World Musicals

At regular intervals, however, Americans have rediscovered the vanished popular forms of their own culture when it has been handed back to them, mutated into bizarre new shapes by foreign imitators. It worked for the Western in the 1960s, when the Italians borrowed Clint Eastwood and returned him to us as the Man With No Name, and it could work again. Although it's hard to imagine a commercial revival of the full-blown musical, a sense of delight and rediscovery would not be too much to hope for from a monumental new series being launched this week by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance," a yearlong showcase for musicals from all corners of the globe. Curator Andrea Alsberg spearheaded this massive programming effort, which ropes together 80 tuneful films from 20 nations: black-and-white filmi melodramas from India, giddy nightclub comedies from Egypt, lederhosen operettas from the dark heart of Nazi Germany. We are disarmed, perhaps, by the surface novelties of these films, and for an hour or two we simply forget to be jaded and blase as something wonderful slips in past our defenses.

In the months ahead, we can be disarmed by productions from two film cultures of enormous historical resonance: the doomed Yiddish cinema of Poland in the '30s, and the Shanghai-exile Mandarin-language cinema of Hong Kong, from the immediate post-revolution period of the late '40s and early '50s. Most of the people who made films in those crisis zones (or in Nazi Germany in the '30s and early '40s, or Communist Hungary in the mid-'50s) had no intention of documenting their situation for posterity. If anything, they were offering their audience a haven of escape, a refuge from the social forces pressing in upon them. But for us, the atmosphere of those environments seems to have soaked into every frame. We absorb the atmosphere as if by osmosis, as all our interest is focused upon a legendary star like the limpid Shanghai "songstress" Zhou Xuan, pouring out masochistic heartache in the 1948 Orioles Banished From the Flowers. Or the Yiddish cutup Molly Picon, warbling the klezmer drinking song "Let's Tie One On" in the 1936 comedy Yiddle With His Fiddle. Movie musicals capture our affections so easily that we tend to let our guard down, and when seemingly peripheral issues do intrude, the impact can be devastating. Yiddle contains some unbearably sad footage of life in a Polish shtetl that was shot on location just a few months before the German tanks rolled in.

The series' opening-night offering, Edmond Greville's Princess Tam Tam (1935), does appear to be a conscious attempt to wrestle with social issues, and its floundering awkwardness speaks volumes about the state of racial awareness during that period. This is one of four pictures that the loose-limbed American dancing marvel Josephine Baker made in France, after transplanting herself from Harlem to Paris, where she became a major star. But even the French tied themselves into anxious knots trying to come to terms with this frankly sexy African-American performer. Tam Tam expends so much energy figuring out how to safely define Baker for the audience that it never allows her to cut loose. Baker does not play a professional entertainer in this film, as she does in her other major French star vehicle, Zouzou (1934). Here, she is an illiterate street person in Tunisia taken in and laboriously "civilized" by a visiting French novelist, who drags her home with him to Paris and fobs her off as a Middle-Eastern princess (the story is an uncredited reworking of Pygmalion).

Baker is deployed as an icon of the "noble savage" in Tam Tam, depicted with reverence but also with unmistakable condescension. When she finally uncorks her wild dancing gyrations in a Paris nightclub, the implication isn't that she's a gifted artist but that her savage nature just can't be suppressed any longer. Within minutes she is shipped back to Africa to run barefoot and raise babies under the palm trees. A similar issue arises in comments published in the Archives calendar from filmmaker Carlos Diegues (Bye Bye Brazil), who selected a Busby Berkeley classic, The Gang's All Here (1943), as his contribution to the series-within-the-series, "Director's Choice." Diegues intended the booking as a showcase for the talents of his home-girl Carmen Miranda, the Portuguese entertainer turned Rio star, who does her infamous "Lady in the Tutti-Frutti Hat" number in this film. Diegues deplores the fact that when Miranda emigrated to Hollywood, she was quickly transformed into "a hyperbolic and . . . stereotypical image of what Brazil was supposed to be." Her foreign-accented sexiness was bowdlerized into camp.

Of course, it could be argued that all musicals are hyperbolic by definition. That seems to be exactly the problem that a lot of modern moviegoers have with them. Even more than most forms of popular entertainment, musicals boil down national characteristics into digestible stereotypes, even for home consumption, from Guys and Dolls to Hum Aapke Hain Koun..!. But because musicals are syntheses of so many different kinds of cultural activity, and affect us in so many different ways at once, they often convey far more than the people who made them ever consciously intended -- even when (or perhaps especially when) the moviemakers wanted nothing more than to become a perfect Czechoslovakian equivalent of Busby Berkeley.

CAPSULE REVIEWS

Two musicals in Yiddish shot in Poland in the 1930s rub elbows with a pair of song-and-belly-dance pictures from Egypt---a striking demonstration of the all-but limitless adaptability of the musical form, which seems to absorb ambient cultural vibrations like a thirsty sponge.

Yiddle With His Fiddle (Yidl mitn Fidl, 1936), in which American vaudeville star Molly Picon disguises herself as a boy to join a wandering klemzer troupe, is a lively love-story of mistaken sexual identities, a plot pattern that probably pre-dates Shakespeare. Filmed on location in the shtetls of rural Poland, just a few years before the Nazi annexation, Yiddle is also, unavoidably, a heartbreaking record of a lost culture, all the more poignant for its insistent bouncy optimism. (A second Picon vehicle on the same program, Mamele, is less infectious; it records the hardships of urban ghetto life in Lodz with a relentless sentimentality that recalls the street-urchin heartuggers of the silent era.)

Youssef Chahine’s Inta Habibi (My Love is You, 1957) is pure froth, a triangular comedy of errors in which an exuberant cabaret star (the slinky firecracker Samya Gamal) tries to disrupt the engagement of a flustered playboy (singer-composer Farid al-Atrosh) and a doe-eyed spoiled beauty (Shaadia). But Al-Atrosh is a masterful practitioner of Arabic vocal acrobatics, the Middle Eastern equivalent of scat singing; when he’s ululating the movie no longer feels trivial.

***

Jessie Matthews was England’s top musical comedy performer, on both stage and screen, from the 1920s until the war years, when her trademark genre, the light-hearted backstage romp, no longer seemed to push the public’s buttons. (She made her last significant screen appearance as Tom Thumb’s mum in the 1958 George Pal fantasy.) In her high-stepping prime Matthews was a knockout, a unique combination of good-girl perkiness and sleek sex appeal---Julie Andrews morphing into Louise Brooks. Victor Saville’s First A Girl (1935), a music hall-flavored remake of the teasing German cross-dressing comedy Viktor und Viktoria, is an ideal Mathhews vehicle. It shows off her snare-drum timing in a series of fast-patter routines with her future husband, Sonnie Hale, a lanky facetious hoofer; and of course she looks more womanly than ever in her crisply tailored tuxedos. (The hokey device of a disguise that accentuates what it pretends to conceal suits her to a T.)

The German camp classic Amphitryon, filmed the same year and set in a backlot-kitsch version of ancient Greece, contains only a couple of major musicals numbers, elaborate screen-fillers in the Busby Berkeley mode. But the twisty mistaken-identity plot, in which an aging Olympian God disguises himself as a studly young mortal, is irresistibly outlandish. Also screening: Two films starring Lillian Harvey, a Brit who became a star in Germany. The Congress Dances (Der Kongress Tanzt, 1931) is a lavish Viennese-style waltz musical from the legendary UFA studio; The Only Girl (1933) was made in England but mimics the glittery style of Harvey’s German hits.

***

Singer-actor Kundan Lal (K.L.) Saigel, who was only in his early 40s when he died, in 1948, was known in India as “The Golden Voice of the Silver Screen.” Saigel’s stardom was definitive, helping to form conventions for Hindi cinema that remain firmly entrenched. (All movie heroes and heroines on the sub-continent are still expected to burst into song periodically, albeit with somebody else’s voice.) Street Singer (Saathi, 1938) is not a music-drama in the Bollywood mold but a true musical in the Western sense. Poor-but-happy orphans Bhulwa (Saigal) and Manju (Kanan Devi) scratch out a living as performers on the mean streets of Calcutta. She eventually becomes a star, gets a swelled head, and abandons her mournful mentor. Saigel’s deep-welled gaze is startlingly soul-filled and vulnerable for a popular leading man; he’s an icon of principled suffering. So the film is by no means of historical interest only, although on that level it’s priceless, with eye-opening glimpses of popular Indian theatrical traditions that fed into movies. Saigel’s sinuous improvisations suggest a transitional phase between the Indian classical style and Westernized pop song forms.

The Mexican classic Aventurera (1949) is a deliriously over-heated example of the cabaretera sub-genre of dance hall musicals. With Cuban dancer Ninón Sevilla portraying a “fallen woman” plotting revenge upon her exploiters, it must have been a formative influence upon Pedro Almodóvar.

***

It is a shock at first to see Takashi Shimura, the grave and soulful star of Ikuru and Seven Samurai, singing and dancing in the spring sunshine in Masahiro Makino’s Samurai Musical (Oshidori Uuagassen/Dueling Ballads of the Mandarin Ducks, 1939). Shimura plays a daffy parasol-maker and antiques collector whose daughter (Chiezo Kataoka) has developed a crush on a highly unsuitable young man, a gruff ronin samurai. And like all the characters in this fast-paced period comedy of criss-crossing romantic attractions he seems to be bubbling over with high spirits---and with cheerfully anachronistic music that often sounds more American (or even Latin American) than Japanese. This short (75 minute) feature was produced in a period of fervent nationalism, yet it gleefully thumbs its nose at the splendors of Japanese tradition. A local daimyo sings jaunty love songs to his hoard of ancient porcelain, and director Makino (whose more conventional period action films include the 1930 Man-Slashing, Horse-Piercing Sword) stages the movie’s only fight sequence as a dance-comedy number, with jazzy muted trumpets and woodblock percussion.

Despite the efforts of influential devotees like Placido Domingo, the Spanish operetta form known as zarzuela hasn’t been fervently embraced by English-speaking music fans. In Spain, however, classics like Tomás Bréton’s La Verbena de la Paloma (The Festival of the Dove), which mixes macho melodrama with hide-under-the-bed farce, are considered national treasures. La Verbena was a smash hit on La gran via (the Broadway of Madrid) in 1894, and when director Benito Perojo filmed it in 1935 it got the full prestige-picture treatment, with lavish sets and decor, intricate, sensuous camerawork, and teeming choral crowd sequences. The images are meticulously textured to resemble vintage photographs, or Impressionist paintings in motion. But it never feels clogged or stilted, because Perojo replaces stagy theatrical devices with bold cinematic equivalents. When the protagonist, Julian (Roberto Rey), is heartsick with jealousy, he sings his mournful aria in a separate superimposed image, while continuing to plug away at his job as a printer---a surprisingly moving interior monologue effect.

***

The great Raj Kapoor was a toweringly influential figure in Indian commercial cinema in the 1950s: as a charismatic superstar actor, as an innovative director with a bold expressionistic style, and as a producer who took charge of his own films and built a studio in Bombay. Even his close supervision of the music in his movies was a definitive influence on the shape of Indian pop music. The songs in Kapoor’s Awaara (Vagabond, 1951) were huge hits for the playback singers Lata Mangeshkar and Mukesh, who was Kapoor’s on-singing voice throughout his career. This almost three-hour musical melodrama is extravagantly entertaining, with a truly Dickensian mistaken-identity plot that extends over several decades: the unjustly cast-off wife of a rigid legalistic judge (played by Raj’s father, Indian theater pioneer Prithviraj Kapoor) gives birth to a son who becomes the pocket-picking protégé of a bandit chieftain. As an adult the forgotten son reconnects with his childhood sweetheart, now a ward of the very same judge, when she becomes his defense attorney in a sensational murder trial. Kapoor and his co-star, the radiant Nargis (Mother India), are ardent and impossibly glamorous lovers, and the film’s noir visual design is rich enough to suggest a covert Orson Welles influence.

The liberal social agenda of Awaara helped make Kapoor a lionized star in the Soviet Union, which had a rich movie-musical tradition of its own. Two of the USSR’s ebullient best, Grigori Alexandrov’s Circus (1936) and Volga-Volga (1938), are also screening this weekend. In both, the dauntingly energetic Lyubov Orlova (a borscht-fed Jeanette MacDonald) strikes bright-eyed onward-and-upward poses.

***

In the late 1940s, refugee directors from the mainland film capitol of Shanghai created a Mandarin-language cinema in Hong Kong that for almost two decades shared the local scene with indigenous Cantonese productions. Fang Peilin's Orioles Banished From the Flowers (Huawei Liuying, 1948) is a boisterous and mildly risqué romantic comedy, with musical interludes in the Westernized "Mandarin popular song" style that originated in the Shanghai nightclubs of in the 1930s. The heroine, a high-spirited school girl who first aggravates, and then dazzles, the stuffy teacher next door (Yan Hua), is an atypical character for the limpid leading lady, Zhou Xuan; she was better known for her long-suffering wronged-woman roles.

John Woo's Princess Chang Ping (Dinü Hua, 1975) is a wide-screen and color re-make of a beloved Cantonese opera, first filmed in 1959. The story of a princess and a wandering scholar), torn apart by the surging tides of history, could be a romantic epic on the scale of Doctor Zhivago; in this stage-derived version it is essentially a series of glorious duets between Lung Lim-sang and Mui Suet-si, an actress who specialized in male roles. Woo's seductive camera work (dismissed as intrusive by some hometown fans) seems remarkably sensitive to the ebb and flow of the recitative dialog, a stylized heightening of the spoken language from which the arias emerge organically. Skeptical Westerners be may be amazed at how quickly they get the hang of it.

***

Ivan Pyriev's Cossacks of the Kuban (Kubanskie Kazaki, 1949) is a Stalin-era musical from the USSR that opens and closes with heroically-framed shots of harvesting equipment chewing through amber waves of grain. Between these inspirational bookends, however, is an unexpected treat: a thigh-slapping, high-kicking, romp that plays like a Marxist-Leninist re-think of Oklahoma. Fairs, feasts, and horse races abound, all photographed in vivid golden SovColor. The beaming blonde peasant icon Marina Ladynina, as a robust and eligible horse farmer of the Siberian steppes, gets off on the wrong foot with her leading professional rival, a blustering, mustachioed Cossack officer (Sergei Lukyanov), but it's a foregone conclusion that they will eventually become more than comrades. These two are the Hepburn and Tracy of collective farming; their relationship finally gels during a hell-bent horse race. The relentless heartiness of Isaak Dunayevsky's folk-flavored tunes becomes a little tiring after a while (it's the Russian equivalent of oompah music), and you can work up a sweat just watching the strenuous dance routines. There's also a nagging sense that the folk culture of the Russian plains has been co-opted to serve a bluntly obvious political agenda. Yet in spite of all this the human energies that are uncorked feel unforced and open-hearted, and they win you over.

Perhaps the portmanteau form that is the movie musical offers opportunities for moments of direct emotional self-expression that it is always, on some level, subversive.

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