The Band Wagon

1953 musical

Rating: 14/20

Plot: An aging song 'n' dance man joins a pretentious stage production and falls for a dame.

Vicente Minnelli might not be for me. As a cinephile who loves color almost more than he loves anything else, it seems odd to say that Minnelli isn't for me. I enjoyed the colors in this one, too. Some shots dazzle with striking colors. A song-and-dance number in Central Park, the weird and noirish "Girl Hunt" sequence (especially a great shot of Astaire on a fire escape), the hyperactive colors at the arcade where Astaire gets a shoeshine, hotel wallpaper and furniture. There are lots of colors, and as a guy who likes colors, that alone makes this worth watching.

Actually, it's worth watching because of that shoeshine. This is a comedy that I can't imagine would make too many people laugh, but I lost it during this shoeshine sequence. Astaire starts singing about how wonderful shoeshines are, probably with the lyric "I like a good shoeshine because a good shoeshine is fine!" in there somewhere, and he and the shoeshiner started dancing flamboyantly and whipping towels around and circling the shoeshine chair while people watched. I started imagining that happening in real life and then couldn't stop laughing for over twenty minutes.

Fred Astaire seems completely unnatural in this when he's doing anything other than dancing. All of the male performers give pretty hammy performances actually. Cordona has a great Price-esque voice, more deliberately hamming it up because that's what his character is supposed to be, but with Astaire and that other guy, it's just a wackiness that makes them seem like the type of people who would be overly excited about getting a shoeshine. I did like both women in this. Cyd Charisse showed more versatility than even Astaire by dancing ballet, soft-shoeing in the park, and getting downright jazzy during that "Girl Hunt" bit. And I fell in love with these striking green gloves that she wore in one scene. And when she removes a coat and reveals this glimmering red dress, one that showed off a whole bunch of her lovely legs, in the "Girl Hunt" club? My, oh, my. I think I became a man at that stage.