Gerald Mast > Quotes

“Like all Freed musicals and all Astaire musicals, The Band Wagon believes that high and low, art and entertainment, elite and popular aspirations meet in the American musical. The Impressionist originals in Tony’s hotel room, which eventually finance his snappier vision of the show, draw not only a connection to An American in Paris but to painters, like Degas, who found art in entertainers. The ultimate hymn to this belief is the new Dietz and Schwartz song for the film, “That’s Entertainment,” which is to filmusicals what Berlin’s “There’s No Business Like Show Business” is to the stage.11 Whether a hot plot teeming with sex, a gay divorcée after her ex, or Oedipus Rex, whether a romantic swain after a queen or “some Shakespearean scene (where a ghost and a prince meet and everything ends in mincemeat),” it’s all one world of American entertainment. “Hip Hooray, the American way.” Dietz’s lyrics echo Mickey’s theorem in Strike Up the Band. What’s American? Exactly this kind of movie musical from Mount Hollywood Art School.”
― Gerald Mast, CAN'T HELP SINGIN': THE AMERICAN MUSICAL ON STAGE AND SCREEN

“Every art always deals with human beings, it is a human manifestation and presents human beings. To paraphrase Marx: "The root of all art is man." When the film close-up strips the veil of our imperceptiveness and insensitivity from the hidden little things and shows us the face of objects, it still shows us man, for what makes objects expressive are the human expressions projected on to them. The objects only reflect our own selves, and this is what distinguished art from scientific knowledge (although even the latter is to a great extent subjectively determined). When we see the face image of things, we do what the ancients did in creating gods in man's image and breathing a human soul into them. The close-ups of the film are the creative instruments of this mighty visual anthropomorphism.”
― Gerald Mast, Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings

“Only after resolving the conflict between Tony’s entertainment and Jeffrey’s art can the film serve its climactic dessert of onstage musical numbers—exactly as the Busby Berkeley musicals do. Like An American in Paris, The Band Wagon sweeps up its narrative dust quickly enough to get on with the show but subtly enough to convince an audience of its psychological credibility. Minnelli, Comden, and Green solve two ticklish problems so cleverly that they both reveal and hide the way to solve such problems.”
― Gerald Mast, CAN'T HELP SINGIN': THE AMERICAN MUSICAL ON STAGE AND SCREEN

“At MGM, Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli made their last musical together, Bells Are Ringing (1960), reunited with Comden and Green. Dean Martin joined the Broadway package, replacing Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s eldest son.13 Adding Martin’s star persona to the Judy Holliday vehicle produced another close match of movie star to musical role. As Jeff Moss, a Broadway playwright who’s been hitting the bottle harder than the typewriter, Martin fit the public perception of his romance with the grape. Even those who don’t care for the liquid Martin style find him charming in this musical.14 The vivacious answering-service operator Holliday nurses him back to sobriety and success, and the laid back, breezy Martin hoofs with Holliday in casual soft-shoe duets like “Just in Time.” In “Drop that Name,” Minnelli’s eye adds stylish brilliance to a satire of New York’s pretentious social elite, a Black-and-White Ball of burlesques and grotesques in answer to An American in Paris. Though Bells Are Ringing is neither vintage Freed nor vintage Minnelli—cramped by a middle-class present, a CinemaScope frame imprisoned in stageset interiors, and self-conscious disguises for Holliday’s shape—it is pleasant enough Holliday and Martin.”
― Gerald Mast, CAN'T HELP SINGIN': THE AMERICAN MUSICAL ON STAGE AND SCREEN

“In Rodgers and Hammerstein’s familiar “A Wonderful Guy,” from South Pacific, the hard, alliterative consonants of the opening line, “corny” and “Kansas,” fall precisely on the downbeat of two successive measures. However interesting Rodgers’s waltz and Hammerstein’s simile, the two join in a musical-verbal conjunction that conveys the emphatic joy of the singer at that moment. Hammerstein knew that the anapests (“corny as,” “Kansas in”) were verbal equivalents of the waltz, which he emphasized with the crackling alliteration. Kansas is actually not very corny in August: Kansas is the wheat state and Iowa is the corn state. If you imagine “I’m as corny as Iowa in August,” you can hear the poetic, musical, and dramatic reasons for Hammerstein’s agricultural stretcher. Americans hear and, consequently, understand these verbal-musical bundles automatically; the words and music of the best American film and theater songs fit so snugly that their conjunction seems “natural.” Only by pulling words and music apart does one hear careful art coyly masquerading as simple nature.”
― Gerald Mast, CAN'T HELP SINGIN': THE AMERICAN MUSICAL ON STAGE AND SCREEN

“Having settled on the Shavian style of Higgins’s songs, Lerner and Loewe weave two other levels of musical style into the score—just as Rodgers and Loesser wove multiple musical styles into mirrors of class and character. Eliza, the lowly flower seller whom Higgins turns into a lady, could sing with the conventional fire and passion of operetta and musical heroines. The passionate, full-throated sound of her songs—the longing of “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” the anger of “Just You Wait, ’Enry ‘lggins,” the joy of “I Could Have Danced All Night,” the insistence of “Show Me”—contrasts with the dry wit of Higgins’s talk-songs. This contrast not only gives the score musical variety and color but embodies the essential dramatic conflict between intellect and emotion. The third musical style belongs to Alfred Doolittle, Eliza’s working-class dad, who, like Higgins, is an unconventional moralist—resisting such constraints of middle-class morality as work, sobriety, thrift, and marriage. Lerner and Loewe saw Doolittle as a refugee from the English music hall—literally, since the veteran music-hall performer, Stanley Holloway, created the role. Doolittle’s “With a Little Bit of Luck” and “Get Me to the Church on Time” are bouncy, raucous music-hall numbers, oom-pah marches with conventional major harmonies and not a trace of American syncopation.”
― Gerald Mast, CAN'T HELP SINGIN': THE AMERICAN MUSICAL ON STAGE AND SCREEN

“His 1968 film of Finian’s Rainbow, a fanciful 1947 Broadway blast from the left by Fred Saidy, E. Y. “Yip” Harburg and Burton Lane, is a guidebook to other movies and musicals. Coppola packs his film with intrusive references that proclaim the artifices of filmusical style and the tension between credible storytelling and musical convention. The editing of an arrival by train comes directly from Hallelujah; a dance with laundry on a clothesline from Dames; the aerial floating on that clothing from Mary Poppins; the spray of fire hoses on a burning church from Strike; the passing of water pails, “Keep the water coming,” from Our Daily Bread; the use of blackface from two decades of filmusicals between The Jazz Singer and The Jolson Story.”
― Gerald Mast, CAN'T HELP SINGIN': THE AMERICAN MUSICAL ON STAGE AND SCREEN