It's George Sidney Centennial Week!
Dancin' Dan here to begin our mini-celebration of one of Hollywood's more undersung directors.
George Sidney was an MGM workhorse who got his start on Our Gang shorts. Though he was nominated for the DGA Award four times between 1952-1957, he never received an Oscar nomination. No, not even for 1945's Best Picture nominee Anchors Aweigh. And really, you could make a very persuasive argument that he was robbed.
Anchors Aweigh is a strange picture, one that feels more like a fantasy than anything else, and to the extent that it is remembered today, it is remembered for one thing:
You would be forgiven, of course, for thinking that the film really was a fantasy based on that one number...
Yet in the context of the film, the number is only part of a story Gene Kelly's Navy man on shore leave tells to a classroom of kids when they ask how he got his Silver Star. In fact, it's basically the first of two "dream ballets" in the film, and the second is very nearly as description-defying as the first:
It's worth noting that Anchors Aweigh was the first film on which Kelly had sole choreographic control, and even here you can see nearly all the elements he would play with throughout his career (including his perfectionism - one number took co-star Frank Sinatra eight weeks to learn and seventy-two takes to shoot, prompting the Chairman to state that he could have made an entire film in that time). Indeed, the whole film feels like a dry run for other later, better-remembered films, most of them Kelly's: On The Town, An American in Paris, and Singin' in the Rain just to name a few.
But lest you think that the success of this film rests solely on Kelly's shoulders (and the Academy sure did - this was his sole Oscar nomination, for Best Actor), Sidney proves he's no slouch numerous times throughout the film. Let's set aside the famous animated sequence (supervised by his good friends at Hanna-Barbera), which is a great technical feat, for now. For real proof of his skill, look at what he does with this otherwise perfectly ordinary Kathryn Grayson number:
There is so much beyond the frame that we don't see in films, and Sidney is incredibly sly in how he calls that out here. The way he shoots this whole scene is very playful, and has nothing at all to do with the song, or the plot of the film, really. It could be cut completely and the film wouldn't really be any worse off. But it's a pretty bold move for a giant, big-budget MGM musical, and it seems to be indicative of Sidney's philosophy and style as a director: Anchors Aweigh is a big production, but under Sidney's steady hand, it never really feels as big as it is - he keeps the focus squarely on the characters even in the big production numbers. He's the real reason why the film hangs together as well as it does, weaving all of its disparate elements together into a whole that is as satisfying as it is entertaining.
And really, we should celebrate the man who gave us this every day:
