July 6, 2007
The Questionably Quotable Quaker II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 11:00 PM EST I wholeheartedly agree with Frederic Schwarz that the practice of digging up the greats of the past to provide political backup in the present should be laughed out of existence. But, alas, I have every confidence that it will continue, with or without our approval, until approximately five minutes before the Battle of Armageddon begins. In 1923, the future conservative Republican senator Arthur Vandenberg wrote an entire book called If Hamilton Were Alive Today. In it he tells us what Alexander Hamilton’s opinion would have been on the great political issues of 1923, which was 119 years after Hamilton died. Strangely, they coincided exactly with Arthur Vandenberg’s opinions on those very same issues. Funny that. But Mr. Schwarz’s less-than-glowing reference to the movie of 1776 and the stage original provides me with an excellent excuse to discuss movie versions of Broadway musicals in general. They are, with a few glorious exceptions, awful, regardless of how good the stage original was. The stage is a highly artificial medium; no one confuses it with reality. So a cowboy walking onto a stage singing about what a beautiful morning it is, with a full orchestra coming in to back him up, doesn’t seem unreasonable at all. We are trained to more willingly suspend our disbelief in these circumstances. But the movies are a highly literal medium, easily confused with reality, so a cowboy riding past a cornfield singing “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’,” with a full orchestra apparently lurking unseen in the corn, seems, well, a bit silly. So does a bunch of cowboys and farmgirls at a train depot breaking into an elaborate dance that only highly trained professional dancers could possibly execute without making total fools of themselves. Oklahoma!, as a matter of fact, offers a beautiful means of comparing the stage version vs. the movie version. The 1955 film I find unendurable, despite one of the greatest of Broadway scores. In fact I’m not sure I’ve seen it since it first opened half a century ago. The reason, I think, is that Rodgers and Hammerstein, geniuses though they were with stage musicals, never really understood the nature of cinema, and so the film version is simply the stage version shot in front of real scenery. (Well, almost real; the movie was filmed in Arizona, not Oklahoma. There is even the occasional glimpse of a mountain range, not a geographical feature with which Oklahoma is richly endowed.) I would recommend getting the DVD of the 1997 London stage revival of Oklahoma!, which works wonderfully and really gives you the feeling of being in the theater. It starts off with a terrific device, shamelessly cribbed from the Laurence Olivier version of Henry V, which shows London from a helicopter flying up the Thames until it reaches the actual theater where the show was being performed. You then zoom down, join the crowd, and enter the theater. The signal is unmistakable: we’re going to the theater, not a movie. If your knowledge of Oklahoma! comes entirely from the 1955 film version, I promise you that you will find this version a revelation. It’s as close as we will ever be able to come to what it was like to sit in the St. James Theatre on the opening night of the most influential American musical ever written. Unless you just hate all musicals, you will love it. Almost all the other Rodgers and Hammerstein movie versions I think are equally awful for exactly the same reason. (I realize that The Sound of Music has been seen by everyone on the planet ten times and that trucks back up regularly to the Rodgers and Hammerstein office in order to dump vast piles of cash into their coffers because of it. I still don’t like it.) The one artistically successful movie of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, in my opinion, is The King and I. I suspect the reason is that the setting is so exotic—the royal court of 19th century Siam—that we don’t mind an English schoolmarm and an oriental potentate dancing a polka together (and, of course, what a polka!). A great example of a great Broadway musical reconceived for the movies is Cabaret, which opened the same year as the movie of 1776 and won best actress (Liza Minnelli), best supporting actor (Joel Grey), and best director (Bob Fosse). The stage version is a brilliant conventional musical, where people break into song in living rooms and elsewhere. In the movie version, every song in the film is sung on the stage of the cabaret around which the show is built, with one exception. While the songs comment on the plot and characters, they stand apart from them as well and thus “work” for the audience. The exception is the utterly chilling scene in the biergarten, where the angelic looking boy begins to sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” and is then revealed to be wearing a Nazi uniform, and nearly the whole crowd joins in by the end of the scene. It is something that could have happened in real life (even though the song was, of course, written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, Cabaret’s creators). The scene is reminiscent of another great scene from a non-musical movie, Casablanca, where the French in Rick’s Café break into the “Marseillaise.” Kander and Ebb’s Chicago, which won the Oscar for best picture in 2002, is another perfect example of a stage musical brilliantly reconceived for the movies in much the same way. So my advice is to never judge a Broadway musical by the film version, any more than you would judge a classic novel by a film version of the story. Some make the transition beautifully (Cabaret, Tom Jones) and some do not (Oklahoma!, Barry Lyndon).
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