TCM Greatest Classic Films Collection: American Musicals [2 Discs]

DVD FEATURES:

• Region: 1
• Number of Discs: 2
• Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 (Pre-1954 Standard)
• Audio: Dolby Digital Mono, Dolby Digital 5.1
• Screen: Color
• Subtitle: French, Spanish, English
• Features:
  • • cc

AWARDS

• Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences

•     Won Best Musical Score - 1948 (Roger Edens, Johnny Green)
•     Nominated Best Color Costume Design - 1953 (Mary Ann Nyberg)
•     Nominated Best Musical Score - 1953 (Adolph Deutsch)
•     Nominated Best Story and Screenplay - 1953 (Adolph Green, Betty Comden)
•     Nominated Best Musical Score - 1952 (Lennie Hayton)
•     Nominated Best Supporting Actress - 1952 (Jean Hagen)
•     Nominated Best Color Cinematography - 1944 (George Folsey)
•     Nominated Best Score - Musical - 1944 (George Stoll)
•     Nominated Best Screenplay - 1944 (Fred F. Finklehoffe, Irving Brecher)
•     Nominated Best Song - 1944 (Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin)

• American Film Institute

•     Won 100 Greatest American Movies - 1998

• British Academy of Film and Television Arts

•     Nominated Best Film - Any Source - 1952 (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

• Directors Guild of America

•     Nominated Best Director - 1952 (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly)

• Hollywood Foreign Press Association

•     Won Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture - Musical or Comed - 1952 (Donald O'Connor)
•     Nominated Best Picture - Musical or Comedy - 1952

• Library of Congress

•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1994
•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1993
•     Won U.S. National Film Registry - 1988

• National Board of Review

•     Won Best Acting - 1944 (Margaret O'Brien)
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1952
•     Nominated Best Picture - 1944

• New York Times

•     Won 10 Best Films - 1944

• Telluride Film Festival

•     Film Presented - 2002

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION:

• Director:

  Charles Walters, Vincente Minnelli, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

• Producer:

  Arthur Freed

• Screenwriter:

  Guy Bolton, Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Sidney Sheldon

• Screen Story:

  Albert Hackett, Frances Goodrich

• Book Author:

  Sally Benson

• Screenwriter:

  Irving Brecher, Fred F. Finklehoffe, Betty Comden, Adolph Green

• Screen Story:

  Betty Comden, Adolph Green

• Cinematographer:

  Harry Stradling, George Folsey, Harold Hal Rosson, Harry Jackson

• Songwriter:

  Irving Berlin

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Roger Edens, Johnny Green, Roger Green

• Composer (Music Score):

  Ralph Blane, Hugh Martin, George Stoll

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  George Stoll

• Composer (Music Score):

  Nacio Herb Brown

• Songwriter:

  Betty Comden, Roger Edens

• Composer (Music Score):

  Arthur Freed

• Songwriter:

  Adolph Green

• Composer (Music Score):

  Lennie Hayton

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Lennie Hayton

• Songwriter:

  Fred Brown, Al Goodhart, Hoffman

• Musical Arrangement:

  Alexander Courage

• Musical Direction/Supervision:

  Adolph Deutsch

• Composer (Music Score):

  Howard Dietz

• Songwriter:

  Howard Dietz

• Composer (Music Score):

  Arthur Schwartz

• Songwriter:

  Arthur Schwartz

• Editor:

  Albert Akst, Adrienne Fazan

• Art Director:

  Cedric Gibbons, Jack Martin Smith, Lemuel Ayers, Randall Duell, Preston Ames

• Associate Producer:

  Roger Edens

• Set Designer:

  Arthur Krams, Edwin B. Willis, Paul Huldschinsky, Jacque Mapes, Keogh Gleason

• Costume Designer:

  Irene Valles, Irene Sharaff, Walter Plunkett, Mary Ann Nyberg

• Makeup:

  Jack Dawn, William J. Tuttle

• Special Effects:

  Warren Newcombe, Irving G. Ries

• First Assistant Director:

  Jerry Thorpe

• Choreography:

  Robert Alton, Fred Astaire, Charles Walters, Michael Kidd, Oliver Smith

• Lyricist:

  Arthur Freed

REVIEWS:

• Meet Me in St. Louis is a "family values" exercise in traditional Americana, following the life of a midwest family as the World's Fair comes to early 20th century St. Louis. There are songs, family crises, more songs, more crises, and more songs. The highlight of the film is Judy Garland's singing "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." Meet Me in St. Louis was the first team-up for Garland and director Vincente Minnelli, whom Garland would go on to marry, producing their daughter Liza Minnelli, though they would divorce six years later, in 1951. Minnelli's talent for handling complex set pieces works well in this film, as does the lively Technicolor cinematography of George Folsey. At least some of the credit should go to songwriter turned producer Arthur Freed for his excellent work in bringing together the proper talent. Freed also doubled as the singing voice of actor Leon Ames. One piece of Hollywood backstage lore -- that this was the film for which the director (Minnelli) resorted to telling a child actress (Margaret O'Brien) that her dog had been run over and killed, in order to get her to cry properly in the next scene to be shot -- has since been denied by O'Brien. The actress recently told Turner Classic Movies' Robert Osborne that her impetus for crying in the scene was hearing (from her mother) that actress Jane Powell wouldn't have any problem drumming up tears. O'Brien - fiercely competitive with Powell -- then wept on camera without any problem. She cried at full volume, and she later received a special Oscar for her performance. ~ Richard Gilliam, Rovi
• Made towards the end of MGM producer Arthur Freed's peak period of musical productions, at a time when movies, theater, and other forms of entertainment were all feeling the heat from the rise of television, preeminent musical director Vincente Minnelli's backstage story celebrates the musical itself and its brand of pop entertainment. Pitting Fred Astaire's washed-up movie hoofer against Jack Buchanan's high-falutin' artiste and Cyd Charisse's transplanted ballerina, The Band Wagon reflexively pokes fun at the musical's excesses and delves into the question of what an audience really wants, implicitly defending traditional forms of entertainment at a time when Hollywood was in decline and consumers were turning to new form of recreation. As with Freed's Singin' in the Rain (1952), the sophisticated comedy of show business manners becomes a showcase for the Freed Unit's sparkling production values and musical acumen, as well as Minnelli's stylistic virtuosity. While numbers such as Astaire's 42nd street dance "Shine on Your Shoes" and Astaire's and Charisse's "Dancing in the Dark" reveal Minnelli's mastery at integrating dance and story, the final "Band Wagon" revue is a peerless sequence of pure musical entertainment, with "The Girl Hunt" deftly mixing the high and low arts of ballet and jazz in a parody of Mickey Spillane's detective yarns. Though not one of Minnelli's Oscar winners, The Band Wagon has come to be considered his best musical, and a wise elegy to the form. ~ Lucia Bozzola, Rovi
• Easter Parade crams seventeen songs into 103 minutes and, even at that, still struggles to find enough plot to fill out its length. Fortunately, the musical numbers are very good, and the wait between them is seldom long enough for the story to become tedious. Stars Judy Garland and Fred Astaire find a strong first-time chemistry, to Irving Berlin's music set to the Oscar-winning adaptation of Roger Edens and Johnny Green. Choreographer Charles Walters nominally performs in the director's chair. He's competent in getting the singing and dancing on film, but, as in much of his work, he shows little interest in the story that surrounds the music. The film maintains a fun, wholesome, upbeat tone and has the classy look common in MGM films of this era. ~ Richard Gilliam, Rovi
• Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain is usually lumped together with the other MGM "songbook" musicals of its era, An American in Paris and The Band Wagon. In contrast to those two outstanding works of music and motion, however, Singin' in the Rain had an additional layer of importance and appeal as one of Hollywood's relatively rare feature films about itself. The Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown songbook is on one level the center of the movie, but it's also a backdrop for a humorous and delightfully stylized look back at the crisis that engulfed the movie mecca and its inhabitants once synchronized sound came to films. The musical was made in 1952, only 25 years after the beginning of the series of events depicted and satirized in the script, so recent in time that there were still plenty of old studio hands (including sound department head Douglas Shearer) who had firsthand memories of the actual events. The fit was natural for the music, too, since Freed and Brown had been on hand (and even onscreen) for the arrival of sound to MGM in 1929. The film is full of delightful in-jokes about its subject and the people who lived through the era: Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont is a burlesque of silent-movie sex symbol Clara Bow, whose decidedly urban style of diction never really fit her image or what the public wanted, while Millard Mitchell's R.F. Simpson was a gently jocular satire of Freed himself, who could never quite visualize the elaborate musical numbers whose scripts and budgets he was approving as producer. Donald O'Connor's Cosmo Brown was an onscreen stand-in for men like Franz Waxman and dozens of other musicians, who moved from writing arrangements or conducting the major theater orchestras to heading the music departments of the studios. The resulting musical, in addition to offering a brace of memorable songs and performances (with a startlingly sultry featured spot for Cyd Charisse in the "Broadway Melody" sequence, as a bonus), gave audiences a short-course pop-history lesson about how the movies learned to talk, sing, and dance. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi