STANLEY DONEN, director of MGM musicals and comedies

Love many of these, but Charade is canon for me.

A lightweight Hitchcock knockoff? No.

I like at least two of the musicals better than Singin'.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbzJtP75NqM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgAmXb5UZlY&fbclid

I should've known a Morbs-started poll thread would ultimately just be an opportunity to shit on things commoners like.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=3&v=nNUq4IAuzGU

dude, it's just very clearly not what he did best.

Love Letters is not the Jamie Lee Curtis movie but a TV movie with Laura Linney, I'm just learning

One of the innovators of American film.

I recently in quick succession bought Saturn 3 for myself and The Little Prince for my gf without realizing (at the time) that they shared a director or that the director in question was Donen.

Two duds that just about finished him!

I've seen 11 of these. Really curious to see the Burton-Harrison gay dramedy sometime.

Made a lion comedy the same year as Singin'.

Arabesque, beloved by PBS in the early nineties, has a bat shit NxNW rip where Gregory Peck does his best imitation of being on an acid trip.

so he made TWO NxNW ripoffs.

Have you seen any of the 3 Grant movies he did before Charade?

I like Charade a lot and has more balletic movement than you're giving it credit for, particularly when Cary Grant's in action.

I can't pick one, actually, but Funny Face I'd watch today if I could.

Yes, Indiscreet, a dud. Reminds me of Renoir's own Ingrid picture: the rhythm of the thing stops so we can admire her in every frame.

oh GOD I'd no idea he directed Kiss Them for Me. I've endured it too.

I don't hate Charade; it's just fluff.

I thought about marking the ones co-credited to Gene Kelly. Obviously they had a symbiotic partnership, but it's significant that Kelly didn't get untracked as a solo filmmaker.

I have a hard time imagining Grant and Jayne Mansfield in the same universe, let alone the same movie.

That's what I mean. His titanic passivity in his late movies is also boredom.

that one is '57 though; not that late.

exactly!

I haven't seen The Grass is Greener; the cover art is terrifying.

Even though Bedazzled seems like Cook & Moore's project as writers-performers, he helped them deliver the goods blissfully. That trampoline scene...

Charade is a better Hitchcock movie than Topaz or Torn Curtain, but not otherwise.

Had to be Singin' in the Rain - I highly recommend the Peter Wollen/BFI book on it btw, tho' irrc Wollen doesn't take a particularly auteur-centric approach (he's very good on the centrality of dance - duh - to the Kelly/Donen films).

its hard to look past singing in the rain from any list but i think seven brides is the one for me

i rewatched some clips from the little prince a while back, that is really a strange movie. probably better appreciated by watching scenes on youtube than actually trying to sit through the whole thing -- bob fosse's scene as the snake is wonderful.

Donen's NY Times obit has a touching tribute to his native Columbia, S.C.:

"I hated it and got out as fast as I could."

"Bedazzled" for me

As a comedy person, that might be the one that gives me the most pleasure, but the earlier musical stuff is landmark.

The one time I saw Donen speak was at a Q&A at a Lincoln Center retro in fall 2010 (I had to look that up)... It was conducted by the critic Scott Foundas, after a screening of Movie Movie (1978), which is a cute double-feature pastiche of Golden Boy and 42nd Street (George C Scott is quite funny in both halves; written by Larry Gelbart). It was a non-hit, but it probably got the most respect of Donen's last six movies (the rest of which cratered).

Anyway, it was unmemorable except for one moment. Donen was 86, but he seemed reasonably sharp for his age in his answers. Then he suddenly asked Foundas, "Excuse me, but this movie... It was after Singin' in the Rain, correct?"

The whole audience kinda sucked in air, and Foundas nodded somewhat calmly. An intimation of mortality.

Holy Shit, didn't know Donen directed the "Dancing On The Ceiling" video!

yes, it's a riff on the Fred Astaire sequence in Royal Wedding, otherwise a minor film. Astaire's love interest is played by Churchill's daughter Sarah.

presumably Richie wanted to get the OG director

“[Gene Kelly and I] really worked as a team. We didn’t say, ‘I do this and you do that.’ No, not a bit. Even through rehearsing the numbers, when everything would really get complicated I would be with him. When there was real pressure to get a lot done in terms of rehearsal, I would rehearse in one hall and he would rehearse another number, but then we would switch and I would go supervise his number and he would come to do mine. So it really was a collaboration. There was no question about it.”

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/in-memoriam-stanley-donen/

If you're a fan of this director for the love of God do not ever watch Blame It on Rio

I have only seen Singin' in the Rain! wow! Love it though

What an odd duck The Grass is Greener is. Loquacious, brittle, and improbable, it also benefits from Donen's long takes. Three of the four leads are miscast: Jean Simmons can't play a gin-soaked airhead, Deborah Kerr isn't Irene Dunne, and Cary Grant, subbing for Rex Harrison, plays a British stuffed shirt. Grant can't play Englishmen -- he's Cary Grant, no less and certainly more. Robert Mitchum, snappy in a tux, is almost in peak form, though; he and Grant should've made a dapper buddy comedy.

obit roundup

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/6217-stanley-donen-s-movie-magic

donen's kind of an interesting figure b/c he was around for the end of the heyday of the studio system, part of the MGM Freed unit etc., making some of the most well-regarded studio musicals ever.... but he was young enough to want to hop on the new wave bandwagon, taking cues from resnais and godard in his somewhat later films, like two for the road and the little prince, etc. so he's one of the few bridges between two modes of american filmmaking that are often expressed in terms of changing generations.

and donen went a bit farther out on the new wave limb as, say, richard fleischer or robert wise, slightly older directors who likewise bridged eras and who kept apace with changing trends , but without making anything as flashy/odd as two for the road.

he also seems like he was a hep cat, which wise and fleischer were not. which explains a fair bit.

If you're a fan of this director for the love of God do not ever watch Blame It on Rio.

fixed

well, Donen was a decade younger than Wise and 7+ younger than Fleischer; he started at MGM when he was 19.

right, i make that point ("slightly older directors") but he began directing at roughly the same time, late '40s and their careers all extended into the 1980s.

right. I kinda glided over that, sorry. Didn't he date Elizabeth Taylor at one point? I'm sure he moved in fab circles.

i've never heard that taylor story, though i wouldn't doubt it.

as someone in a long-term non-married relationship his multi-decade partnership w/ elaine may is very moving.

i remember as of maybe 15 years ago donen was making noise about wanting to direct another film but that never came to pass.

i rewatched to for the road and basically liked it, although everything is a little bit too on the nose for me, including finney's stentorian performance.

eleanor bron and bill daniels make a very inventively annoying couple though i can see some people running for the exits b/c of it.

*two

he directed some of May's theatre work since the late '90s.

did he do much theatre in general?

Started there as a chorus boy; infamous '90s Broadway flop of The Red Shoes.

https://www.ibdb.com/broadway-production/the-red-shoes-4591

To be clear, you're saying you were a chorus boy in The Red Shoes?

We regret to inform you that tonight Dr. Morbius has taken ill and will not be able to perform his role as a chorus boy in The Red Shoes.

Rewatched Bedazzled last night, still one of the saucier '60s comedies and the only pure movie expression of the Cook-Moore sensibility. Main flaws are the first couple "wish" sketches are OK rather than hilarious, but all the Pete-Dudley scenes have zip, and the guilt-ridden love scene in the car between Dud and Eleanor Bron is a scream, as is Cook playing the "saintly" cuckold. And then, of course, there are the B&W dueling pop stars -- "LOVE ME!" "I don't care" -- and the Leaping Order of Beryllians.

In the trailer, Donen is trumpeted only for his recent hits, Charade, Arabesque, and Two for the Road, I guess so no one went in expecting MGM numbers. Cook does work in a Seven Brides for Seven Brothers reference.

"You fill me with inertia..."

I wonder if they had anyone particular in mind with that parody...

have you seen the remake with Brendan Fraser and Elizabeth Hurley?

When it came out I did. It wasn't a disgrace, and Fraser was good, but y'know, so-so. Harold Ramis does an interview on the DVD of the Donen original; obv a big Cook-Moore fan.

Me too, I barely remember any of it. Bizarre that Fraser had a career as a leading man, however brief. I need to revisit Monkeybone.

I love the original Bedazzled.

Fraser has a couple of funny bits in the remake, but the original is so obviously a Pete & Dud vehicle that you wonder why they bothered at all. And I remember being deeply unimpressed with Hurley's comic chops.

"You fill me with inertia."

I was gonna cite this line.

i had forgotten P&D kept going as a team up til Moore's breakthrough to solo stardom. They hosted SNL in '76.

The first Derek & Clive record didn’t come out until ‘76.

dont think ive ever heard em

Me neither. Only read about.

See how much of this you can stand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YI8cVdbP73c

absolutely do not attempt that

(the first Derek & Clive LP, which is just a bunch of different tapes of them riffing for themselves, rather than a dedicated session of edgelording for an audience that wanted to hear them being "offensive", is good)

What about the legendary crunchy frog bit?

^ the part where Derek falls through the bar is funny

do you mean The Frog & Peach, Redd? They did that on SNL.

Shame we don't have a Cook-Moore thread. Not much Donen content here.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Indiscreet is a real drag in the first half, picks up a little when the worm turns

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

fn hate singing in the rain, gene kelly is such a sleazeball

the dancing tho

I'd like to object to the age gap between Audrey and Fred in Funny Face, or the script's cheap shots at Beats and philosophy, but I don't (much). Think pink.

Like Silk Stockings the age gap undermines the credibility of the romance but i'm not watching those films for their realism so the casting just functions as another expression of artificiality i.e. yeah it doesn't bother me, i'm watching for the expressive aspects anyway

i mean, he's the only Astaire they had.

You think maybe it would have been better with Adele?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVC6nvXTt6s

Nowadays a Hollywood lead in his late 50s would look about half the age Astaire looks in those movies

coulda Benjamin Buttoned him

most pro-union musical?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w4mVycaC_o

I wondered during the first 30 minutes of Two for the Road why i had found it so irritating 20+ years ago... then in the last 80 minutes i remembered why. It def has one of the more charming Audrey H performances, and Albert Finney is prickly and tumbledown, but there are way too many cutesy "matched cuts," Eleanor Bron and William Daniels (both normally delightful) are around about twice too long, and while there are some funny lines it lapses into becoming a Statement on Marriage. It's very pretty of course.

haven’t rewatched so still on your first impression

Arabesque falters near the end, with an impossible to follow plot and rips from other films and overall preposterousness. But it’s maybe one of the films where Sophia Loren looks her best, along with El Cid.

Zero votes is correct, though

Arabesque just got a 4K restoration from Universal that is playing some festivals. It’s really visually audacious and Peck is great, but the script isn’t top-tier

That’s the one I just saw… and agreed

You saw it at Lincoln Center?