The Band Wagon

The Band Wagon – It’s heresy, I suppose, to make the comparison, but viewed on the same day, The Hobbit, and The Band Wagon seem similar in conception. Both films have exceedingly simple, schematic plots, that are designed to highlight set pieces of movie magic, projected for the audience at about intervals of twenty minutes. In The Hobbit, the set pieces are battles with orcs or trolls or goblins, choreographed against huge landscapes; in The Band Wagon, the set pieces are dance numbers featuring Fred Astaire and, mostly, Cyd Charisse. In both films, the movie’s story is just a skeletal framework on which to string, like precious gems or pearls, the sequences that provide the raison d’etre for the film. The Band Wagon was directed in 1953 by Vincente Minnelli. In addition to Charisse and Astaire, the film feature two performers not sufficiently seen in films – Oscar Levant and Nannette Fabray. Both are excellent impersonating Betty Comden and Adolf Green – the original composers of the 1931 Broadway musical. The Band Wagon dramatizes the clash between high art and pop culture – a clash that, in fact, results in the mixed genre of the musical, part European opera and part music hall variety show (with elements of vaudeville thrown in). A pretentious New York director wants to make a musical version of Faust – the director has a resonant voice and is larger-then-life. We see a fragment of his Oedipus Rex which is staged to look like Orson Welles’ Broadway Shakespeare productions of the thirties. Levant and Fabray write the score and lyrics, but the show is top-heavy with significance and fails. Fred Astaire and company, in the spirit of “let’s put on a show, kids!” re-tools the musical, financing the effort by the sale of his personal collection of Degas and Chagall paintings (he has a nice Max Beckmann still-life as well). The revised musical, which seems to be just a series of song and dance numbers with no discernible plot – the temptation to which The Band Wagon almost succumbs – is a huge success. Personifying the Kulterkampf between high and low art is Fred Astaire, as a vaudeville hoofer, paired with Cyd Charisse, an icily beautiful ballerina. Astaire is much older than Charisse, but they fall in love and, presumably, their marriage signifies the rapprochement between pop culture and high art. On every level, this film is wonderful. But, like The Hobbit, the whole thing is just an excuse for the camera’s rapturous inspection of its stars in motions – in this case Charisse and Astaire filmed dancing in extraordinarily long and graceful takes.