{"id":115419,"date":"2017-09-13T11:00:16","date_gmt":"2017-09-13T15:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115419"},"modified":"2017-09-13T11:52:57","modified_gmt":"2017-09-13T15:52:57","slug":"how-the-unflappable-fred-astaire-survived-the-fifties","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/13\/how-the-unflappable-fred-astaire-survived-the-fifties\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Unflappable Fred Astaire Survived the Fifties"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Still from The Band Wagon<\/i> (1953).<\/p><\/div>\n

The first half of the fifties were a pivotal moment for Hollywood musicals. The genteel tux-and-tie choreography of the thirties had given way to Gene Kelly\u2019s scrappier, more athletic brand of drawn-out (and often pretentious) modern ballets. Kelly\u2019s vision, in the form of musicals like Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/em>, An American in Paris<\/em>, and On the Town<\/em>, was bubbly, bright, and middle-class. And it left Fred Astaire, the movie musical\u2019s first bona fide superstar, out in the cold.<\/p>\n

Astaire had tried to adapt himself to the new style with varying success (see\u00a0Ziegfeld Follies<\/em><\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Yolanda and the Thief<\/em><\/a>.<\/em>) But Astaire\u2019s fate in the early fifties was something one suspects he\u2019d never accounted for: his age was beginning to show. Of course, this was a time when elderly men still courted young women on-screen with stunning regularity, and had\u00a0Astaire been a normal romantic lead, this might not have been\u00a0a problem. But he was a\u00a0dancer<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Astaire\u2019s 1953 film,\u00a0The Band Wagon<\/em>,\u00a0came in the midst of this stylistic change. Released on the heels of the wildly successful\u00a0Singin’ in the Rain<\/em>\u00a0and involving much of the same creative team (script by Comden and Green, produced by Arthur Freed of the famous MGM Freed Unit), The Band Wagon<\/em> was a candy-colored musical in the same vein, but with a much lonelier premise.<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s hero, Tony Hunter, is a self-described \u201cwashed up\u201d song-and-dance man, very much like Fred Astaire himself at the time. And he is played by Astaire, who was perhaps able to channel the uncanny sensation of witnessing the genre he helped create, the musical, go through a sea change that risked\u00a0abandoning him in the process.<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Band Wagon<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>then, had to work on a very naked premise: it had to fictionalize elements of Astaire\u2019s plight while still fitting\u00a0within the parameters of a standard Hollywood musical as produced by MGM’s \u201cDream Factory.\u201d That meant no morbidity, no self-pity, no unsolvable problems\u2014and nobody not getting laid by the end.<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Still from The Band Wagon<\/i> (1953).<\/p><\/div>\n

This, in a nutshell, was\u00a0The Band Wagon<\/em>\u2019s impossible dream. Did it achieve it? Well, in certain ways, yes. The Band Wagon<\/em> was a messy achievement, and a fascinating failure\u2014something like the toothache you might expect from eating so much fifties\u00a0Hollywood candy floss.<\/p>\n

The plot of The Band Wagon <\/em>is as follows: Tony Hunter, a song-and-dance man twenty years past his prime, is enlisted by his friends, the playwriting team Lily and Lester Marton, to star in a new Broadway musical. They\u2019ve also enlisted the help of the flamboyant director\/producer Jeffrey Cordova (played by Jack Buchanan, twenty-three years after\u00a0his last Hollywood role) who is known mainly for lavish restagings of the classics:\u00a0Oedipus Rex<\/em>, et al. As the Martons describe the project to the pair\u2014a light musical comedy\u2014Cordova can\u2019t help but draw parallels to Faust (\u201cYou just said he sells his soul to the devil!\u201d) Not only does he insist on revamping the story as a modern-day Faust, he\u2019s also intent on casting a stuck-up ballerina (Cyd Charisse) as Astaire\u2019s leading lady. Astaire and his costar have trouble getting along\u2014he thinks she\u2019s pretentious, she thinks he\u2019s patronizing\u2014and an even harder time dancing together. By the end, of course, they turn it around and manage to turn the dull, self-serious Faust project into a delightful\u2014but completely nonsensical\u2014smash-hit musical.<\/p>\n

The film manages to usher Tony\/Astaire into the new twentieth\u00a0century despite the combined machinations of ego, eccentricity, and a stodgy middle age.\u00a0He learns to dance with someone else\u2014without even trying to lead. This happens quite literally, in the film\u2019s \u201cDancing in the Dark\u201d sequence\u2014the thing that most people remember from the film. Charisse and Astaire wind up in Central Park. Wordlessly ascending their horse-drawn tourist carriage, they begin to dance with one another: the very thing they kept saying they couldn\u2019t do from the start.<\/p>\n

Still from The Band Wagon<\/i> (1953).<\/p><\/div>\n

I\u2019ve always thought of\u00a0The Band Wagon<\/em>\u00a0as a poor man\u2019s\u00a0Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/em>. In film classes, one is encouraged to compare the two, presumably because they are contemporaneous and both regarded among the top five of the genre. If The Band Wagon<\/em> holds together at any point, it\u2019s because of a certain continuity of mood and feeling. It\u2019s the consummate \u201cputting on a show\u201d musical. And it\u2019s a movie about the theater that seems to suggest, even more than\u00a0Singin\u2019 in the Rain<\/em>\u00a0does, that if your problems can\u2019t be fixed by love, they can still be fixed by art.\u00a0And that art, in turn, can be fixed by self-knowledge, including the knowledge of one\u2019s own limitations. \u201cI\u2019m just an entertainer,\u201d says Astaire, trying to nip the \u201cFaust\u201d business in the bud. Entertainers have no business making art. But of course, art is the result of The Band Wagon<\/em>\u2019s messy weirdness, in both narrative and meta-narrative\u2014and it lends the film a sense of completeness in spite of itself. The Band Wagon<\/em> is a movie that tries to break up with the Hollywood system while using all its tricks.<\/p>\n

When you hear Fred Astaire sing \u201cBy Myself,\u201d as he leaves his train car without anyone to meet him at the station, you recognize the sound of the jauntiest, happiest breakup song ever written.<\/p>\n

\u201cI’ll face the unknown,\u201d he warbles. \u201cI’ll build a world of my own.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Poster for The Band Wagon <\/i>(1953).<\/p><\/div>\n

To build a world of one\u2019s own is probably the least lonely thing a person can do. There\u2019s no tragedy in it. Similarly, there is no\u00a0sense of devastation in the film\u2019s second great breakup song, \u201cI Guess I\u2019ll Have to Change My Plans,\u201d in which Astaire sings about losing \u201cthe one love I\u2019ve found\u201d with an even greater nonchalance.<\/p>\n

In the end, it doesn\u2019t matter so much that the film\u2019s central romance is unbelievable and slightly depressing. The Band Wagon<\/em> is a movie about knowing yourself, in both a profound and deeply basic way (\u201cI\u2019m an entertainer!\u201d) It\u2019s about building a world of your own. This becomes clearest when you hear Judy Garland\u2019s rendition of \u201cBy Myself\u201d for a 1963 television special. Her interpretation is much less jaunty. The way she sings it, the song is beautiful and tragic and lonely, just like everything else she sings. And when you hear her version, you appreciate Astaire\u2019s anew: his ability to see beyond the present, to not take it to heart or take it too seriously. Perhaps this was the secret to his profound longevity: Astaire\u2019s career would outlive the Hollywood studio system by twenty\u00a0years, though after the fifties\u00a0he stopped making musicals. After Finian\u2019s Rainbow<\/em>, in 1968, his dancing days came to a close, but he kept working until he was in his eighties.<\/p>\n

Heartbreak is never the end of the world with Astaire. And you can say that it\u2019s because he\u2019s a man, and he\u2019ll always end up with a woman by the end, and you can say that it\u2019s because age doesn\u2019t matter as much for him as it did for, say, Ginger Rogers. But the fact remains: the man in the top hat and tails was curiously adept at dealing with disappointments, rejections, setbacks, and pain. He wasn\u2019t optimistic; he was pragmatic. With the world falling down around him, all he could think to do was change his plans. He\u2019d never been too attached to them anyway.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Henry<\/span>\u00a0Giardina is a writer living in Los Angeles. He is a 2016 MacDowell fellow.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first half of the fifties were a pivotal moment for Hollywood musicals. The genteel tux-and-tie choreography of the thirties had given way to Gene Kelly\u2019s scrappier, more athletic brand of drawn-out (and often pretentious) modern ballets. Kelly\u2019s vision, in the form of musicals like Singin\u2019 in the Rain, An American in Paris, and On […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":387,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1186],"tags":[6762,5369,12088,5370,30547,12280,5335,30548,6761,30546],"class_list":["post-115419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-film","tag-cyd-charisse","tag-fred-astaire","tag-gene-kelly","tag-ginger-rogers","tag-jack-buchanan","tag-judy-garland","tag-musicals","tag-singing-in-the-rain","tag-the-band-wagon","tag-tony-hunter"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow the Unflappable Fred Astaire Survived the Fifties<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The plot of the 1953 film \u2018The Band Wagon\u2019 mirrored Fred Astaire's own career crisis.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/13\/how-the-unflappable-fred-astaire-survived-the-fifties\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"How the Unflappable Fred Astaire Survived the Fifties by Henry Giardina\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 13, 2017 \u2013 The first half of the fifties were a pivotal moment for Hollywood musicals. 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