Down on your heels, up on your toes

by David Benjamin

“We’ve always thought knowledge was naught. We should be taught to dance! Right here in Tait, we’re up-to-date. We teach a great new dance! Don’t think that I brag. I speak of the drag!” —June Allyson

MADISON, Wis.—Hollywood musicals, particularly the classics, croon to me a Siren’s song but, after the finale, tend to leave me torn. They are both seductively escapist and fundamentally flawed—by their escapism. As a wide-eyed naif gazing up at the silver screen, I’m transported. But, as a lifelong movie maven and grizzled skeptic, I sigh with vexation at a silliness that borders on the malignant.

Beneath the allure of spectacle, most of these films are rigidly formulaic with a paper-thin plotline and a script that segues awkwardly from inane boy-girl banter to sudden bursts of soft-focus balladizing.

I tend to forgive the extraordinary lightness of your typical musical because a) I love dance numbers and b) there are passages of poetry that border on genius and brilliant choreography that would be impossible in any other format.

Robert Preston’s talking-blues soliloquy about “Trouble in River City” in The Music Man is immortal, as is Donald O’Connor’s “Make ’Em Laugh” solo in Singin’ in the Rain, not to mention (which I’m doing) Gene Kelly’s rendition of the title song. I recently caught Bye Bye, Birdie on TCM, a movie whose best moments—before it starts and after it’s over—are Ann-Margret making love to the camera under the pretext of singing the title song.

I could go on … Cagney strutting out “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” Bobby Van hopping through town for three minutes (in five cuts) in another otherwise fluffy and forgettable MGM flick called Small Town Girl, Mel Brooks ruthlessly spoofing the entire musical genre with “Springtime for Hitler” in The Producers.

Musicals are almost extinct, a development usually attributed to the prohibitive cost of a vast sound-stage production number that literally need a cast of hundreds of lavishly costumed, heavily rehearsed and flawlessly synchronized dancers, plus an entire orchestra. But, even if Hollywood studios were as rich and profligate today as they were in the middle of the last century, I think the big-budget musical would still be gone, killed by cultural incongruity.

Almost every movie musical you’ve ever seen, fell in love with, come away from the theater humming its tunes, is populated entirely by white folks. There is no troublesome ethnic or racial diversity in River City, Iowa, Sweet Apple, Ohio, or Carvel, Idaho, nor in Oklahoma, St. Louis or Oz (not counting flying monkeys), not in the Ziegfeld Follies, anywhere on Broadway, nor even on the island of Bali Hai. In West Side Story, directors Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise created a racially charged gang war in a New York slum that contains no black people at all. In his gratuitous remake sixty years later, Spielberg reverently toed the color line.

The exceptions prove the rule. Cabin in the Sky, an all-black musical that features a sort of Green Book all-star squad of Lena Horne, Ethel Water, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Eddie Anderson, Cab Calloway and Dooley Wilson, is rarely shown and barely remembered. Yes, there’s Porgy and Bess but, technically, it’s opera.

Indeed, the decline of the musical tracks instructively with the infiltration into the industry of non-white talent. Chicago, the best musical of the last three decades—and possibly ever—is the most diverse ever produced. It’s a bellwether for the demise of its genre. Significantly, its creator, Bob Fosse, grew up, both as a performer and choreographer, in the classic era of Hollywood musicals.

Recently, as I was watching Good News—one of my guilty pleasures—I got to thinking about the cultural footprint of the Hollywood musical. Elizabeth Taylor once cubbyholed Good News as “everybody’s favorite college musical.” Released in 1947 and based on a 1927 stage production, it stars Peter Lawford and June Allyson. In a number called “Be a Ladies Man,” one of the uncredited dancers is Bob Fosse. The story, such as it is, takes place at Tait College, a fictional campus where every boy owns a tuxedo and every girl has a closetful of evening gowns. Male students tend to major football either in football or nookie. The typical Tait girl doesn’t have time to study because she’s frantically primping and fussing in pursuit of the boy—preferably rich—who’ll pin her, propose to her, sweep her off her tap shoes and carry her away from all this collegiate crap. The only student who deviates even slightly from the hedonist norm is Connie (Allyson), who works to pay her tuition and appears to attend the classes that are otherwise not evident in the film.

Good News, true to its title, is bubbly, frivolous and seemingly harmless, but only if viewed with no concession to the society from which it springs and the intellectual desert that it portrays. Every student at Tait can sing. They can all dance up a storm, in perfect unison. But they don’t know much about history, don’t know much biology, don’t know much about the French Tommy took …

But they do know that they’re white.

One of those most disturbing production numbers, “Pass That Peace Pipe,” features the show’s best dancer, Joan McCracken, as Babe Doolittle. Among her lines, she sings, “Pass that peace pipe and bury that tomahawk, like the Choctaws, Chickasaws, Chattahoochies, Chippewas do … “ Babe’s infectious lyric, sung to a tom-tom beat, treats the names of native tribes as alliterative wordplay and clever rhyming, all in good fun and oblivious to three centuries of history that chronicle the dehumanization, subjugation, deprivation and ethnic cleansing—by her forebears—of all those Choctaws, Chickasaws, Chattahoochies and Chippewas.

Few filmgoers in 1947 had an inkling of the racism inherent in Babe’s lively performance, set in a soda fountain on the Tait campus. But today, that note of casual bigotry sneaks into a viewer’s perception, annoyingly. Rather than a toe-tapping number with remarkably athletic choreography, Babe’s solo evokes one of the darkest manifestations of American conquest, a homegrown holocaust that foreshadowed the Holocaust.

In 1947, most high-school graduates didn’t go to college and most black graduates who went to college were not welcome on campuses where racial intermingling might occur. It was credible for Hollywood to depict Tait as an ivory oasis untouched by the Ellis Island hodgepodge of real America, or even with the body of knowledge being taught in real universities. It’s a college nobody where seems to be going to college, where eggheads are outcasts and professors virtually non-existent. In the final production number, “The Varsity Drag” (which is great!), Connie, the last earnest student, forsakes book-learning, sings a paean to ignorance and dances into the arms of her football hero.

Given the times, it’s reasonable to forgive the insensitivity of Babe and all those Tait kids dancing on the grave of the last of the Mohicans. They didn’t know any better. Nor did they—according to the Hollywood concept of college—know anything any better.

Historian Richard Hofstadter explained, not long before the release of Animal House, that Americans are chronically suspicious of intellect. We had Natty Bumppo before we had Alexander Hamilton and afterward, we got Andrew Jackson, who rose to glory declaring that the only good Indian is a dead one. Now we have a president who obviously hated his Ivy League days at the University of Pennsylvania—probably because his peers routinely reminded him of how smart he was not. On the other hand, at Tait College, where he could entice willing coeds with his father’s money and hire June Allyson to take all his tests, he would have been top dog, president of the Phi Betas, the BMOC to end all BMOCs.

Or maybe not? After all, we’ve never heard him sing. And we’ve seen him try to dance.

Sad.