Invitation to the Dance (DVD review)

I don’t know how many times I’ve checked Amazon looking for this on DVD. I’ve wanted it ever since I saw the brief episode of Gene Kelly dancing with the cartoon harem guards on That’s Entertainment Vol. 2, and I’d almost given up. Then this spring I found it, finally put on DVD in 2011.

It wasn’t remastered, there is no menu (though it is possible to jump through the film with the buttons) and there are no extras on the DVD. Given the number of VHS reviews on Amazon that effectively said “where’s the DVD?” I suspect Warner simply put it from the vaults straight to DVD, and according to some reviews effectively made the DVDs to order. Too bad, as the movie is worth more than this cursory treatment – but it’s not the usual musical, and MGM apparently shelved it for four years before releasing it.

It’s really a dance and music performance, starring Gene Kelly and a number of other excellent dancers, with not a word spoken. Even the crooner (a takeoff of Frank Sinatra) has an instrumental voice – I think a trumpet, though I could be mistaken on that.

The performance is made up of three dances, only one of which I had seen at all before.

The first is a tragedy, told in mime and dance, set in a small circus. Gene Kelly is hopelessly in love with a girl who sees him only as a clown. The ballet sequences are beautiful, and I particularly liked the one danced on a fishnet hung vertically.

The second, with both ballet and tap dancing sequences, follows a bracelet from wrist to wrist. My favorites were the crooner and the stage door Johnnies.

The third was the tale of Sinbad the sailor. The meat of this one was a marriage of live action and animation, with Kelly dancing in cartoons representing book illustrations. This sequence had pieces that reminded me very much of Cyd Charisse’s dream dance in Singin’ In The Rain, a movie that came out 4 years after Invitation, but was actually being made the same year, also with Kelly as choreographer. Another part of that sequence might have helped inspire the Disney artists of Mary Poppins, which came out almost a decade later. Certainly it had very much the feel of Mary and Bert being carried across water by turtles.

Parts of all three sequences were obviously shot either speeded up or in slow motion, emphasizing the frenetic activity of a cocktail party or Gene trying to dance the guards into exhaustion,  or the floating motion of a dream.

Fans of Gene Kelly will want to watch this, as will those interested in the history of the combination of cartoon and real life characters. But I do wish the film had been remastered and color-corrected. As an example of the problems, the segment from Sinbad the Sailor on That’s Entertainment showed harem guards whose clothing varied from green to blue, and I believe that when the trousers are blue, the background is a much more bluish shade of red, suggesting that the yellow pigment has faded. In the Invitation to the Dance DVD the harem guards are consistently in green trousers, though some other colors look faded. Sometimes the skin tones are totally unrealistic.

In short, the film is wonderful. The DVD leaves a great deal to be desired, but for right now it is all we have.

Singin’ in the Rain DVD review

“The times, they are a-changing,” and as a writer, I am well aware of the confusion in the writing world. E-books and independent authors are turning the world of publishing upside down. Readers are awash in a sea of new authors, some excellent, some really awful, and how do they tell the difference?

The internet and e-readers have made a tremendous difference, but it’s far from the first time a technological advance has turned the way artists get their work to the public upside down. Look at what happened when synchronized sound came to the movies.

One of my favorite DVD’s is another with, and directed by, Gene Kelly – Singin’ in the Rain. It’s a movie about the tumultuous time when sound came to the movies. The film didn’t start that way. It began simply as a showcase for the songs of Arthur Freed.

MGM got into musicals almost as soon as movie studios began jumping on the sound bandwagon, and Arthur Freed began writing music for those musicals almost from the start of musicals. Around the middle of the 20^th century he had the idea of a musical that would showcase a number of those songs, none of them new and some used in movies as far back as 1929.

The writers were at first at a loss. How were they to do a modern (at that time) musical, with a plot of sorts, with a group of songs written much earlier in the century? But then they came up with an idea: since the songs were written starting at the time sound movies were replacing silent films, why not design a plot around that time period? Specifically, why not center the film on actors and actress who were able to make the transition (Gene Kelly’s character, Don) and those who were not (Jean Hagan’s character, Lena?)

The result is now generally recognized as one of the best musicals of all time: Singin’ in the Rain. But a large part of the fascination of the film lies in the fact that at the time it was made and the story line was being written, many of the people who had actually lived through that transition were still at MGM. As a result, many of the anecdotes that made up the final film are based on the stories of people who actually observed them.

Many of the songs that were used were moved around in the shooting. “Singin’ in the Rain,” for instance, was originally planned to be a trio with Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds in the rain with umbrellas – an idea that was retained in the opening title and the cover of the DVD. But as actually shot for the film, it was the wonderful sequence of Gene Kelly dancing alone in the rain, after the trio has come up with their idea to salvage the first sound film “Don” and “Lena” made.

Salvage it needed! Jean’s character was one of those beautiful women with impossible voices, and between the fact that the sound men were not used to microphones (which could pick up the most inappropriate sounds) and what I think would be described as a rather nasal Brooklyn accent, the movie was a disaster! I’m not at all sure that the idea of re-recording the dialogue was that early, but it certainly saved “The Duelling Cavalier.”

If you like musical comedies, this one is definitely worth watching. I may wear out my DVD!