"Son, in this life, you don't walk by a red dress," the late baseball great (he should have been a Hall of Famer) Buck O'Neill once advised a protégée.
Millions of film fans took that to heart when they gaped at an impossibly leggy vision in red appearing with Fred Astaire in the 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon. Oddly enough, the year before they also stared in slack-jawed astonishment at a figure in a green dress, in the Gene Kelly film Singin' in the Rain.
In both cases, the occupant of said dress was Cyd Charisse, whose death from a heart attack at age 86 last month severed one more living tie to the cinematic form that best united the possibilities of sound and movement: the movie musical.
Some years ago, a friend recalled how her husband’s tongue kept inadvertently hanging out during a dance number spotlighting "The Girl in the Yellow Dress" (played by actress Deborah Yates—and by the way, could somebody please tell me whatever happened to her?) in Contact.
Over the years, even more film aficionados experienced the same sensations, on a more extended basis, in the MGM musicals featuring Charisse.
The actress-dancer’s death came out of the blue for me, since only the weekend before I’d seen her in It’s Always Fair Weather. This last collaboration between onetime friends Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen not only lived up to its billing—On the Town, 10 years after V-E Day—but, in its sour view of friendship and Eisenhower Era materialism, feels at times like a precursor of Stephen Sondheim’s wised-up musicals starting in the Seventies. It falls just short of greatness.
One reason why is that there's no love dance between Kelly and Charisse to compare with the delirious Central Park number, set to the strains of Arthur Schwartz' "Dancing in the Dark," in The Band Wagon (which Charisse regarded as her favorite scene in all her films). (Admittedly, this absence is not as unconscionable as Kelly's decision to ax the big dance number featuring co-star Michael Kidd, which appears to have been made to avoid the picture being stolen from its star-co-director.)
But Charisse did very nicely with "Baby, You Knock Me Out." In the politically incorrect parlance of the time, her "classy dame" shone all the more brightly among an all-male chorus that looked like all-too-realistic stand-ins for Stillman Gym's real-life plug-uglies.
The same film slipped in a fact that surprised me when I heard it, but which was confirmed by the obits: the brunette star stood only 5 ft. 6 inches!
Ten years ago, a high school friend of mine who was appearing in films bemoaned a particularly galling missed opportunity in his most recent, major Hollywood production: “They cut my big scene, Mike!”
Woulda, coulda, shoulda…I could write great lyrics—a whole musical, even!—on that one theme. The case of Charisse, however, reveals the truth behind the cliché.
Charisse’s heyday was not only half the length of male co-stars Kelly and Astaire (who, in his autobiography Steps in Time, gave her the appropriate nickname “beautiful dynamite”) but also of other major female musical stars of the time, Judy Garland and Betty Hutton (women whose uncertain temperaments gave them the reputations of “dynamite” of a different sort).
Her first appearance on the big screen was as “Lily Norwood,” opposite Don Ameche in Something to Sing About, in 1943. (The “Charisse” part of her later professional name came from her dance instructor Nico Charisse, whom she married in her teens. The “Cyd” part which gave that particularly euphonious name came after she signed her MGM contract.) It took the studio nine years to figure out what to do with the former Tula Ellice Finklea of Amarillo, Texas, while it offered plum parts to the likes of Katharine Grayson and Esther Williams.
“Broadway Melody Ballet,” in Singin’ in the Rain, changed all that. Years later, she joked that her second (and far longer-lasting) husband, Tony Martin, always knew who her co-star was: “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”
Millions of film fans took that to heart when they gaped at an impossibly leggy vision in red appearing with Fred Astaire in the 1953 MGM musical The Band Wagon. Oddly enough, the year before they also stared in slack-jawed astonishment at a figure in a green dress, in the Gene Kelly film Singin' in the Rain.
In both cases, the occupant of said dress was Cyd Charisse, whose death from a heart attack at age 86 last month severed one more living tie to the cinematic form that best united the possibilities of sound and movement: the movie musical.
Some years ago, a friend recalled how her husband’s tongue kept inadvertently hanging out during a dance number spotlighting "The Girl in the Yellow Dress" (played by actress Deborah Yates—and by the way, could somebody please tell me whatever happened to her?) in Contact.
Over the years, even more film aficionados experienced the same sensations, on a more extended basis, in the MGM musicals featuring Charisse.
The actress-dancer’s death came out of the blue for me, since only the weekend before I’d seen her in It’s Always Fair Weather. This last collaboration between onetime friends Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen not only lived up to its billing—On the Town, 10 years after V-E Day—but, in its sour view of friendship and Eisenhower Era materialism, feels at times like a precursor of Stephen Sondheim’s wised-up musicals starting in the Seventies. It falls just short of greatness.
One reason why is that there's no love dance between Kelly and Charisse to compare with the delirious Central Park number, set to the strains of Arthur Schwartz' "Dancing in the Dark," in The Band Wagon (which Charisse regarded as her favorite scene in all her films). (Admittedly, this absence is not as unconscionable as Kelly's decision to ax the big dance number featuring co-star Michael Kidd, which appears to have been made to avoid the picture being stolen from its star-co-director.)
But Charisse did very nicely with "Baby, You Knock Me Out." In the politically incorrect parlance of the time, her "classy dame" shone all the more brightly among an all-male chorus that looked like all-too-realistic stand-ins for Stillman Gym's real-life plug-uglies.
The same film slipped in a fact that surprised me when I heard it, but which was confirmed by the obits: the brunette star stood only 5 ft. 6 inches!
Ten years ago, a high school friend of mine who was appearing in films bemoaned a particularly galling missed opportunity in his most recent, major Hollywood production: “They cut my big scene, Mike!”
Woulda, coulda, shoulda…I could write great lyrics—a whole musical, even!—on that one theme. The case of Charisse, however, reveals the truth behind the cliché.
Charisse’s heyday was not only half the length of male co-stars Kelly and Astaire (who, in his autobiography Steps in Time, gave her the appropriate nickname “beautiful dynamite”) but also of other major female musical stars of the time, Judy Garland and Betty Hutton (women whose uncertain temperaments gave them the reputations of “dynamite” of a different sort).
Her first appearance on the big screen was as “Lily Norwood,” opposite Don Ameche in Something to Sing About, in 1943. (The “Charisse” part of her later professional name came from her dance instructor Nico Charisse, whom she married in her teens. The “Cyd” part which gave that particularly euphonious name came after she signed her MGM contract.) It took the studio nine years to figure out what to do with the former Tula Ellice Finklea of Amarillo, Texas, while it offered plum parts to the likes of Katharine Grayson and Esther Williams.
“Broadway Melody Ballet,” in Singin’ in the Rain, changed all that. Years later, she joked that her second (and far longer-lasting) husband, Tony Martin, always knew who her co-star was: “If I was black and blue, it was Gene. And if it was Fred, I didn’t have a scratch.”
But Kelly did for her what he did for Reynolds in the same movie—made her a star. She would go on to appear not only in The Band Wagon and It’s Always Fair Weather, but also Brigadoon and Silk Stockings, which she took on the thankless role originally done (as a nonsinging part) by Greta Garbo in Ninotchka.
Sadly, at just the moment when storytelling, technological advances, and first-rate choreographers and stars brought the American movie musical to its artistic zenith in the Arthur Freed musicals of the late ‘40s and ‘50s, it all came tumbling down, courtesy of trust-busters, the threat of TV, and studio bean-counters who persuaded the moguls to save money by jettisoning the off-camera talent that gave musicals their wings. That spelled the end of her period of greatness for Charisse, who, aside from a few non-musical film roles, spent the rest of her professional career in television, clubs and theater, often with Tony Martin (who survives her).
Time, wrote the poet W.H. Auden in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” is “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.” But the magic of celluloid musicals preserves the young and the graceful forever in memory. Nearly 20 years ago, at a lecture given at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the novelist Mary Gordon made an uncharacteristic wisecrack: "I wish my legs were as long as Cyd Charisse's."
Anyone who ever saw that classy, talented perfomer—a woman who, in a mere half-dozen years, taught a half century of men never to walk past a red dress—knew what Ms. Gordon was saying.
Sadly, at just the moment when storytelling, technological advances, and first-rate choreographers and stars brought the American movie musical to its artistic zenith in the Arthur Freed musicals of the late ‘40s and ‘50s, it all came tumbling down, courtesy of trust-busters, the threat of TV, and studio bean-counters who persuaded the moguls to save money by jettisoning the off-camera talent that gave musicals their wings. That spelled the end of her period of greatness for Charisse, who, aside from a few non-musical film roles, spent the rest of her professional career in television, clubs and theater, often with Tony Martin (who survives her).
Time, wrote the poet W.H. Auden in “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” is “indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.” But the magic of celluloid musicals preserves the young and the graceful forever in memory. Nearly 20 years ago, at a lecture given at Fairleigh Dickinson University, the novelist Mary Gordon made an uncharacteristic wisecrack: "I wish my legs were as long as Cyd Charisse's."
Anyone who ever saw that classy, talented perfomer—a woman who, in a mere half-dozen years, taught a half century of men never to walk past a red dress—knew what Ms. Gordon was saying.
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