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I went to see On The Town today, as the local arthouse is celebrating Leonard Bernstein’s centennial.
It was a lot of fun, though the museum dance sequence did not age well -- the dancing itself was fine, but the costuming and drums were pretty racist.
Otoh, it was quite hilarious to see how the two sailors not played by Gene Kelly (meaning Jules Munshin and Frank Sinatra (playing a naive young sailor, wtf?)) were basically scooped up by their respective girls immediately and decidely.
I mean, when Claire (who is studying anthropology to get over her obsession with men; ‘is it working?’ ‘almost’) dips Ozzie into a kiss, that’s when the others show up to find them in a clinch, and Hildy the cab driver (who insisted Sinatra’s Chip sit next to her before she’d drive the others around) first line of dialogue to Claire is:
“Dr. Kinsey, I presume?”
This movie came out in 1949. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. No one in the original audience would have missed that joke.
Also, Claire first notices Ozzie because he’s standing next to a caveman reconstruction, and looks quite like it. So she spends the rest of the movie calling him ‘Specimen’ and he seems quite all right with it.
One thing I love about Gene Kelly movies (besides the singing and the amazing dancing) is that while his characters tend to have a hard edge to them, they are never dicks to women. Even though Gabe winds up with Hildy’s disaster of a roommate for a while, he turns her down gently at the end of the night *and* gives her a pep talk about her finding the right guy eventually. And when it turns out the girl he has been pursuing all day is not the high-society girl he thought she was, but an aspiring dancer making ends met at as a ‘cooch dancer’ at Coney Island he really doesn’t care, because he likes her for her.
It was a lot of fun, though the museum dance sequence did not age well -- the dancing itself was fine, but the costuming and drums were pretty racist.
Otoh, it was quite hilarious to see how the two sailors not played by Gene Kelly (meaning Jules Munshin and Frank Sinatra (playing a naive young sailor, wtf?)) were basically scooped up by their respective girls immediately and decidely.
I mean, when Claire (who is studying anthropology to get over her obsession with men; ‘is it working?’ ‘almost’) dips Ozzie into a kiss, that’s when the others show up to find them in a clinch, and Hildy the cab driver (who insisted Sinatra’s Chip sit next to her before she’d drive the others around) first line of dialogue to Claire is:
“Dr. Kinsey, I presume?”
This movie came out in 1949. Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948. No one in the original audience would have missed that joke.
Also, Claire first notices Ozzie because he’s standing next to a caveman reconstruction, and looks quite like it. So she spends the rest of the movie calling him ‘Specimen’ and he seems quite all right with it.
One thing I love about Gene Kelly movies (besides the singing and the amazing dancing) is that while his characters tend to have a hard edge to them, they are never dicks to women. Even though Gabe winds up with Hildy’s disaster of a roommate for a while, he turns her down gently at the end of the night *and* gives her a pep talk about her finding the right guy eventually. And when it turns out the girl he has been pursuing all day is not the high-society girl he thought she was, but an aspiring dancer making ends met at as a ‘cooch dancer’ at Coney Island he really doesn’t care, because he likes her for her.
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