KEITH UHLICH
The Band Wagon
film classics
The Band Wagon (1953, Vincente Minnelli, United States) The world is a stage of entertainment in one of the great Hollywood musicals. Washed-up film star Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) hopes to restart his career with a Broadway show, though the subject—a pretension-doused adaptation of the legend of Faust—isn’t exactly the confection audiences are gonna crave. Throw in a full-of-himself director (Jack Buchanan), a chatterbox husband and wife composer team (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray, gently parodying screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green), and a younger leading lady, Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse), who’d rather be anywhere but in Tony’s arms and you have a recipe for disaster. Nothing left to do, after one horrific preview, but put on an impromptu show featuring some of the greatest dance scenes ever committed to celluloid, culminating in the lavish “Girl Hunt” production number that parodies Gene Kelly’s own dream ballets while giving Astaire’s footwork and Charisse’s incomparably high-kicking legs a prime showcase. This is all catnip for director Vincente Minnelli, who makes the work of play seem sublimely effortless. (Streaming on Criterion.)
Red Desert (1964, Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy/France) For his first color feature, the great Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni created this enduring, endlessly interpretable drama about a woman, Giuliana (Monica Vitti), navigating a postwar Italian landscape of factories and the pollution produced by them. Nothing is easy here; the film is neither angrily anti-industry nor poetically pro a return to simpler times. Antonioni instead deals with the reality of each given moment, and how his lead character’s psychology shifts in ways both major and minor. Red Desert is a parable of adaptation, both the ability and the inability to do so as the world turns ever on. Change comes whether we like it or not, and that theme is amply supported by the revolutionary photography of Carlo Di Palma who, in consultation with Antonioni, conjures haunting visions of both the natural and manmade worlds. Color punctuates the often monochromatic gray frames in innovative and breathtaking ways. Antonioni, as he was frequently wont to do, speaks to his time with the complexity of the greatest artists. (Streaming on Criterion.) C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E
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