required viewing

Tonight I took advantage of Turner Classic Movies on Demand and caught up on some films I've been meaning to see. The first was Kiss Me Kate, starring Howard Keel, Kathryn Grayson, and that musical theater dynamo Ann Miller. One of Bianca's suiters was played by Bob Fosse, who mostly did the waltz-y dancing of Hermes Pan except for his last number, when he totally Fosse-d the crap out of the sequence. Yes, I know for a fact that the guy was an asshole and a womanizer, but shit, could he move. He's in a rarefied group with Gene Kelly and Prince as guys who dance gracefully but are utterly masculine even in delicate movement.

The other film was Please Don't Eat the Daisies, which I felt I had to see as a Doris Day fan and a theater critic. In the movie, based on a book by Jean (wife of theater critic Walter) Kerr, David Niven plays a professor turned play reviewer - one of the top seven in NYC, as a matter of fact. He lives in a large two-bedroom apartment with a chic address, and eats at Sardi's all of the time. Perhaps I shouldn't power down my critical career if success means a Manhattan apartment with a doorman and an elevator and constantly eating at see-and-be-seen places ... :)

His dramatic arc was that, though he got into reviewing because he loved plays, he became more fond of being cruel and penning poisonous critiques full of mean-spirited jokes. When people started telling him that he was now feared, and that he'd made a playwright quit the profession, Niven's character was scared straight, folks! Good moral to the story for us taste makers, I think. It is a tough slog through the Doris-Day-as-Niven's spouse/housewife fixing up their hellhole suburban house and managing a sheepdog and four kids (one of whom is locked in a cage!) plot lines, no matter how sweet and plucky Doris is or how jazzy-pretty she lays down a song. She does sing a bit of Que Sera, Sera, though, and makes a Rock Hudson joke. Ha ha, scriptwriters! We totally get that she was in movies with him! How insider-y do we feel right now?!