Howard Keel Centennial: "Calamity Jane"

We're celebrating musical star Howard Keel's Centennial this week. Here's Tim Brayton...

Presenting a musical in which Howard Keel plays the obnoxious gunslinger love interest to a famous woman from the Wild West. My apologies if you feel a little bit of déjà vu from that logline: Nathaniel did, after all, just write about Keel's breakout performance in 1950's Annie Get Your Gun, about which every word of that sentence equally applies. And that's absolutely no accident. Warner Bros. had fought to get the rights to that stage musical as a vehicle for its up-and-coming singing star Doris Day, but lost out to MGM. When that film proved to be a hit, Warner's responded by developing an original Western musical based - oh so very loosely - on the life of Calamity Jane, famous frontierswoman and scout.

So eager was the studio to recreate that Annie magic that they even went to the trouble of borrowing Keel from MGM for the span of this one production. Not that you could tell any of this just by looking at 1953's Calamity Jane...

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Stage Door: "The Cher Show" and "Aint too Proud"

by Nathaniel R

Musical theater has its own version of limited and wide release / indie and blockbuster if you will. The analogy is far from perfect but those movie groupings are sort of comparable to Off Broadway and Broadway. Every Broadway show is trying to be a four-quadrant blockbuster.  

One of the safest routes to a quick buck (if not necessarily continuous sales) is the jukebox musical. Not all of them try to double as biographies of whoever's songbook it is but many do. That way they're easily marketable, excessively familiar, and can rely on nostalgia and sight-unseen goodwill to fill the house...

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New Podcast: Us, Dumbo, The Beach Bum, and Gloria Bell

by Murtada Elfadl, Chris Feil, and Nathaniel R

 

Now that 2019 movies are more than underway, a new season of the Podcast is upon us! 

Index (55 minutes)
00:01 Julianne Moore is Gloria Bell
12:30 Jordan Peele's Us starring Lupita Nyong'o  [MAJOR SPOILERS]
33:30 Tim Burton's Dumbo
40:00 Randomness
42:50 Harmony Korine's The Beach Bum and Matthew McConaughey's strange year
52:00 Randomness

Supplemental Reading
• Film Comment Gloria Bell review
• Murtada's Beach Bum review
• Chris's Us review
• Jason's Serenity review
• Paulina García's great performance in the original Gloria

You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you? 

Gloria Bell, Us, Dumbo

Howard Keel Centennial: "Annie Get Your Gun"

Our Howard Keel Centennial celebration begins. Here's Nathaniel R...

What is the lasting legacy of Hollywood's biggest musical of 1950, Annie Get Your Gun? The best remembered thing about it may well be its place in Judy Garland's storied career; she was infamously fired well into production, marking in some ways the nadir of her career, and fueling the mythology of that comeback of all comebacks with A Star is Born (1954) after a four year absence from the big screen. But that's not the movie as it exists today, only what could have been. And "could have beens" are many with this troubled production which lost its original star (Judy), its first two directors (Busby Berkeley and Charles Walters) and one key supporting cast member (Frank Morgan as Buffalo Bill, who died after filming began) on its way to its final cut.

The first shot of Howard Keel in "Annie Get Your Gun"

Though "Annie Get Your Gun" has had a long healthy life on stages, big and small (including three Broadway runs: 1946-1949, 1966, and 1999-2001) it's most lasting cinematic contribution is the introduction of Howard Keel as a leading man...

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Happy National Siblings Day!

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Fontaine and de Havilland in 1967 at a Marlene Dietrich show

“I bequeath all my beauty to my younger sister Joan, because she has none.”
- Olivia de Havilland, according to her “will,” age nine

 Apocryphal? Who can say. Delicious? 100 percent!

 

Though chronicled to death (at TFE and elsewhere), the purported feud between the most famous siblings of Hollywood’s Golden Age endures like no other. Why? Because it seems silly and pointless in retrospect, as most sibling rivalries and familial angst do. But rather than dwell on the negative, let’s turn our attention to more positive outpourings of mutual love and respect, shall we?

 

Here are 10 of the more famous (in some cases infamous) siblings over the years on the ties that bind—and unbind—them to each other, not to mention the public’s imagination...

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