Well, looks like you’ll have to wait quite a while–we’re both at the bottom of the list! 
However, odds are I’d be surprised if any of the 3 I have in mind for my pick will get chosen before then. We’ll see… 
Well, I probably didn’t phrase things as clearly as I might have!
My choice will probably be limited by the constraints of my local video shop. They actually have a pretty good selection of Western films, but when it comes to musicals they mostly stock the most famous ones, with stars that are/were popular in Japan.
That’s what I get for posting late at night!
They were still the same proportion, but wasn’t the average movie screen BIGGER by that time? Or perhaps I’m just getting mixed up with the wider screens that started to come in a bit later when the aspect ratio began to change.
ArchiveGuy – I salute your successful battle in the fight against ignorance – you’re right, I’m wrong about Gene Kelly. I feel foolish for having reacted to the rather schmucky characters he often played, without ever noticing that they were characters. :smack:
Eureka – my recollection is the same as yours, that the age difference wasn’t so great in the book. (I read the book several times – but that was 35 or 40 years ago, some of the details are a bit vague.)
Which leaves us to wonder – WTF on this film and Funny Face? Astaire was in his mid 50s. As ArchiveGuy has pointed out, he’d had a career of playing nice-guy romantic leads – and lacked much in the way of acting chops. OTOH, there were more age-appropriate partners available: In Easter Parade, he was paired with not one but two of them, Ann Miller* and Judy Garland, both of whom were in their mid 30s at that point. Cyd Charisse, his Band Wagon costar, was also roughly that age. Eleanor Powell, also, though she’d retired from the screen after she married Glenn Ford. (I didn’t know she was married to Glenn Ford. Hunh.) So who thought it was a good idea to pair him with women so oogily much younger than he?
*If you type Ann Miller into an IMDb search, you get a “which one do you want?” page with the one we want in the top spot – though I didn’t realize that at first, since it identified her as “Ann Miller (actress, Mulholland Dr. (2001).” Yeah, that’s the first movie I think of when I think of Ann Miller. :rolleyes:
The really large urban movie houses were fairly well-established by the 1930s (you’ll note most have the Art Deco accoutrements), so the sense of scale was comparable at *Singin’*s release (though I’ve no doubt there may have been some markets that may didn’t acquire/build really large screens 'til after the war).
No need to be hard on yourself–the star system was specifically designed so that the icons shouldn’t be perceived to be “Acting”, but just Being. Though the bigger names may have been limited and/or pigeonholed in their talent, they were often equally underestimated in their abilities because they were able to “play themselves” so effortlessly.
Well, I assume they were intent on cementing Caron as the Next Big Thing (musically speaking), and what better vehicle to showcase her in than with one of the biggest musical stars around? She’d already worked with Kelly, so the next step was to find another partner; Fred seemed the obvious choice, I’m sure. Didn’t quite work, IMHO, but Caron was an obvious hit for the next decade or so.
As for Funny Face, my favorite film to compare it to is Charade. Both are stylishly directed by Stanley Donen and are shot on location in Paris (though the latter uses the geography much more creatively). But whereas the May-December thing in FF feels a bit forced, it plays wonderfully (and to great comic effect) in Charade. True, Astaire was 5 years older than Grant (making the age difference 30 vs. 25 with Hepburn), but the tactic to have fun with it instead of casually overlooking it is the right one, I think (credit Peter Stone for fashioning a far superior script).
Well, in all fairness, the IMDB simply works on a member voting system. You’ll note that of all of Miller’s films, the Lynch has more votes than all the others combined! That’s why the film comes up in the search (I suspect it’d be too labor-intensive to customize each entry appropriately).
More thoughts on book vs. movie.
I went to the library and checked out the book.
This lead to the discovery that the book was first published in 1912. I’m surprised. I knew it wasn’t new when I first discovered it (my mother read it to me because she had enjoyed it as a girl). But I would not have guessed that it is as old as it actually is. There is just something about it which is both quaint and universal. As opposed to Singin’ in the Rain or * Bye Bye Birdie* which are so deliberately located in time.*
Master Jervie is 14 years older than Judy (Jerusha) Abbott. This seems down right reasonable compared to Astaire’s age, yet I as I think about how persons 14 years older and younger compare to me, I don’t know that I could date them. **
This is not the only movie based on this book. (but it is the only one mentioned in a form that can be identified in the description on the front page of the book I’m looking at).
The ending is a bit different. Miserable, Judy writes to Daddy Long Legs for advice and asking for a meeting. He writes back telling her that he is ill. Judy explains that she has turned down Master Jervie because she has never told him about the orphan asylum despite being in love with him and believing he is in love with her. Also, Jervie believes that she might be in love with Jimmie McBride. In the two months since that time, Jervie has gotten pneumonia. Daddy Long Legs writes back to invite her to come to New York City. Finally, the last letter of the book is addressed to “My very dearest Master-Jervie-Daddy-Long-Legs-Pendleton-Smith” and explains the events of their meeting and how wonderful it is to be in love.
This works better in the book than in the movie in large part because through the letters one knows that the lovers have had more than a couple of meetings. Also, Master Jervie is a lovable character in a way that the Jervis Pendleton of the movie never is.
*Especially Bye Bye Birdie, which I just saw recently. I’d seen it live twenty years ago but as I was ten-ish I had no concept of Elvis Presley or Ed Sullivan or their place in pop culture. Watching it now, I was struck by those kinds of details. Also, I was startled when I realized that Dick Van Dyke’s voice was coming from someone who did not have white hair. I’m mostly familiar with him from Diagnosis Murder. I knew perfectly well that he had that role in part because of his history in show business, but I’d somehow forgotten that he had once been young and thus dark-haired. I got quite a chuckle out of that, at my own expense.
**14 years younger would be 16, interested in getting a driver’s license, and a car. Way too young. 14 years older would be 44. Give it a couple of years and I might consider it, but right now that sounds terribly old. It is really sad when one must pull out one’s driver’s license to figure out how to spell it!
My local video shop doesn’t have Kiss Me Kate in stock, so I re-rented Daddy Long Legs and watched it again. I don’t have anything of great import to add (you can see above that I had little of import the first time around!), but I could pay more attention to some of the smaller details upon re-viewing.
Like I caught that Julie’s position of 12th in her class was with little better than a B-average! Sheesh, what kind of a school is this? This isn’t a slam against the Julie character, a better-than-B average is quite good for a non-native English speaker suddenly thrust into a strange environment. But one would expect that there’d be more than eleven “eggheads” in her year capable of pulling in As. After all, these are young women who’ve had every advantage in life. I guess they were just too busy worrying about pretty frocks to study. :rolleyes: I myself graduated from a private women’s college, and let me assure you, it ain’t that way in real life.
One thing they did get right was the bit about learning to lead too if you’re at a “girls school”, although I like to think I manage with a bit more grace than Astaire’s athletic dance partner!
Other members of the supporting cast have already been praised, but I wanted to give a shout-out to Fred Clark as Griggs. He was always great as an uptight straight man, but as Griggs he also managed to seem like a man who was truly compassionate beneath the officiousness. And much of the movie’s humor was based around him.
During the scene where Jervis asks Griggs to pretend to be “Daddy Long Legs”, it occurred to me that this would hardly be pretending at all. Griggs and Miss Pritchard were more Julie’s guardians than he was. Jervis forgot about her for two years after deciding to pay her way through college, but although he was the financial backer it was Griggs and Miss Pritchard who arranged everything down to her wardrobe and summer vacations. They were also the ones who read all her letters as they arrived. I’d have liked it if the script had allowed Julie to have some idea of all they’d done for her and show them the gratitude they deserved.
Oh, finally, I’ve got to disagree with this comment of ArchiveGuy’s in his first reply: “I’ve seen plenty of Scope films on video where you could sense you were missing things out on the margins–but I never get this feeling here”. I’m sure this movie suffered badly in the transition to pan-and-scan. There was a bit in the “Sluefoot” number where Leslie Caron must have been dancing away off to Astaire’s right, but all that was visible on my television was a bit of red fabric from the back of her skirt! And the breakfast-on-the-balcony scene must have looked much better in Cinemascope too.