"The Music Man" is another one of those films that goes far far beyond rational emotion for me. Its place in my heart is firm and immovable. And honestly, not all that many people understand. The most common question I get when I talk about this seems to be 'why do you love such a weird film?' The best answer I can give is - don't all weird things deserve love from someone? To me, this film is like that shy girl in the corner of the room who everyone avoids. Then, one day, that girl locks eyes with someone over a joke, and they suddenly realise she is HILARIOUS.
This film, likewise, is HILARIOUS. It mocks the bajiminy out of small-town folk but does it with the utmost love and tenderness. Creator Meredith Willson based 'The Music Man' on his own experiences of growing up in Mason City Iowa, and only someone who knows that kind of life like the back of his hand could simultaneously roast it and love it so splendidly.
Robert Preston was not a dead cert for the role, not by any means. He had been an actor in Hollywood for quite some time, but never a lead actor. He was The Best Friend Who Got Killed kind of an actor in films such as Beau Geste and North-West Mounted Police.
So - he went on the stage. He was successful there and when the opportunity arose, he auditioned for The Music Man. He had some musical knowledge behind him, and the added attraction of not being so full of himself as a musical performer that he couldn't be given direction. He got the role.
http://www.pinterest.com/pin/461970874250856821/
It was such a huge success at the time. The Korean War was over, the world was changing left right and centre and then this show appeared - this show that celebrates Home Town America and Apple Pie and Chickens That Lay Double-Yoked Eggs. It struck a chord with the theatre going public. You know, West Side Story was nominated for Tony Awards the same year as The Music Man. Two musicals from completely different worlds. The Music Man trounced West Side, and yet West Side is much more famous today.
Many many different companies clamoured for the rights to adapt the musical. At one point in time it looked like there would be a television special of the show, but very fortunately that fell through. Such a tremendous amount of money and time and effort went into the making of this film, and it all paid off, in my opinion. This is one of the last great musicals, before they had to be left alone for a really long time so that the world could work out a way to process them again.
More about the cast. Shirley Jones is one of my favourite musical performers of the period. She is beautiful, both to look at and to listen to. I always get that 'Oh good, it's you and not Vera-Ellen' feeling when I see her. You know, she went to Broadway with the blessings of her parents to try to make it big when she was around 18 years old. She ended up catching the eye of Rodgers and Hammerstein and became the only singer to be put under personal contract by them. She had already starred in 'Oklahoma', 'Carousel' and then very determinedly in 'Elmer Gantry', playing a prostitute and winning a Best Supporting Oscar.
She is sublime in 'The Music Man'. Her work with Pert Kelton, Robert Preston and Ron Howard, in particular, is just a delight to watch. She sings in 'Being in Love' 'but someday, why couldn't there be, just once, somebody being in love with me?' and I say to you right now, who wouldn't be in love with Shirley Jones? She, of couse, went on to steal a nation's heart in 'The Partridge Family'. She married Jack Cassidy before getting the role, and then later, completely independently, David Cassidy, her stepson, was also given his role on the show. I had no idea that they were real life Stepmother and Stepson. Goes to show you how much I know.
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I also love Shirley Jones because she is able to pull off This Hat. I mean - DAMN.
And this dress.
I have spent many many hours trying to work out which dress I like best in 'The Music Man' and believe me, there are many to chose from. Logic dictates that I ought to like the most party-fied dress the best, but I still stop at this one. There is just something so awesome about the colours, the pompoms and her eye makeup all going on here. It was all meant to be. She became pregnant whilst making this film, and by the time it got around to these scenes, she was around 6 months pregnant, according to her. During the scene on the footbridge,
apparently she was so pregnant that when she and Robert Preston embraced, he got booted in the stomach by her unborn son. He was rather shocked, previously being unaware of her pregnancy. I have stared and stared at her, and I can't tell she is pregant - apart from a lovely full face. So I say points to you, Dorothy Jeakins costume designer - you did a bangup job.
Mason City Iowa outdid itself celebrating the premiere of this film.
The town had a massive festival. Warner Bros, admittedly, provided them with a cash injection, but there were 100 marching bands, a massive parade, more ice-cream and apple pie and festival business than you can possibly imagine, and Robert Preston, Shirley Jones, Morton da Costa and Meredith Willson himself there. I kind of miss this notion. I can't imagine many places doing this these days (with the vaguely rememberd exception of Auckland and the Lord of Rings Trilogy...)
Watch it. Watch it for its wacky supporting cast, for the extra-ordinary amount of toe-tapping tunes that you realise somehow you have known all your life, for the beauty of the dresses and the sheer dynanism of Preston's performance. Just watch it.
I don't honestly think I could love this film more if I tried. In part it is a familiarity thing - like most things that you come across when you are a child and you love, you continue to love it no matter what. I'm not talking about Tim Burton's 'Batman' which you saw as a teenager and loved and then watched again after twenty years and were horrified, I am talking about true filmic love from childhood.
In the first place, it is simply a beautiful film to look at. Gull Cottage has got to be THE dream cottage by the sea (although it does seem to be a very long way from the beach. Have you ever tried to work out Mrs Muir's route home?) and I know that it started my life long love-affair with bay windows. The set was constructed on the Palos Verdes peninsula in California. Gull Cottage had removable portions to allow for easy camera access to the interior of the house, and, as far as I can tell, the set was demolished at the end of the shoot. I am sure for the Palos Verdes locals it is odd to see their now heavily populated coastline as it was 60 years ago - all trees and bush and sheep.
Charles Lang Jr. was the cinemtographer for this film and he does the most splendid job. He had worked mostly at Paramount before this, and apparently the two studios had very different visual styles. Fox films always had a very rich visual background, and it must have been quite the adjustment to go from one studio's style to another. Charles Lang Jr, fortunately, was extremely well versed in 'The Ghost Story' as a filmic style. He shot 'The Uninvited', that most gorgeous & genuinely spooky of ghost stories, 'The Cat and the Canary' and 'The Ghost Breakers' among many others. Something to note - the first glimpse we see of Captain Gregg is supposedly his portrait in the living room, but it is in fact Rex Harrison - check out the angle at which we see his face, compared to the portrait. She was looking at the ghost and she never realised it....
And then the first time we REALLY see Captain Gregg, well, for me, it is a bit of a mini thunderbolt. Imagine having a portion of your kitchen that was the blackest black, so black that a ghost could easily emerge from it. (They don't make kitchens like they used to). And how utterly gutsy she is when she comes face to face with him. I doubt I would have as much presence of mind as she does when faced with a ghost. The depth of their growing regard for each other is another reason that I love this film so much - you can see them fall in love in front of your eyes in the most comfortable of ways, and yet for such a long time nothing is said. When the subject is finally broached, it is done so in the most matter of fact of ways, almost as if to say 'Of course we're in love, why on earth wouldn't we be?'
The screenplay to the film was written by Philip Dunne, a prolific screenwriter, known best for his adaptations rather than his original works. Some of his best known screenplays were 'How Green Was My Valley', 'The Robe' , 'The Agony and the Ecstasy' and, quite fascinatingly, the 1992 'The Last of the Mohicans' starring Daniel Day Lewis is largely based on his 1932 screenplay of the novel by James Fenimore Cooper. He worked at Twentieth Century Fox for a very impressive 25 years and is also the utterer of the most delightful quote; 'If I had known it was the Golden Age of Hollywood, I would have enjoyed it more'.
Wanna get yourself a first edition? http://www.biblio.com/the-ghost-and-mrs-muir-by-dick-r-a/work/278006
The novel on which the film is based was written under a pseudonym, R.A. Dick. The author of the novel is Josephine Leslie, a writer I am completely unaware of. I do have to wonder - if you were going to pick a pseudonym, why on earth would you pick that one? Was it a bet?
The film was edited by Dorothy Spencer, another extremely impressive individual. Dorothy began as a cutter at Twentieth Century Fox in the 1920's and had her first full editing credit in 1937. She was nominated four times for an Academy Award and she retired in 1979. That's 42 years editing, folks.
And I cannot leave out Bernard Herrmann. This score is reputed to be his favourite, and indeed, one of the key phrases from 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir' he is obviously so enamoured of that he took it and reworked it into his opera 'Wuthering Heights'. I bought the score a number of years ago and for quite some time was unable to listen to it without having a little bit of a cry. I am much older and harder now, and go the goosebumps option rather than the tears option.
Mr Herrmann himself - http://www.othehumanities.com/happy-birthday-bernard-herrmann-his-10-best-scores/
It seems, really, that there were a number of top-notch professional working on this film. Joseph L. Mankewicz was a very literate director who appreciated and knew how to deal with a witty screenplay. Philip Dunne and Bernard Herrman worked very well together, Herrmann taking into consideration Dunne's notes regarding the score as storyteller. Dorothy Spencer pieced together Charles Lang Jr's superb cinematographer with the same ebb and flow as the sea that features such a great deal in the script. Oleg Cassini designed for his estranged wife a series of costumes that I refer to as '40's 1900's', as most films refuse to ever go the whole hog in exact costume replication for fear of looking ridiculous (which, let's face it, they probably would) and Gene Tierney looks exquisite for the entire film.
Such a beautiful gown - http://thefoxling.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/ghost-and-mrs-muir-costume-design.html
Now, I did promise that I would expand more fully on Gene Tierney's real-life tragedies and I will. She was married to Oleg Cassini, and was pregnant in the early Forties when she served at the Hollywood Canteen. She contracted rubella during her pregnancy and her daughter Daria was born severely disabled in 1943. This began the process of the unravelling of poor Gene, who had a number of mental breakdowns subsequently, as well as a number of institutionalisation in an attempt to 'cure' her.
Then, mind bogglingly, she met an enraptured fan years later, who told her that she had gone to the Hollywood Canteen to meet her specifically, even though she had been sick with German Measles and everyone had told her not to go. But she had been determined to get an autograph, and had also been able to get a kiss on the cheek from Gene. I don't know if Gene told her what she had done. Honestly, how would you begin?
Now, I don't know how Agatha Christie knew this, as Gene Tierney did not release her memoir until the 1980's and Agatha Christie wrote her novel in the 1960's (and if you have not read this particular novel, I am not going to tell you the name of it because it is GREAT and it deserves just to be read without Knowledge In Advance) but my mind was well and truly BLOWN when I found out about this. Life is well and truly stranger than fiction.
And I haven't even touched on Rex Harrison. I have loved him ever since I saw this film. His portrait was a simply photograph that was blown up and painted over - but it leaps off the screen to me. Mr Kitty had a bit of a Google when trying to find out where the original portrait had ended up, and found a site that made him gasp with horror and then he showed it to me. I can't actually bring myself to write down what happened to the portrait, but if you do want to know.... http://silverscenesblog.blogspot.com.au/2013/11/whatever-became-of-portrait-of-captain.html
But back to 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir'.
There is a particular point in the film that always
bothered me immensely as a child. I will try not to Spoiler You - it is
very close to the end of the film and involves someone snapping at
someone else and then not apologising for their behaviour. I was always
so bothered by this as a child, and then when I read the novel, and
there IS an apology in the novel, I could not fathom why it had not been
included in the film. Mr Kitty believes it is because they were trying
to indicate that life is not perfect and sometimes Things Just Happen. I
am unsure. Any thoughts?
Look, just get it out and watch it. The DVD I own has an amazing Production Stills Gallery as part of its Special Features that is well and truly worth the look. Despite it having been disparagingly referred to as 'A Women's Film', I believe 'The Ghost and Mrs Muir' is a beautiful piece of work. No matter whether a devotee of romantic films, ghost stories, or Bernard Herrmann, there is something for everyone to love in this movie.
