over. During his and his friends’ search, bashful Chip meets a man-crazy female cab driver, Hildy, and Ozzie meets Claire (a role originated on Broadway by Betty Comden) at the Museum of Anthropological History. She explains she’s studying anthropology to get her mind off men. “Dr. Kinsey, I presume,” Hildy quips when introduced to Claire. In the museum, Ozzie accidentally knocks over a reconstructed dinosaur skeleton and has to dodge the police in increasingly zany ways (including hanging off the side of the Empire State Building) for the remainder of his leave.
Meanwhile, Gabey finds Ivy at a dance studio and makes a date to meet her atop the Empire State Building. During their date, Ivy slips out of one of the many nightclubs she attends with Gabey and his friends to fulfill her duties as a “cooch dancer” on Coney Island. Noting how depressed Gabey is over Ivy’s disappearance, Hildy asks her homely, sneezy roommate, Lucy Schmeeler, to act as his blind date. Lucy asks Gabey over a drink: “Have you seen The Lost Weekend?” “I feel like I’m living it,” he mutters.
After saying good-bye to Lucy, the group discovers Ivy’s whereabouts and heads to Coney Island, eluding a speeding police car all the way. The law catches them at the precise moment Gabey sees Ivy performing her cooch dance. Mortified, she explains that she has to do such work to pay for dance lessons. Hildy and Claire then make a rousing speech to the police and the crowd that has gathered, declaring that it is a citizen’s duty to see that boys in uniform enjoy themselves in New York. The police sergeant, overcome with emotion, convinces the crowd to take up a collection to pay the sailors’ fine. Their leave now over, the boys rush to their ship, but not before they kiss their girls good-bye.
With the script complete, next came the casting of the film. As Gene’s two sailor pals were Jules Munshin (as Ozzie, who, in the altered screenplay, took on the part of the clumsy comic relief) and Frank Sinatra, reprising his customary girl-shy screen persona as Chip. Freed had been so pleased with the onscreen chemistry between Frank, Gene, and Jules in Take Me out to the Ball Game that he was eager to see them together again in On the Town.
The picture also found Frank Sinatra reunited with Betty Garrett, who filled the romantically aggressive role of Hildy. “The rehearsal periods were a joyous period in my life,” Betty recalled. She did, however, note that Frank was far moodier, even with her, on the set of On the Town than Take Me out to the Ball Game. “We [on the set] thought nothing of hugging each other, pinching, or even giving a friendly pat on the behind, until one day when we were shooting . . . and I tried it with Frank. ‘Don’t do that,’ he said to me very sharply. ‘Gees, what’s the matter with him?’ I thought. ‘Don’t you know?’ Gene asked. Frank was upset because he was wearing ‘symmetricals,’ which was padding that he had to use in the rear.”13
Frank’s displeasure with his part went beyond alterations to his physical appearance. For the first time in any film in which he costarred with Gene, he received second billing. Because he felt he was being “outshone by Kelly,” he was “just along for the ride” throughout filming. Freed’s assistant, Lela Simone, called Frank’s sullen behavior on the set “atrocious.”14
Vera-Ellen, cast as Ivy Smith, could not have had a more different demeanor than Frank. Her cheerfulness was enough to impress even the moody Frank, who said of her: “God, she’s so lovely and so sweet.”15 Despite Gene’s attempt to change Vera-Ellen into a sultry dancer in Words and Music, she was again the image of wholesomeness in On the Town. Leggy tap dancer Ann Miller was chosen to portray Claire.
With the cast in place, Freed then “turned them [Donen and Gene] loose on On the Town.” Freed recognized that Gene thought more like a director than an actor; therefore, choosing Gene to take charge of the picture “was no haphazard thing. . . . The picture will show Gene and Stan have contributed something really fresh.”16 One novel device was how the film showed the
passing of time. At scene transitions, a digital reading of a clock scrolls across the screen, much like the headlines one might see on the side of a building in Times Square. Most innovative was Gene and Donen’s idea that the film’s opening sequence be shot on location—something unprecedented in a Hollywood musical. “It was tough getting them to let me shoot in New York. I had to stamp my foot and act like a movie star,” Gene recalled in a 1970 interview.17 As usual, Freed championed his “kids,” and Mayer and Dore Schary finally agreed to give the crew five days of funding to shoot on location.
Five days was a painfully short time to shoot what promised to be the highlight of the picture. Lela Simone explained that such a tight shooting schedule warred with Freed’s usual modus operandi: “We never did things quick, quick, quick, quick, quick like the other productions do. That didn’t happen.”18 However, it had to happen if Gene and Donen were to realize their vision. Location shooting began on March 28, 1949. The first scenes filmed were the opening and closing sequences at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the very location where Gene had made a military service film in 1946. “I got permission from the Navy [to use one of their ships in Town] because I was one of their boys,” Gene explained.19
Gene and Donen shot the rest of the location scenes in a seemingly chaotic fashion that, in the end, fit together like a puzzle. Simone summarized the trip to New York as a “madhouse. . . . We could barely shoot anywhere [because of] the . . . thousands of people everywhere we went. . . . We had to go through an underground passage and people . . . chased us. . . . It was absolutely horrifying.” In total, thirty thousand bystanders gathered to watch the actors film their scenes. Police almost had to carry the cast and crew through the crowd, but after a certain point, the police grew so exhausted that, Simone asserted, “they didn’t care anymore who [got] run over.”20
He's Got Rhythm: The Life and Career of Gene Kelly (Screen Classics) Page 29