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THE DVD SHELF: Joshua Logan's "Fanny," Granada's "Brideshead," Chekhov, "Blues in the Night"
By Steven Suskin
11 Aug 2008
This month's column discusses the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Fanny (presented without songs), a box set featuring the legendary miniseries "Brideshead Revisited," a collection on Chekhov works the jazz-themed drama "Blues in the Night."
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There was a joke of the sniggering-teen variety making the rounds some 47 years ago, the punch line of which had to do with going to see Joshua Logan's "Fanny" on the big screen. An unappetizing prospect, no? Anyway, now you can see it on the widescreen, in the privacy of your living room. Invite your friends.
Josh Logan's "Fanny," of course, is the screen version of the 1954 musical with which David Merrick started his invasion of Broadway. This was intended to be an artistic blockbuster-of-a-follow-up to the 1949 South Pacific. Merrick enlisted Logan, who went about the task of attaching the Messrs. Rodgers & Hammerstein. All seemed to be progressing until Rodgers determined that he wasn't about to be presented by an uncouth novice lawyer from St. Louis. He tried to buy out Merrick, the latter wouldn't budge, and there went R & H. And there went a musical with the potential of being a great second to South Pacific. (In last week's column I introduced the notion of musicals featuring beautiful young girls falling for considerably older men, written by considerably older men. Add Fanny to the list.)
Even so, Fanny [Image] emulated South Pacific. Once again, Logan directed and co-authored the book. He also brought along the earlier show's two male leads, Ezio Pinza (Emile) and William Tabbert (Cable) as well as designer Jo Mielziner. With Rodgers & Hammerstein off the project, Logan went to composer-lyricist Harold Rome for the score. Rome, a Yale-trained architect, had started his career writing satiric songs of social significance. He had written Logan's most recent musical, Wish You Were Here, which was critically skewered but nevertheless went on to a successful run. Rome's musicals had been very much contemporary, marked by jaunty tunes and comical lyrics with a New York flavor. This made him an unlikely choice for Fanny, which took place along the waterfront of Marseilles. While Merrick's musical was a something of an overproduced bouillabaisse, it was stocked with a surprisingly romantic and effective score. "Fanny," "Restless Heart," "I Have to Tell You," and more filled the Majestic with romance and strings, in a manner that was not what one might have expected from Rome.
The songs — including the title tune, which was as omnipresent on the airwaves as Rome's title song for Wish You Were Here had been two years earlier — and Merrick's marketing pizzazz managed to turn Fanny into an 888-performance hit. If it wasn't another South Pacific, it outran the two musicals Rodgers & Hammerstein wrote instead, combined. These being the 1953 Me and Juliet and the 1955 Pipe Dream. In the latter case they did manage to buy out the originating producers, Feuer & Martin, so that they could produce it themselves. To little avail.
In any event, Logan managed to parlay Fanny, the big Broadway hit, into "Fanny," the big Hollywood movie. He even managed to enlist the stars of the incredibly successful 1958 Hollywood musical "Gigi," Leslie Caron and Maurice Chevalier. With those two musical favorites plus that title song on the tip of everybody's musical tongue, the brothers Warner decided to make Fanny as a non-musical. That's right; cut out all those songs. Go figure. So we have Fanny, without music. Well, not without music; Rome's score is threaded through the film everywhere we turn, only without lyrics and without vocals. Look! there's a song cue: Marius looks at a boat in the harbor, the orchestra launches into "Restless Heart," and nobody sings. The moment passes.
This won't bother anyone who doesn't know the musical which, as these things go, probably meant the vast majority of moviegoers then and the vast majority of DVD buyers today. Hollywood has seen fit to occasionally buy hit Broadway musicals and then produce them with new songs added, by Hollywood hands; sometimes, they have even adapted them with all new scores that the show composers didn't recognize and no doubt fumed over. But rare is the musical adaptation in which all songs were simply adapted out of existence. This happened a couple of years after Fanny with Irma La Douce, another Merrick musical as it happens, but I can't think of another similar case. (The 1939 film version of On Your Toes cut Rodgers & Hart's songs, but it did reproduce the two Rodgers-Balanchine ballets, including Slaughter on Tenth Avenue.) Poor Harold Rome, who since 1960 or so hasn't gotten much respect. The "Fanny" film must have been quite a blow; he would be startled, no doubt, to find that this new DVD release includes, as a bonus, a separate CD of his score! His film score, that is, without the lyrics. If they did not use the Broadway songs for the film, they did use the logo — and adapt the lettering for all the credits, not just the title. (In the film itself, not on the artwork reproduced on the slipcase.) Those interested in such things will also note that Merrick gets sole credit as producer of the musical on the "originally produced on Broadway" placard, while in fact the show had been equally coproduced by Merrick and Logan.
Logan had enormous success in the theatre, through the '40s and '50s; beginning in 1960, though, every musical he directed was exceedingly dire (All American, Mr. President, Hot September, Look to the Lilies, Miss Moffat). But his movie musical career was always somewhat checkered, artistically speaking, consisting of South Pacific, Camelot and Paint Your Wagon. Film mavens have it in for "Fanny", anyway, because the movie — and the musical, for that matter — is a bowdlerization of Marcel Pagnol's trilogy of masterpieces (or near masterpieces) of the French cinema, "Marius" (1931), "Fanny" (1932) and "Cesar" (1936). These starred the great French actor Raimu, who first played Cesar in the 1929 stage version of "Marius," and they are indeed pretty wonderful. Joshua Logan's "Fanny" is something of a mishmash comparatively, although it has its attributes. It is beautifully photographed, for starters, and includes that glorious background score. Ms. Caron was young and delicious at the time — think "Gigi" — and properly French, as were her co-stars. Cesar was played not by Chevalier but by Charles Boyer, with Maurice playing Panisse, the much much much older man who marries Fanny even though she is pregnant with a baby by Joey, the foreman on the grape ranch. Oh, wait; that's The Most Happy Fella, another one of those middle-aged musicals (except in that case the 56-year-old composer wound up marrying the heroine in real life). In Fanny, the baby is courtesy of Marius, the young man "with no heart to give" who runs off "to the sea, my one love."
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Acorn Media, noting the new film version of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, has seen fit to bring us the fabled 1981 Granada Television miniseries in all its glory. Eleven episodes, eleven hours, eleven all-time great British actors. Actually, I made that part up; it does, though, have Claire Bloom and John Gielgud in five episodes each, plus Laurence Olivier in two, plus a castle-full of faces familiar to people who watched British stage and television back in those olden days. Most notably, this is the program that launched Jeremy Irons to stardom, while not quite launching his co-star Anthony Andrews to the same. "Brideshead Revisited" ranks high among the most beloved and respected television programs ever, and understandably so. The new film, with a cast headed by Emma Thompson and Michael Gambon in the roles formerly played by Bloom and Gielgud, has thus far received a moderately favorable reception. Just about everyone, though, says that of course, it's not the same as the real "Brideshead Revisited." Which is now available, in considerably better shape and more complete than when previously released in 1997. The "25th Anniversary Collector's Edition," they call this four-disc set. Very handsome, indeed. If this "Brideshead" is not loaded with special features — we get a retrospective documentary, plus some miscellaneous bonuses and commentaries on some episodes — they give us all 659 minutes-worth of footage. Set aside a spare weekend, or whatever, and immerse yourself in Mr. Waugh's "epic tale of love and loss amid the fading glory of the British aristocracy." Continued...
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