Mad About Musicals--June on TCM

This month, Turner Classic Movies is featuring a host of movie musicals all day long on Tuesdays and Thursdays as part of what they're calling Mad About Musicals. In addition, TCM and Ball State University are hosting an online class on that same theme. Although the Mad About Musicals course officially began yesterday, you can still enroll here.

Here's how they're describing the Mad About Musicals "deep dive" experience:

Running from June 3-30, this FREE interactive experience will give you an entertaining deep-dive into the Hollywood musical, from the 1930s to the 1970s, with addictive multimedia course materials, digital games, ongoing interactions with your fellow film fans on the TCM message boards, and more!

You can also see the syllabus and answers to some frequently asked questions on that same page.

And if you're not into taking classes, you can still see a whole lot of musicals between June 5, when Going Hollywood, a little-known MGM musical from 1933 starring a very young Bing Crosby opposite the infamous Marion Davies, starts things off at 5 am Central time, and June 29, when Oliver!, the Oscar-winner from 1968, finishes the parade at 5:15 am.

By my count, there are 93 movie musicals running on TCM between those two, ranging from perennial favorites like Top Hat and American in Paris to lesser-known works that you absolutely have to see, like Hallelujah from 1929, the first all-black musical from a major studio; Strike Me Pink, a 1936 Eddie Cantor vehicle with Ethel Merman in the mix; Shirley Temple doing a Fred-and-Ginger number in Stowaway, also from 1936; and Chubby Checker in a 60s oddity called Don't Knock the Twist. There's also some Busby Berkeley, Ruby Keeler, Jimmy Cagney, operettas, the real Fred and Ginger, a touch of Lubitsch, Maurice Chevalier, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Kathryn Grayson, June Allyson, Doris Day, Frank Sinatra, Cyd Charisse, Esther Williams, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Sondheim, Kander & Ebb, and big-time Broadway musicals represented on screen.

That's a whole lot of singing and dancing and a fascinating way to see how Hollywood directors, choreographers, cinematographers, designers and screenwriters found a way to bend film effects to showcase music and performers. Yes, there are omissions, but so much good stuff, too. I doubt anyone can plant themselves in front of the TV to see every single one of the moving pictures TCM has chosen, but I suggest you fire up the DVR and catch as much as you can.

For all the details and a look at the schedule, you'll want to start here. 

LES GIRLS Is Just Too Too!

When Les Girls, a 1957 movie musical directed by George Cukor, came up on the Turner Classic Movies schedule, I realized I hadn't seen it since... Well, in a very long time. Whether it came up on my local Late, Late Show in 1966 or 1970 really doesn't matter. I did see it when I was young, even if I didn't remember much.What stuck with me was a) Gene Kelly as an entertainer taking his show on tour around Europe, b) Kay Kendall as one of the three women in his act, and c) big technicolor production numbers to show off a tuneful Cole Porter score.

And, yes, that's all still there. What I didn't remember was the Rashomon-style storyline, set into motion by a tell-all memoir written by Kendall's Lady Sybil. After she characterizes the romantic events that transpired during their show biz days in a rather lurid fashion, she ends up in court, sued for libel by Angèle Ducros, the French member of the trio, played by Finnish actress Taina Elg. (I knew Elg from her days as Olympia Buchanan, presumed dead wife of One Life to Live patriarch Asa Buchanan, as well as a stint as Guido's mother in Kopit and Yeston's Nine, which happens to be the first Broadway show I saw, with, yes, Elg in the cast. But I did not remember her from Les Girls at all.)

On the witness stand, Sybil stands pat with her story about an affair between Angèle and Kelly's Barry Nichols that ended badly, while Angèle says Sybil was the one involved with Barry. Oh, and she was a major lush to boot. To try to figure out who's telling the truth, Barry Nichols himself takes the stand, but his story... Doesn't accord with either of theirs. Instead, he matches himself with Joy Henderson, the American member of the female trio, played as a straight arrow/good girl by Mitzi Gaynor.

Each story involves singing and dancing with Gene Kelly front and center (of course) and some romantic hijinks. Even though that includes a suicide attempt, alcoholism and lying, the tone of the movie is silly and bright, befitting the Cole Porter score and such tunes as the cheeky "Ladies in Waiting," bouncy (and kind of crazy) "You're Just Too Too!" and "Why Am I So Gone (About the Gal)?," which attempts to cast Kelly as a motorcycle tough in a leather jacket. Yeah, that doesn't work. At all.

But the movie is a lot of fun, and Kay Kendall, a star who died much too young, is really quite adorable. Gaynor is also fun, even if she is MIA for the first 2/3 of the movie. And I admit it, the storyline hooked me enough to keep going to get to the end and find out "the truth." What is the truth? Les Girls doesn't really answer that question, and it never quite pulls off the mix of dark humor, sly innuendo and fizzy pop it's looking for.

Les Girls was Gene Kelly's last movie for MGM until he did That's Entertainment! in 1974. Kendall did only The Reluctant Debutante with husband Rex Harrison and Once More with Feeling after Les Girls. As a testament to Kelly at MGM and Kendall's career, Les Girls is certainly worth a look.