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The Broadway revue shares the film's title, it needs a new leading lady and sorts through the crowd of hopefuls. "What do they want? Jane Powell and Vera-Ellen rolled into one?" The fellas have their favorites, the director (Gower Champion) hopes to lure the estranged partner (Marge Champion) out of retirement, his assistant (Bob Fosse) falls for the pert tap-dancer (Debbie Reynolds), the composer (Kurt Kasznar) fancies the artsy ballerina (Helen Wood). "Nothing is Impossible," goes the tune, as illustration the lanky guys do rapid-fire gyrations while the schlub gawks at a 135° lean, practically a Tashlin effect. Vera Caspary story and Burton Lane-Ira Gershwin score for Stanley Donen's follow-up to Singin' in the Rain, "lo and behold, a million charms." Disconcertingly boyish, Fosse somersaults to Reynolds' delight in a studio-park, complete with painted cityscape at dusk and a river for falling into. "Right now the thing to discuss / Is the wonderful status of us!" (Their other number together is a reverie played in reverse, so that a blizzard of confetti ascends the screen and popped balloons are conjured up out of thin air.) The Champion flame is rekindled on a rooftop for the benefit of West Side Story, then fanned in a chamber streaked with poles that darkens into a private cosmos. Throughout, Donen edits via camera movement, often craning from long shot to medium shot and back. "Applause, Applause" for the climax, a whole circus squeezed into a proscenium of moving sidewalks and acrobatic choruses. "A girl can't dance in a vacuum, can she?" Largely forgotten, yet there it is on Godard's list of favorite 1960 releases, ahead of Mizoguchi and Lang and Buñuel and Hitchcock. With Richard Anderson, William Ching, Lurene Tuttle, Larry Keating, and Donna Martell.
--- Fernando F. Croce |