Parky at the Pictures (DVD 25/6/2015)

Refusing to stray from the upper echelons of leisured society, Mark Sandrich

's Top Hat (1935) is a Jazz Age film that somehow found itself brightening up the tail end of the Depression. It's a treatise on innocent wish-fulfilment, in which people with impeccable manners and sartorial style drift through an Art Deco Neverland while managing to make life and love look ridiculously easy.

Yet Fred Astaire was reluctant to embark upon this fourth pairing with Ginger Rogers, as he still feared becoming part of another team following his stage success with his sister, Adele. However, unprecedented creative freedom convinced him to sign up for this peerless musical screwball, which bore many similarities to The Gay Divorcee (1934).

This was no coincidence, however, as co-scenarist Dwight Taylor had written the libretto for the 1932 Cole Porter show. But the idea of having Ginger mistake Fred for Edward Everett Horton (supposedly the husband of her best friend) came from Alexander Farago and Aladar Laszlo's play, A Scandal in Budapest, which RKO had bought for $10,000, only to have its comic adultery storyline blocked by the Hays Office. The fashion designer subplot was another interpolation, from Irene, which the studio had acquired for Rogers, but ended up making with Anna Neagle in 1940.

Astaire's choreography also owed something to his past, as he had led an evening-dressed chorus through `High Hat' in Funny Face (1927) and machine-gunned down a similarly attired ensemble in `Say, Young Man of Manhattan' in Smiles (1930).

The score, however, was wholly original. Indeed, this was Irving Berlin's first screen musical and he attended all the initial script conferences to ensure that the songs were specifically tailored to both the storyline and Fred and Ginger's talents - thus making this the most integrated movie musical of the period.

`No Strings', for example, comes about because Fred is keen to avoid Horton's suggestion that he settles down. But it also leads to his first meeting with Ginger (after he wakes her in the hotel room below) that completely changes his mind and his sand-danced lullaby similarly intrigues her, as she settles back on her satin pillows. Even the stage number `Top Hat, White Tie and Tails' follows on from Helen Broderick's invitation to Venice and Fred sidles on to the stage still clutching the telegram.

Top Hat

is the classic Fred`n'Ginger scenario. They meet accidentally and while he is smitten on sight, she finds him irksome and resists his attentions until their first dance. `Isn't This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)?' is a typical challenge dance, in which Ginger gives as good as she gets (in keeping with her feisty character) until she allows herself to be impressed by his grace and agility.

But true love is never allowed to run smoothly and a comic misunderstanding conspires to keep the couple apart, as Ginger mistakes Fred for Broderick's dithering husband, who is really the English backer of Astaire's West End revue.

Yet, she still loses her heart in a second, more intensely passionate duet, `Cheek to Cheek', which is made all the more deliciously illicit as Ginger dances it thinking that Fred is a married man. Indeed, even after she learns that he is single (thanks to their unchaperoned gondola ride), they still dance `The Piccolino' under the impression that she has just wed foppish Italian dressmaker, Erik Rhodes, and it's only in the closing sequence that the narrative contrivances are happily resolved by the revelation that Ginger was married by Horton's valet (Eric Blore) posing as a clergyman.

Everything about Top Hat was meticulously conceived, although no amount of perfectionism could prevent Ginger's dress from famously shedding ostrich feathers (much to Astaire's fury) during the numerous takes of the Oscar-winning `Cheek to Cheek'.

Van Nest Polglase and Carroll Clark's Venetian sets were particularly splendid. Yet while they evoked the `white telephone' romances then popular in Italy, Mussolini's regime banned the film after taking exception to Erik Rhodes's malapropistic Beddini and perceiving an assault on totalitarian uniformity in Astaire's machine-gun routine.

The Hollywood censors also insisted on a number of cuts. But the majority of excisions - including the songs `

Wild About You', `You're the Cause' and `Get Thee Behind Me, Satan' - were made to brisken the action, which so appealed to American audiences that the $620,000-picture took $3.2 million at the box office and remained RKO's most profitable musical for years to come.

Vincente Minnelli once described Yolanda and the Thief (1945) as `a fantasy that just didn't perfectly come off'. Indeed, ever since its disappointing showing at the American box office, it's been deemed a disaster and rarely figures prominently in histories of the genre. Yet, it was an audacious experiment in dance and design that not only confirmed Minnelli as a visionary artist, but it also sent the Hollywood musical in an entirely new direction.

Producer Arthur Freed found his inspiration in a magazine story by Ludwig Bemelmans, who collaborated with Irving Brecher on a screenplay that reworked the

operetta tradition of pinning a country's future on the romantic fortunes of its most significant citizen. Moreover, it also provided a classic example of the fairytale musical, as love not only affords Yolanda Aquaviva the opportunity to escape from the confines of her supposedly idyllic existence, but it also prompts the scheming Johnny Riggs to forget his wanderlust and settle down.

Despite Judy Garland lobbying for the role, Fred Astaire was cast opposite Freed's protégé, Lucille Bremer, with whom he had teamed effectively on the Ziegfeld Follies (1946) routines `Limehouse Blues' and `This Heart of Mine', the latter of which anticipated Yolanda's tale of an unscrupulous con man.

However, the diverse visual influences were less obviously in step. The opening sequence in the convent school was drawn from Bemelmans's famous Madeline books, while Broadway art director Jack Martin Smith took his cue for Patria's baroque architecture from the paintings of Tiepolo. Choreographer Eugene Loring imported ideas from Salvador Dali and Jean Cocteau for `Dream Ballet', while Irene Sharaff conceived the undulating black-and-white striped floor in `Coffee Time' solely to set off her café au lait costumes.

But Minnelli imposed a miraculous unifying vision. Pre-empting the self-reflexivity of the nouvelle vague, he glories in the filmicness of his creation, employing colours and compositions of such self-conscious artificiality that the audience can never forget that it's watching a motion picture rather than a slice of real life.

Yolanda

also brims with a sexual energy that defies the strictures of the Production Code. Bremer's carriage ride to meet Astaire at his hotel emphasises her repressed passion, which is both reinforced and subverted by Minnelli's decision to shoot Astaire's serenade through the strings of a harp, that not imply her moral imprisonment, but also her willingness for his fingers to play her in a similar manner.

This emphasis on artifice, eroticism and psychology culminates in Loring's 16-minute dream ballet, which borrows liberally from conceits devised for the stage productions of Oklahoma! and Lady in the Dark. However, the combination of Loring's ingenuity, Astaire's grace and Minnelli's genius for Technicolor stylisation gives this surreal interlude a mesmeric beauty and disconcerting ethereality that it rivals anything later achieved by Gene Kelly.

But the picture isn't just artistically daring. It also packs a political punch. Yolanda has too often been lumped with the Good Neighbour musicals that Hollywood churned out to keep Central and South America onside during the Second World War. But it slyly implies the inter-dependence of the Americas rather than following the `quaint, exotic and exploitable' line that Fox established in the likes of Down Argentine Way (1940). Moreover, it parodies this patronising attitude, as by having Johnny pose as Yolanda's guardian angel, it exposes the cynical reasons for the USA's overtures of friendship and its reluctance to enter into anything other than an alliance of convenience.

Yet, despite positive reviews, Yolanda missed the mood of postwar audiences, who regarded Latin escapism as passé and preferred all-American entertainments that didn't make too many intellectual demands. Consequently, it lost $1,644,000 on its $2,443,322 budget and its failure cost Bremer her career and prompted Astaire to retire the following year. But Freed courageously persevered, as he had recognised the pioneering qualities that would become the artistic cornerstones of the distinctive MGM style over the next decade.

`Do you know what is wrong with this show,' composer Richard Rodgers asked director Rouben Mamoulian and producer Theresa Helburn, as they agonised over minor details before Oklahoma! opened at the St James Theatre on 31 March 1943. `Nothing.'

However, rival producer Mike Todd offered a very different opinion, having seen the first act during the New Haven tryouts - `No girls, no gags, no chance' - and the production earned the nickname `Helburn's folly'.

But, Rodgers would ultimately be proved right. An incalculable influence on the stage and screen musical, Oklahoma! ran on Broadway for 2,212 performance over the next five years and then visited over 150 venues nationwide before the touring production finally closed in May 1954.

Ironically, when Fred Zinnemann's long-delayed 1955 film adaptation was finally made, it was photographed in the Todd-AO widescreen process. But, the hiatus meant that Hollywood had already incorporated many of the show's innovations, from integrating the score into the narrative to fashioning dream ballets.

Moreover, despite being a laudably faithful transfer, the screen version suffered from the fact that Zinnemann was a dramatist rather than a pictorialist or a musical specialist, like Mamoulian. Consequently, the picture was never as impactful as its stage predecessor, even though it grossed $7.1 million at the US box office.

Helburn had conceived the idea for Oklahoma! during a 1941 summer stock revival of Lynn Riggs's social realist drama, Green Grow the Lilacs (1931), which not only retained the original's interpolated folk songs, but also included a square dance choreographed by Gene Kelly. Realising that the story worked better as a `play for music' and keen to break the moulds of operetta and musical comedy, Helburn asked Rodgers to compose a new score.

However, his lyricist partner, Lorenz Hart, was convinced that the project was doomed to failure. So, he turned instead to Oscar Hammerstein - who had written Show Boat with Rodgers's hero, Jerome Kern - as he felt intuitively that their contrasting styles would gel. Rodgers had to abandon his jazzy urbanity to accommodate Hammerstein's folksily direct lyrics, but he was eventually able to boast that `the orchestrations sound the way the costumes look'.

Indeed, everything about the show was designed to enable Mamoulian to produce a musical play in which action and score were `interwoven to compose one rhythmic and dramatic pattern'. But the aspect that drew the most praise was Agnes De Mille's dream ballet.

Ballet was nothing new on Broadway. Indeed, Rodgers had already collaborated with George Balanchine on On Your Toes (1936) and Charles Weidman on the `Sweet Sixty-Five' fantasy in I'd Rather Be Right (1937).

But `Laurey Makes Her Mind Up' explored exclusively through dance the conflicting emotions of farm girl Laurey ?? for cowpoke Curly McCann and sinister farmhand Jud Fry. Hammerstein had envisaged something with a circus theme, but De Mille insisted that `nice girls dream rather dirty dreams' and replaced the stars with professional dancers more ably to convey feelings that shifted from naive romance to sinister doubt, as the music, movement, lighting and design merged in a uniquely expressive manner.

The ballet also contributed to the show creating the template for the folk musical, as the dances (and, indeed, many everyday actions) adhere to the rhythm of life, while the songs are inspired by the sounds of nature.

As a sodbuster and a cowboy, the lovers respectively represent the stability of the soil and the energy of wanderlust and, by coming together, they benefit the wider community by bringing a renewed sense of permanence, vigour and continuity that equates to the creation of civilisation out of the chaos of the untamed frontier. There was even a similarity between the 1907 setting (which was the year in which Oklahoma was admitted to the Union) and the wartime context of its premiere, as American forces in 1943 were attempting to restore order to a conflicted world.

Yet, even though Zinnemann's film was released at the height of the Cold War, the story's reaffirmation of liberty and individuality within a democratic system didn't have quite the same resonance 12 years on.

Embittered by seeing so many of his earlier Broadway hits discarded by movie producers, Rodgers had been determined to make Hollywood wait for Oklahoma! and stipulated that the score had to remain intact. But the delay meant that the songs were already well known from the bestselling cast album and the screen versions didn't become definitive - even though the principals did all their own singing.

James Dean and Paul Newman had been mentioned to play Curly opposite Joanne Woodward's Laurey and Eli Wallach's Jud. But while non-musical stars Rod Steiger, Gloria Grahame and Eddie Albert were cast as Jud, Ado Annie and Ali Hakim, Curly and Laurey were played by established singers Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones, while Charlotte Greenwood finally got to play Aunt Eller, having been forced to turn down the original show because of her film commitments.

Zinnemann made atmospheric use of his authentic locations for `Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin'' and introduced some sprightly action to `The Surrey With the Fringe on Top'. He also brought verve to `Kansas City', `Oklahoma' and `The Farmer and the Rancher', a deft comic sensibility to `I Cain't Say No', and some quaint romanticism to `People Will Say We're in Love'.

But the widescreen photography often diluted the story's intimacy, despite the use of audacious close-ups. Yet time has imparted a nostalgic glow and the success of later Rodgers and Hammerstein films helped it acquire classic status.

`I was born to play Sky the way Gable was born to play Rhett Butler,' Gene Kelly once lamented. `But the b*stards at MGM refused to loan me out.'

In fact, it was East Coast supremo Nicholas Schenck who blocked the deal for Kelly to appear in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's Guys and Dolls (1955), in order to settle an old score with producer Samuel Goldwyn, and the exuberant hoofer's career never really recovered from the setback. However, it's debatable whether his presence could have done much to improve what was a tumescent adaptation of a vibrant stage classic.

Damon Runyon was the `laureate of the illiterate' and 16 of the stories contained in his 1931 collection Guys and Dolls were filmed. But it was `The Idyll of Sarah Brown' that inspired Frank Loesser's musical, with its book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. Subtitled `A Musical Fable of Broadway', the show ran for 1,200 performances from November 1950 and prompted a bidding war that saw MGM, Paramount and Columbia drive Goldwyn to $1 million, then the highest sum ever paid for a story property.

Having failed to land Gene Kelly, Goldwyn and Mankiewicz considered Tony Martin, Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Burt Lancaster for the role of inveterate gambler Sky Masterson and even saw insistent representatives from Bing Crosby and Clark Gable before Goldwyn came up with the preposterous idea of teaming Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis.

However, he finally settled on Brando (who was reluctant to risk himself in a singing part, as he felt his voice sounded like `the mating call of a yak'), while Mankiewicz was over-ruled in his preference for Broadway original Sam Levene in the casting of Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit, the cash-strapped organizer of the oldest established permanent, floating crap game in New York, who bets Sky that he can't seduce a Save-a-Soul missionary in order to fund his latest enterprise.

When Grace Kelly proved unavailable, Goldwyn sought Deborak Kerr for Sarah Brown before settling on Jean Simmons, while Vivian Blaine was allowed to reprise the role of Nathan's long-suffering chanteuse fiancée, Miss Adelaide, after Goldwyn fell out with Betty Grable (when she cancelled a meeting to nurse a sick dog) and Mankiewicz refused to work with Marilyn Monroe after his experiences on All About Eve (1950).

Eleven of the original 16 songs survived, with

Loesser's genius for underworld argot bringing a wiseacre realism to the lyrics. But he was less comfortable with romantic ballads and was rightly vexed when Brando's discomfort with one of his best, `I've Never Been in Love Before', led to its replacement with `A Woman in Love'.

Ultimately, Brando's vocals was cobbled together from the best takes. Yet, he still had the temerity to criticise Sinatra's delivery style, which only further strained their combustible relationship. Sinatra had never forgiven Brando for stealing Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) - and winning the Oscar for Best Actor in the process - and deeply resented his insistence on improvisation, which he felt undermined his own spontaneity. Eventually, he and `Mumbles' communicated solely through intermediaries after Brando deliberately muffed a number of takes during the cheesecake vs strudel sequence because he knew how much Sinatra loathed the former.

Yet, in spite of his musical prowess, it's Sinatra who gives the weakest performance. Realising he had been saddled with a supporting role, he puts little effort into his renditions of `Adelaide' and `Sue Me'. By contrast, Blaine tries too hard in her bid to break into movies, although `Adelaide's Lament' is delivered with the same panache that fellow stage alumnus Stubby Kaye brings to the rousing `Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat'.

The real problems, however, lay in Oliver Smith's over-stylised sets (which added artifice but little style or wit) and Mankiewicz's lack of trust in his material. Indeed, he so over-wrote his screenplay in an effort to invest it with dramatic legitimacy that Orson Welles told Abe Burrows that he had `put a tiny turd on every one of your lines'.

Yet business boomed, in spite of the indifferent notices, including Brando's own contention that the picture was `nothing to get on your tricycle about'. Even without Goldwyn's proposed strapline, `Brando Sings!', Guys and Dolls more than doubled its $5.5 million investment and in some countries it outperformed Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind (1939). It has since remained a cult favourite. But, even with a newly restored print doing the rounds, it's still tempting to speculate about Gene Kelly's possible interpretation of `Luck Be a Lady' and the Simmons duet, `I'll Know'.

`No musical with swastikas in it will ever be a success,' Billy Wilder told Ernest Lehman, when he heard that he was adapting Rodgers and Hammerstein's final collaboration for the screen. Indeed, Gene Kelly even less enthusiastic in responding to Lehman's overtures, telling him `to go find somebody else to direct this shit'.

However, Welsh housewife Myra Franklin would have disagreed with both Wilder and Kelly, as she entered the Guinness Book of Records in 1988 for having seen Robert Wise

's The Sound of Music (1965) 940 times. But, then this had been a production that had confounded showbiz sages from the start.

Paramount had acquired the rights to Wolfgang Liebeneiner's 1956 feature, Die Trappe Familie, with a view to fashioning a drama for Audrey Hepburn. But director Vincent Donehue thought that the story of a nun who marries an Austrian captain and helps his singing offspring escape the Nazis would make a splendid vehicle for Mary Martin and hired Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse to write the scenario.

Initially, the Von Trapps were to sing folk songs and hymns, but it was suggested that Rodgers and Hammerstein could be persuaded to contribute an original song - but they insisted on composing an entire score. However, Hammerstein was so preoccupied with Flower Drum Song that he allowed Lindsay and Crouse to complete the book. But, while they stuck to key Hammersteinian themes, the narrative's contrivances and melodramatics conspired to make the score seem trite.

It was still well integrated into the narrative, but its contents were rather conventional. The majority of the melodies recalled operetta or folk and were short of complexity and innovation. Moreover, there were no ballets or soliloquies to offer variation from the string of hummable tunes, like `Do-Re-Mi', `My Favourite Things' and `The Lonely Goatherd', whose wholesomeness was out of step with both contemporary Broadway and rock`n'roll.

But, with Martin dominating proceedings, the show traded on the sound of its music rather than its subject matter, dramatic integrity or staging. It ran for 1,443 performances and won six Tonys before playing 2,385 dates in London. The critics deemed it Rodgers and Hammerstein lite. But the lyricist's death, nine months after the Broadway opening, gave the production a cherishability that the movie inherited.

Stanley Donen and William Wyler followed Kelly's lead in rejecting Fox (who had paid a record $1,250,000 for the rights). But Robert Wise signed up without seeing a show that his associate producer, Saul Chaplin, detested. However, they were seduced by Lehman's screenplay and the prospect of working with Julie Andrews. She was always Wise's first choice for Maria, but Audrey Hepburn and Doris Day had been mooted, as had Bing Crosby, Yul Brynner and Walter Matthau before Christopher Plummer finally reneged on repeated refusals to play Von Trapp.

Plummer would later dub the film `The Sound of Mucus'. But his stiff presence, especially while lip synching to Bill Lee, is one of its major weaknesses.

Yet, this was easily the most cinematic Rodgers and Hammerstein transfer. There was less emphasis than before on static performance and Wise achieved a greater sense of interaction between the characters and their environment, in order to reinforce the contrasts between the confines of the abbey and the Alpine expanses, and between Austria before and after the Anschluss.

However, a fatal whimsicality infests the picture and bolsters the risible equation of song with freedom, as though the Nazis would be less evil if, like Maria, they surrendered to the power of music. The original score had contained harder edged numbers like `How Can Love Survive?' and `No Way to Stop It'. But they were dropped from the film, leaving

Cabaret to prove that the National Socialists could sing, and that they knew some pretty sinister songs.

Consequently, this is a fairy-tale musical, with a folk soul (see Chapter 00), as for all its Neverland romanticism, the emphasis is firmly on family unity, the sovereignty of the land, and the potency of tradition to withstand change and pernicious ideology. It also employs the classic musical tactic of having Maria assist the Captain in reconnecting with his family, while he helps her find a purpose in caring for his children.

Thus, a free spirit once more sets down roots, while a stoic rediscovers his suppressed self, in this instance by agreeing to sing at the Salzburg festival. However, this resort to the backstager gambit of linking the fate of the romantic leads to the success of the show takes on a greater urgency here, as lives depend on the Von Trapps turning their performance into a disappearing act.

The Sound of Music

is often labeled a fresh and youthful picture. But it's very much the work of a man who knew he was dying. Hammerstein's nostalgic lyrics are tinged with the regret and despair of an author who isn't sure what the future holds and his evocation of bygone wars and moral rectitude at a time of uncertainty goes some way to explaining the film's extraordinary popular appeal.

It proved virtually critic-proof and took around $80 million on an $8,250,000 outlay. Indeed, it became a cultural phenomenon, whose depiction of

resistance to a tyrannical regime helped redefine America's self-worth following the Cuban incidents, JFK's assassination, the exposure of its own racist shame by the Civil Rights movement and the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam.

Yet these notions of liberty and patriotic pride did not go down well in Cold War Germany, where Hollywood's patronising approach to Nazism and the concept of Heimat condemned the most commercially successful musical of all time to ignominious failure. Clearly the vanquished and divided population didn't concur with Richard Rodgers's contention `that anyone who can't, on occasion, be sentimental about children, home or nature is sadly maladjusted'. [956 words]

Were it not for Tim Deegan, Denise Borden, Louis Farese,

Bill O'Brien and Dori Hartley, Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975) ould not be part of this round-up. Faced with a critical and commercial catastrophe in the States, Fox was planning to consign Richard O'Brien's B-movie homage to video when Deegan persuaded Borden to screen the film as a midnite matinee at the Waverly Theatre in Greenwich Village.

But what turned a curio into a cult was Farese's ad-libbed interaction with the dialogue and O'Brien and Hartley's decision to attend screenings in character costume. Rocky, thus, became a refuge for outsiders and exhibitionists, who identified with the movie's motto `Don't Dream It, Be It', and it's been a countercultural phenomenon ever since.

The Rocky Horror Show

opened in the 60-seater Theatre Upstairs at London's Royal Court in June 1973. It was the brainchild of struggling actor Richard O'Brien, who played Riff Raff, as well as writing the scenario and score. But much credit should also go to Richard Hartley - who helped O'Brien produce a song demo and persuaded the Court to mount the production - and director Jim Sharman and designer Brian Thomson, who were to be largely responsible for the look of both the stage and screen incarnations.

Producer Michael White and pop maverick Jonathan King also merit mention for respectively providing half of the £2,000 budget and for releasing a cast album that prompted US record mogul Lou Adler to open the show at the Roxy in Los Angeles. This, in turn, led to a movie deal with Fox, and a disastrous 45-show engagement at the Belasco Theatre in New York.

But there's little love lost between the various protagonists, as each is keen to secure his own slice of the kudos for Rocky's success. Yet, to most fans, the picture's appeal lies in O'Brien's score and Tim Curry's bravura performance as Frank N Furter, a transvestite from the planet Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, whose encounter with Brad Majors (Barry Bostwick) and his fiancée. Janet Weiss (Susan Sarandon) culminates in his own destruction and that of his creation, Rocky Horror (Peter Hinwood), by his hunchbacked henchman, Riff Raff (Richard O'Brien), and his incestuous sister, Magenta (Patricia Quinn).

Rejecting a substantial budget and the prospect of Mick Jagger playing Frank, Sharman remained largely loyal to the original cast and shot the film for $1 million over eight weeks at the old Hammer studios at Bray and the nearby Gothic pile, Oakley Court. However, Fox nearly cancelled the project at the eleventh hour and few were surprised when it opened to disastrous Stateside reviews.

But the British press was less squeamish about

Rocky's blend of audiovisual pastiche and good honest smut and it was soon hailed as a progenitor of punk. But it was the late-night screenings at arthouses, grindhouses and campuses across America that rescued it from obscurity - although the Waverly sequence in Fame (1980) did no harm, either.

The press release called Rocky `an outrageous assemblage of the most stereo-typed science fiction movies, Marvel comics, Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello outings and rock 'n' roll of every vintage' and Jim Sharman was very conscious of these origins:

`Being surrounded by film mythology, the theatre version was very filmatic, as the film is very theatrical, although I've tried to avoid making a sort of filmed stage play.'

But Rocky is now less of a movie than a karaoke experience. Screenings are tantamount to quasi-religious rituals, in which audience participation is regimented by orthodox quips and actions - although local variations do apply and new crazes are communicated by The Transylvanian newsletter.

Such mania has seen Rocky gross over $135 million. But even its cast members (many of whom prefer the vitality and viscerality of the stage original) are somewhat at a loss to explain its enduring appeal.

A key factor, however, is the subtext, which revolves around notions of stardom and MGM's attitude to its troubled creation, Judy Garland. Indeed, Sharman had even planned to shoot the action upto Frank's entrance in Wizard of Oz monochrome. But he had to content himself with the Kansas tactic of placing the alien retinue among the residents of Denton, as the ploy proved too expensive. However, the conceit can now be viewed among the extras on the 25th Anniversary DVD.

Completing our survey of anniversary masterpieces is Nashville (1975).

Robert Altman decided that he wanted to make a musical after hearing Keith Carradine sing `It Don't Worry Me' and `I'm Easy' at a party. Rejecting a property entitled The Great Southern Amusement Company, he set Joan Tewkesbury to write an original scenario. But as this was to be a typically extemporised collaboration, Altman also insisted that the cast composed their own songs and many relied on the assistance of Richard Baskin, whose contribution to the 50-60 titles that were developed for the project is all the more remarkable considering his influences were Bartok, Gershwin and Satie rather than American folk or country-and-western.

Shooting over 45 days on a $2 million budget, Altman amassed over 16 hours of footage and initially considered releasing two features, Nashville Red and Nashville Blue. But hopes of producing a 10-hour miniseries for ABC were dashed when the film grossed only $7 million - despite reviews that compared Altman to everyone from Chekhov, Joyce, Dos Passos and Mailer to Fellini, Godard, Bertolucci and Astaire.

Howard Koch, who co-wrote Casablanca, considered this study of `the famous somebodys crossing paths with the lowly nobodys in a city of dreams and illusions' to be `the Citizen Kane of this generation of moviemakers', while Wim Wenders (who was married to Ronee Blakely) called it `a movie about noise'.

Molly Haskell proclaimed it to be `a Chaucerian musical pilgrimage whose Canterbury is Nashville' and a quasi-religious sense of America after the Fall pervades the picture, which was released exactly midway between President Richard Nixon's resignation and the start of the Bicentennial celebrations. Moreover, it opened in the same month that A Chorus Line - another story of showbiz aspirants in a microcosmic setting - premiered on Broadway and launched its own assault on the conventions of the stage musical.

Nashville

is a denunciation of the fundamentalist mentality. It equates the conservatism and folksily faux humility of the country scene with the hypocrisy of the political establishment and indicts Nixon, Hollywood and Nashville for each devaluing a cherished American institution. But it's also about the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the suppression and exploitation of women, debasement in the pursuit of ambition, and the public's acquiescence in the decline of political integrity and artistic ingenuity.

But, most significantly, Nashville is about the death of the musical.

Altman felt that Nashville in the 1970s had the same feel as Hollywood in the 40s. Consequently, such MGM and Fox musicals as Meet Me in St Louis, The Harvey Girls, Down Argentine Way and Moon Over Miami exerted a considerable influence on his approach. But he also subverts the genre's love of symbolic celebration by contrasting Centennial Summer's postwar sense of euphoria with the nation's despondency at the tail end of the Vietnam conflict.

This sense of chaos and inertia is superbly conveyed in the airport and freeway sequences, which not only establish the cacophony that will eventually drown out the music, but also suggest that the songs are as superficial as their singers. Thus, Nashville treats music in much the same way that Rashomon exploited diegetic truth and posits that the traditional musical has no place in modern America, because the generic gambits that made it work are now extraneous to everyday life.

Indeed, everything about Nashville is designed to undermine musical convention. The customary duality is destroyed by presenting the characters in isolation or triangles and the resultant lack of romantic contentment dashes any backstager notions of success.

But Altman reserves his special ire for the folk musical (see Chapter 00). With everyone in town for their own ends, the usual sense of harmonious community is corrupted. Consequently, the myth that anyone could be a performer is shattered, because music no longer emanates spontaneously from the soul of the people, but is manufactured and packaged in order to make money, sustain celebrity or secure political power or sexual favour.

Stripped of its potential to touch hearts and change lives - let alone expose the psyche of the singer - music becomes an irrelevance within its own genre. Whereas ambient sound was once suspended for the duration of a number, it now interrupts or obscures the music during the majority of the live spots, because performance now belongs in the artificial studio environment of the real world and not in a screen fantasy. In the late 1980s, Altman considered making a sequel, Nashville 12. But, with the musical virtually extinct, there was nothing left to lampoon.