Gigi, by contrast, has Vincente Minnelli at the height of his powers (I am tempted to say, literally between this and Some Came Running, I don't see the argument that 1958 wasn't the best year of his career *) using them to do the most Vincente Minnelli thing possible: make the actual city of Paris, where the film's exteriors and some its interiors were all shot, look as beautiful as it has ever looked in a motion picture. Frankly, the 1964 screen My Fair Lady is about as bad as I can imagine a filmed version of that undefeatable play turning out, barring some horrible attempt at reimagining it Rex Harrison is visibly irritated, Audrey Hepburn is miscast and receiving no help from director George Cukor, by then in the declining years of his career who himself handles the brightly-based, banter-driven material like a mortician, lacquering the material on expensive but overlit and unattractive sets, not so much staging his actors as pinning them to a board. And this comparison, at least, Gigi wins falling down. Six years later, My Fair Lady was filmed at Warner Bros., and this, also, invites fairly direct and merciless comparison.
In 1958, when Crowther wrote his review, and when producer Arthur Freed (of MGM's legendary musical A-picture production unit this wasn't the final Freed Unit musical, but it does feel like their valedictory effort) finally got the adaptation of Colette's 1944 novel and Anita Roos's 1951 play based on the novel that he'd been pushing Lerner to write for years, My Fair Lady existed solely as an unimpeachable stage masterpiece. There is still room for Gigi to be good, even great, while being weaker than My Fair Lady - but it is almost impossible not to constantly draw the comparisons. The comparison, needless to say, does not flatter the movie: My Fair Lady has one of the finest collections of songs in the history of musical theater, and a unbreakable spine in its book, a barely-redressed version of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. Gigi absolutely lives in the shadow of My Fair Lady, with a list of original songs that have a virtually one-to-one correspondence, right down to giving not-Henry Higgins some speak-singing in not-"I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face". No reviewer of the 1958 MGM musical Gigi will ever come up with a better lede paragraph than the one Bosley Crowther wrote for his review in The New York Times, in which he affects modest shock at the astonishing list of coincidences between the film and a recent Broadway, before drily ending with the observation that "they've come up with a musical film that bears such a basic resemblance to My Fair Lady that may want to sue themselves." Crowther goes on to suggest that he doesn't really have a problem with this, and that Gigi still works in its own right, but the point, having been made, hangs there.
0 kommentar(er)
