Easter Parade (1948)

directed by Charles Walters
songs by Irving Berlin
starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire
Frames in this review are taken from the Warner Brothers DVD.

Easter Parade was finally released on DVD in time for Easter 2005. A clever marketing tie-in, but the film is appropriate year-round. It's one of those happy musicals churned out by the Dream Factory that was MGM, noteworthy as the only musical where Fred Astaire and Judy Garland got together.

The film begins as famous entertainer Don Hewes (Fred Astaire) is shopping for Easter presents for his dancing partner Nadine Hale (Ann Miller). It's a bright sunny day with smiling people greeting each other on the street, but he gets home to find that Nadine is leaving the partnership. She'll be starring in her own performance, and won't be persuaded otherwise even though Don hints that he thinks of them as more than just a business partnership. The young and rich Jonathan Harrow III (Peter Lawford) interrupts this scene, and takes Don out to a bar to drown his sorrows. There's a show going on, and a disgruntled Don boasts to Johnny that he could dance with any one of the dancing girls in the show.

So he picks out young, inexperienced Hannah Brown (Judy Garland) from the lineup, only to regret it the next morning. Initial performances of "Juanita and Hewes" are a disaster as she proves clumsy and unable to tell left from right. Meanwhile, Johnny is contriving situations to get Don and Nadine back together. But as happens so often in such films, Don discovers that Hannah is really quite talented when she's left to be herself, and "Hannah and Hewes" steadily improves until the two are auditioning for Ziegfeld. But Nadine is performing there too, and Don appears to be falling for her again. Still, MGM musicals always have a happy ending, and the guy always gets the girl. Or rather, in this case, the girl gets the guy she wants, and the the two walk in their finest in the New York City Fifth Avenue Easter Parade as Don offers her a ring for her finger.

And it really is a lot of fun, starting right at the beginning with Drum Crazy as Don sees a cute stuffed bunny in a toy shop, but a young boy grabs it possessively just as he's about to pay for it. So Fred dances a number in the shop, beating, kicking, dancing on the various drum sets in the shop, getting the boy to settle for one of them as he leaves with the bunny. Later, an energetic Ann Miller taps her heart out in the spectacular Shaking' the Blues Away. A really fun number is A Couple of Swells, where Fred and Judy play a couple of vagabonds with airs. As Gene Kelly would later point out in That's Entertainment II, Fred would be in a tux (albeit disheveled) even when playing a vagabond.

The film also has a lot of fun outside the musical numbers. Take the snappy dialog when Don and Hannah first meet:

Hannah: [Almost running into Don] Oh?
Don: Sorry. [Looks her up and down]
Hannah: Wh- ...?
Don: Yeah, I think you'll do.
Hannah: You think I'll do what?
Don: I'm looking for someone to dance with.
Hannah: Wrong number.

Or the ending, after Hannah and Don have had a falling-out. Johnny comes to Hannah's hotel room, where she's distraught and not wearing any makeup after a sleepless night. Vulnerable Judy is quite believable, and so it is very enjoyable when Hannah takes Johnny's advice to approach Don directly. One can root for take-charge Judy who sends a topcoat, top hat, and a bunny to the unsuspecting Fred. His valet Sam gets distracted with the "what a cute bunny!" and Don opens the door to find Hannah very pretty in white and feigning exasperation that he'd forgotten their date for the Parade. "Aren't you ready yet? Just like a man," she says and then launches into Easter Parade, swapping the male and female roles in the song ("I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet / And of the guy [girl] I'm taking to the Easter parade").

A lot has been written about how Fred replaced Gene Kelly after he broke his ankle, and Ann Miller replaced a pregnant Cyd Charisse. Sure, Gene is great in scenes with kids, especially kids pretending to be French, but Fred brings a polish to the upscale toy shop that might've been a bit jarring on the Gene Kelly image. The elegant Astaire also fits the image of having a Chinese manservant, which somehow seems a British thing to do. And if Cyd Charisse has legs and can dance, so does and can Ann Miller, with a rosier face and a less sultry expression. Fred and Judy make an entertaining couple. The two are quite well matched, Fred the famous dancer (and a competent singer) and Judy the spectacular singer (and a competent dancer), and both are very precise with small moves in the dance sequences. The two interact very naturally, aided by what seems to be some ad-hoc interjections in the dialog, and also in physical actions (e.g. at the finale as Judy playfully repeats some of Ann Miller's poses from a previous scene in the parade). If the casting hadn't changed, it would've been a different film, perhaps with some wildly different styles of dancing, but probably no better.

The musical numbers are well-complemented by the meticulous camerawork. Cuts are extremely infrequent; six total in the Drum Crazy number, which exceeds four minutes. Considering that most cuts are to switch from closeups to wide shots rather than for effect, we're practically watching the performers live, and they are such professionals that it's a joy to behold. When Judy is stumbling around in the amusingly bad first Juanita/Hewes performance, she has to miss the rhythm and hits the cues exactly so Fred can "correct" her. Fred's slow-motion dance in Stepping' Out with My Baby did seem a bit contrived, but the bluescreen work is above average for the era and matte lines are fairly minimal.

The film is filled with little touches. Jules Munchin has a hilarious turn as the chief waiter at a restaurant who turns peevish when his customers act out their own dramas and leave him with an empty table, and puts on a tearful performance when explaining the freshness of the onions in the house salad. Nadine's maid Ellie attends a rousing Hannah/Hewes performance and telephones a report about how awful it is, then scurries off to watch the next number. Peter Lawford tries his best American accent for Johnny, coming across as an American affecting a British accent, which suits the aimless upper-class Johnathan Harrow III quite well (though the British accent disappears completely when he sings). And when Don comes to Hannah's place for a candlelit dinner and hurts her feelings by talking about a new number, she says twice in one outburst that he isn't even a human being but just a pair of dancing shoes, and he responds, "You said that." In that same scene, "What color are my eyes?" is a nicely pointed question from Hannah. And then the bartender, who muses to Don with a faraway look, "Well, no man is an island. Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main."

And if the plot is similar to other musicals (A tale about performers? Great excuse to insert numbers that don't fit into the plot!), or some developments are a bit implausible (How did Fred manage to take a ring with him when he wasn't even expecting her to show up?), well, "That's Entertainment!" Enjoy the songs, the dances, the costumes, and the color. It's perfectly delightful and happy.

Technical

The Warners DVD is simply swell, having been transferred in the ultra-resolution process. The original Technicolor negatives were scanned in at 4K, digitally cleaned up and the colors re-registered. So it's bright and colorful, with very little grain, and no color fringing at all. A few isolated shots look just a tad too saturated, not quite as garish as early Eastmancolor but not as good as the rest of the film. These were probably opticals or replacement sections for damage in the original negative, and total only a minute or two of the 103-minute film.

The monaural audio track is similarly noteworthy. Every time I watch an MGM musical from the Golden Era, I'm reminded of how well the musical numbers blend in with the dialog — a result of the controlled studio environment in which they were shot. Later musicals of the 1960s and 1970s, with more location shooting, would often combine high-quality prerecorded-songs with muffled, hissy dialog in a rather annoying manner. But here in 1948, the seamless interaction of dialog and music is very much enhanced by the consistently crisp audio.