DVDs: A Jeffrey Cordova Production

At the moment, we're hearing a great deal about "jukebox" musicals, shows built around pre-existing song catalogues. But long ago, Hollywood was doing something similar. MGM had hits with Easter Parade 1948, An American in Paris 1951, and Singin' in the Rain 1952, and while there were some new songs in two of those films, all three pictures fashioned new stories around the old song hits of a particular songwriter or team.

So it was no surpise when MGM attempted another such picture, The Bandwagon 1953. This one would be created around the songs of composer Arthur Schwartz and lyricist Howard Dietz, the latter also head of MGM's publicity department. The film's title came from a hugely acclaimed 1931 Dietz-Schwartz Broadway revue, which had co-starred brother and sister Fred and Adele Astaire and had featured such songs as "High and Low," "Dancing in the Dark," "New Sun in the Sky," and "I Love Louisa." The Band Wagon played 260 performances at the New Amsterdam Theatre, current home to The Lion King.

For the new film of the same title, five songs from the revue were used, along with Dietz-Schwartz numbers from five other Broadway shows. Also from the stage revue came the film's star, Fred Astaire, who, in the all-new film narrative, would be playing a character with parallels to his own life, an aging song-and-dance man who is washed up in Hollywood and decides to return to Broadway. The original script was by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who had done so well with their Singin' in the Rain screenplay.

In The Bandwagon, Tony Hunter Astaire is persuaded to do a musical authored by his friends, the Martons Nanette Fabray and Oscar Levant, a show-writing and performing couple vaguely modeled on Comden and Green. Hunter's co-star will be glamorous ballerina Gabrielle Gerard Cyd Charisse, in her first starring role, in her first Broadway show. Hired to direct the show-within-the-film, called The Band Wagon, is highbrow Jeffrey Cordova English musical star Jack Buchanan, currently starring on Broadway in his self-adapted, self-directed production of Oedipus Rex.

Cordova takes the simple, musical-comedy script written by the Martons and reinvents it as a contemporary version of Faust. The result is an arty, pretentious disaster, but things are ultimately set right when Tony takes over the show, reverting to the original script and songs. Just two years after The Band Wagon, Broadway would get a successful Faust update, in Damn Yankees.

Vincente Minnelli Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris directed. The picture's choreographer was Michael Kidd, whose Broadway credits included Finian's Rainbow and Guys and Dolls, and who had recently worked with Fabray in Love Life and Arms and the Girl. For The Band Wagon, Dietz and Schwartz wrote one new song, the very catchy show-business anthem "That's Entertainment."

Like Singin' in the Rain and An American in Paris, The Band Wagon culminated in a lengthy ballet, this one called "The Girl Hunt," an homage to detective-story film noir, with narration written by An American in Paris's Alan Jay Lerner. Broadway's Oliver Smith On the Town, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Brigadoon designed the sets for the musical numbers.

A backstager about the making of a Broadway musical, The Band Wagon is a favorite movie musical among musical-theatre fans, who enjoy its broad satire of highbrow theatrics. Astaire is superbly shown off, in a wistful opening "By Myself," a tap-happy "Shine on Your Shoes," "I Guess I'll Have to Change My Plan" with Buchanan, and "Dancing in the Dark" with the glamorous Charisse, whose minimal singing chores were dubbed by India Adams. Playing Charisse's choreographer and boyfriend is James Mitchell, of Broadway's Brigadoon, Carnival, and Mack and Mabel. When Tony arrives in New York, Ava Gardner has an amusing cameo as the film diva the press actually turned out to greet.

The Band Wagon is widely considered not only one of MGM's best musicals, but one of the all-time best. Reviewing the film on opening day, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called it "one of the best musicals ever made." Years later, distinguished critic Pauline Kael felt that there were "few {musicals} as good as The Band Wagon, a series of urbane delights."

For its long-awaited DVD debut, Warner Home Video has given The Band Wagon the special, double-DVD treatment. The first disc is notable for a full-length audio-commentary track featuring a conversation between Liza Minnelli and Michael Feinstein, both of whom cite The Band Wagon as their favorite film musical.

This commentary is pleasant if not terribly illuminating, with Feinstein providing most of the hard-core background information on the lives and careers of Vincente Minnelli, Comden and Green, Buchanan, Freed, and Dietz and Schwartz, while Minnelli offers a great deal of enthusiasm and many anecdotes about "daddy."

Both Feinstein and Minnelli believe the film to represent Comden and Green's finest screen writing. Minnelli recalls visiting the set throughout production and being gifted with miniature versions of costumes from the picture. She notes how realistic and timeless is the film's depiction of life in the theatre. Feinstein points out the greatness of Conrad Salinger's orchestrations and discusses the three musical numbers cut from the tryout sequence. Feinstein says that the character of Jeffrey Cordova was based on Jose Ferrer, with a bit of Vincente Minnelli thrown in, and relates that Cordova's overwrought pitch to prospective backers of the show-within-the-movie reminds him of Peter Sellars' similarly bizarre pitches before he was replaced as director of My One and Only 1983.

Disc Two contains a thirty-six-minute documentary, Get Aboard! "The Bandwagon", with appearances by Liza Minnelli, Jonathan Schwartz, Ava Astaire the star's daughter, Comden and Green, Kidd, Charisse, Fabray, and Mitchell. Most illuminating here is Fabray, who recalls a difficult, often unhappy shoot that resulted in a joyous picture. She says Astaire liked to rehearse everything "until you were so sick of it you wanted to die," but acknowledges that his method paid off. She says Levant blamed his mistakes on her until she told him off. She recalls having to shoot around Buchanan's dental problems, and reveals the tricks behind the "Triplets" number.

Disc Two also includes lengthy outtakes from the cut "Two-Faced Woman," a major number for Charisse. The soundtrack to the number was recycled, with unintentionally amusing results, in the Joan Crawford epic Torch Song. There's a 1929 Jack Buchanan Vitaphone short. And there's the one-hour, 1973 Richard Schickel documentary on Vincente Minnelli that was part of WNET's "The Men Who Made the Movies" series.