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The overture showcases one of Vincente Minnelli's finest effects, the spectral Scottish Highlands village roused by sunshine and a gently gliding camera. "The strange thing that happened to two hunters who lost their way," a couple of Yanks abroad, one (Gene Kelly) yearns for the ethereal while the other (Van Johnson) prefers the tangible. The tartan idyll not on the map, out of the mist once every century, just in time for a wedding. (The conjugal union that galvanizes the locals leaves the chum cold, "I've seen too many happy love affairs broken up by it.") The glow of the romantic image is appropriately evanescent, Cyd Charisse in yellow or crimson dresses dancing against artificial greenery. "Why, it's almost like bein' in love," marvels the besotted hero to a disinterested yak in the heather field. Eternity and a day, cf. Lost Horizon, the dreaming mind as a laboratory experiment in a sound stage filled with matte paintings. "Waitin' for My Dearie" ends with Charisse by the window in an invocation of Toulmouche, "I'll Go Home with Bonnie Jean" hinges on an urban sourpuss warming to a tap duet. "Maybe this is the day they take pictures for postcards." Insular enchantment as if kept under glass, a communal blessing yet a curse to the rejected hothead (Hugh Laing) who ponders the village's map like "the dimensions of my jail." (The intrusion of the wedding dance is a rough draft for Some Came Running, the chase in the moors goes into Home from the Hill.) Minnelli savors the jangly hubbub of a New York restaurant before dutifully returning to the pastoral oasis, Mizoguchi remembers the ending in Princess Yang Kwei Fei and Von Trier fastidiously scrapes off all beauty for Dogville. With Elaine Stewart, Barry Jones, Albert Sharpe, Virginia Bosler, Eddie Quillan, Jimmy Thompson, and Tudor Owen.
--- Fernando F. Croce |