Wednesday, November 15, 2006
TIME WARP
Today's NYTimes Best 1176 Film was Vincente Minnelli's production of Lerner and Loewe's (breath)
Lesley Caron, Louis Jourdan, Maurice Chevalier and Hermione Gingold provide the muscle in this extremely thin story about a young girl coming of age and the predators that are waiting for them to 'hatch'.
It is hard not to get a bit of a squeamish feeling from all this. It is certainly pre-women's-lib.
Nonetheless, the songs are great and the best parts are from the oldsters Chevalier and Gingold. They get the best songs and the best lines and steal all the scenes.
The Lerner and Loewe score is very near My Fair Lady in tone and idea. The story is much the same. So is the music and song. But it is of the best of the time.
I don't think I saw it in 1958. It was a remake of the stage musical and at the time I thought such things to be second rate. The Broadway version didn't last very long.
Anyway it was great to see the older stars. Caron was dubbed. Jourdan was very good. They did the patter thing with him but he has a good singing voice.
Blah blah. Enough trivia.
It was pretty good but not good enough for a 5; more like a 4 out of Netflix5.
