Music clips

"Well, it was touching to see the queen both blush and smile, and look embarrassed, and happy, and fling furtive glances at Sir Launcelot that would have got him shot in Arkansas, to a dead certainty"--A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Time for some more music clips!

The Carter Family, "Wildwood Flower." Shania Twain is not country; this is country music!

Harold Arlen, "You're a Builder Upper." This song-- which I originally heard on The Gong Show!--comes from the 1934 Broadway revue Life Begins at 7:40.  Arlen, who sings the song here, co-wrote the show's songs with Yip Harburg (with the assistance of Ira Gershwin) and the cast included Bert Lahr and Ray Bolger.  Five years later these same people would be working together on the movie musical The Wizard of Oz.

Woody Guthrie, "I Ain't Got No Home in This World Anymore." A great radical folk song from the desperate '30s!

Ewan McColl, "North Sea Holes." Another of McColl's working-class folk songs, this time about fishing.

Henry Mancini, Theme from Peter Gunn.  This 1958 private eye TV series' jazzy theme was the start of a long partnership between Mancini and Blake Edwards, who produced the show and soon became a movie director.  It's one of the great TV themes of all time. (One TV theme I wish I could hear again is for the short-lived, otherwise indifferent 1977 show Big Hawaii, which I recall liking a lot.)

Pete Seeger, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." This is the song that CBS tried to keep off The Smothers Brothers Show in 1969:  the network relented, but the show soon got cancelled.  I admire how angry it clearly is:  the anti-Vietnam War subtext is clear.

The Irish Rovers, "The First Love in Life" from The Unicorn.  One thing I like about Youtube is that when you listen to one clip they'll suggest similar ones!  After I found "The Wind That Shakes the Corn" I thus found this other song I remember from The Unicorn!  It's about an Irish lady's man whose true love (surprise, surprise!) comes in a bottle...

Frank Zappa, "Broken Hearts Are For Assholes" from Sheikh Yerbouti.  A lot of people have been asking me, "What's your favourite Frank Zappa song?" Actually, nobody's asked it, but I'll tell you anyhow.  This one came out in 1979 and has a certain punk influence.

Devo, "Big Mess" from Oh No, It's Devo! A song based on a real-life DJ's obsessed fan, from an underrated album.

Joe Jackson, "Chinatown" from Night and Day.  A stylish off-beat number from Jackson's masterpiece album, produced by him and David Kershenbaum.

PIBGORN

"Suppose Sir Walter, instead of putting the conversations into the mouths of the characters, had allowed the characters to speak for themselves?  We should have had talk from Rebecca and Ivanhoe and the soft lady Rowena which would embarrass a tramp in our day"--A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

I've started reading Brooke McEldowney's comic strip Pibgorn online from its 2002 beginning.  The title character is a fairy, but the story is a very offbeat adult comedy. The real star of the strip, like young sister Eve was the real star of The Heart of Juliet Jones, is succubus antiheroine Drusilla. (A succubus, of course, is the supernatural realm's version of a "fast girl.") The first year and a half have stuff like a game show in hell--someone saw Elvis Costello's "This Town" video!--vampires in the world of Regency romance, and a film noir mystery. 

I've also looked at the first episodes of Al Capp's hillbilly strip Li'l Abner from 1934. The first story actually has the hero visiting his rich aunt in Manhattan!

I've started reading Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, for the second time, for the Classic Book Club. (Oddly unimaginative title!) The author definitely had an anti-romantic vision.  It occurred to me that the title character bears a resemblance to the Wizard of Oz...

Thursday at the campaign office I was stapling notices to some flyers indicating the date when Jill Andrew will be visiting the local district.  But today I had to unstaple many of them because the regular flyers have been moving too quickly to keep them in reserve! (The polls in this riding sound promising, but only one poll counts...)

I've lost interest in the online game Big Farm and started playing Emporea instead.

The greatest people of the 19th century, Part II

To a pageboy: "'Go 'long,' I said; 'you ain't more than a paragraph'"--A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Here are some more of the greatest people of the 19th century. (Being on the second list doesn't make them less great than those on the first; I just didn't get around to them earlier.)

J. Nicephore Niepce (1765-1833) & Louis Daguerre (1787-1851):  French inventors of photography revolutionizing our perception of the world and ultimately transforming visual art.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827): German composer central in the transformation from classical to romantic music.

George Stephenson (1781-1848):  British engineer who designed the first railway with steam locomotion, starting a revolution in transportation.

Michael Faraday (1791-1867): British scientist who invented the dynamo, allowing the transformations of electriciy.

Samuel Morse (1791-1872): American artist who invented the telegraph, leading to a communications revolution.

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837):  A poet-novelist who ranks as the towering figure of early Russian literature. (Gore Vidal remarked that while American children read Dick and Jane, Russian kids read Pushkin!)

Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) & Richard Wagner (1813-83): Outstanding composers in the field of Italian and German opera respectively.

Louis Pasteur (1822-95): French biologist who transformed our understanding of bacteria.

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906): Norwegian playwright who developed a new "psychological" drama centred on middle-class characters rather than the elite.

John D. Rockefeller (1839-1937): American businessman who transformed Standard Oil into the first giant corporation, at a time when petroleum machinery was taking the lead the industrial revolution.  His controversial "robber baron" tactics and de facto monopoly led to the first anti-trust laws.

Thomas Edison (1847-1931): American inventor whose laboratories produced the first light bulb, phonograph and motion pictures, often making use of the new electrical technology.

Alexander Graham Bell (1847-1922):  Scottish-American inventor who produced the first telephone, improved other people's inventions and pioneered the teaching of the deaf.

Meiji the Great (1852-1912; a.k.a. Mutsuhito): Japanese emperor whose Imperial court was restored to power by 1868 overthrow of the Tokugawa shogunate, who oversaw his realm's first economic modernization and the development of a post-feudal nation state with ambitions to join the great powers.

I have a feeling I'll think of a lot of people who should have been included...

Campaign work

The last couple of days I've been doing a lot of stapling at the Jill Andrew campaign. (We're adding to the flyers a notice that the candidate will be visiting the poll district on a "fill in the blank" date.)

The polls show that the NDP are the strongest rivals to the Tories, so it's tempting to say "If you vote Liberal, you're letting Doug Ford win," as they used to say about voting NDP.  But I don't want to be a hypocrite.  Vote Liberal if you believe in them, just don't pretend it's the "pragmatic" choice.

Which brings me to how I finished the history of Portugal yesterday. (Shame that it omitted the rape of former Portuguese colony East Timor!) I was reading about the mid-'70s period after the Carnation Revolution, when the "official difference" was between the radical reformists and the moderate ones--that's what we need here!

Monday I planted the potatoes.  I planted the other stuff yesterday, and watered the garden for the first time.  I put the onions among the head crops, to be different.

In the Vikings game, I cleared a bottleneck by building the Level 9 palace, which allowed higher levels for the other resource production buildings. First I had to raise enough wood and stone.  So far, I'm not much interested in conquering other places or joining a clan; I just want a strong enough defence to deter raiders.

Musical numbers

My post of links to movie dance numbers was so popular that I've seen fit to post some more movie musical numbers!

Friedrich Hollander & Sammy Lerner's "Falling in Love Again" from The Blue Angel.  This number, from the first movie where Josef Von Sternberg directed Marlene Dietrich, became her signature song. (Like Greta Garbo, she wasn't as slender in her pre-Hollywood movies!) It foreshadows how she's going to lose interest in her lover Emil Jannings, leaving him hopelessly humiliated.  It's an honestly sad, cruel movie.

"My Forgotten Man," from Gold Diggers of 1933. Who says musicals can't be realistic?  Remember that this was filmed less than a year after unemployed veterans did an early Occupy Washington, demanding a long-promised bonus, and got driven off by General MacArthur (with the help of Eisenhower and Patton).  Few of us have known the real desperation that was common then.   Joan Blondell was one of my favorite '30s leading ladies. (That's Etta Moten singing the real solo.) Choreographed by Busby Berkeley, of course.

"Lullaby of Broadway" from Gold Diggers of 1935.  Why stick to just one Busby Berkeley number?  This one's a real stunner.

"Let's Face the Music and Dance," from Irving Berlin's Follow the Fleet.  Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers could do melancholy too.  Someone said that the song required Astaire's lightweight touch; a better singer would have ruined it!

Frank Loesser's "Inchworm" from Hans Christian Andersen.  I've always liked this number, one of Danny Kaye's signature songs, partly because I have Asperger's Syndrome and identify with the theme. (When I was little I calculated the exponents of two:  four, eight, sixteen, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024...) Really, numbers have a beauty all their own!

"Baby, You Knock Me Out" from Betty Comden & Adolph Green's It's Always Fair Weather.  Here's a fun number!  Did I mention that  Cyd Charisse was a 10? ("How strong!") Directed by Stanley Donen and choreographed by him and Gene Kelly.

"Ladies in Waiting" from Cole Porter's Les Girls.  I had to include this number, directed by George Cukor, not so much because I liked it as because it's so bizarre... (Watch for costar Gene Kelly in the wings.)

"Boy for Sale" from Oliver! That's the great Harry Secombe as Mr. Bumble.  This is another musical with a surprising amount of realism.

"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from John Kander & Fred Ebb's Cabaret.  Directed by Bob Fosse, this number's a jaw-dropper!  What's disturbing about it is that you can see the seductive side of Nazi evil. (If you see this in a cinema, please don't stand up and sing along!) I like the detail of the old man who just doesn't get it--or maybe he's the one who does understand it... 

"Colored Spade" from Hair. My advance apologies to anyone who's offended by the language in Dorsey Wright's number, choreographed by Twyla Tharp.

Allegro Giocoso

"That's not what Your Holiness wanted." "No, I planned a ceiling--he plans a miracle!"--The Agony and the Ecstasy

"But what we're talking here is attitude.  Burt [Reynolds] has got it down now.  He can do a whole movie without any plot to get it all mucked up"--Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In

Friday I went to the campaign HQ again and met the candidate Jill Andrew.  I divided about 3000 campaign flyers into bundles of fifty.  I figured out a fast way:  count out 25, then make a second pile of the same height and combine them to make fifty, saving half the time.  Later I figured out an even quicker method:  make two piles of the same height and combine them, so you'll only have to count out the 25 once!

Saturday afternoon I saw Carol Reed's The Agony and the Ecstasy at the Lightbox, part of a series of movies about artists.  Based on a book by unreliable middlebrow biographer Irving Stone, it's about how Michelangelo (Charlton Heston, hopelessly out of his depth) came to paint the Sistine Chapel.  It's the sort of movie where they show his Statue of David but add a fig leaf!  Yet I'm a bit of a sucker for those Hollywood epics from the '50s and '60s with huge crowd scenes and ritzy production values.  I can somehow believe that Pope Julius II was as much of a pill as Rex Harrison...

Afterward I went on Betty Anne's art walk.  We went to places like the Ben Sherman boutique, where I bought a black bow tie at a ten-dollar discount.  What a big bag they gave me for such a small item!  She also pointed out Terroni's, the Italian restaurant that royal bride Meghan Markle frequented while filming Suits here. (She's done a guided tour of Toronto sites with connections to her!)

Later I went to The Beguiling and bought Cullen Murphy's Cartoon County, a memoir about growing up the son of comic strip artist John Cullen Murphy (Big Ben Bolt, Prince Valiant) and getting to know other leading lights in his father's trade. (I've been looking forward to that one.)

Today was the Reading Out Loud Meetup, and the topic was funny writing, so I titled it "Allegro Giocoso." I read part of Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer, where he fights a well-dressed boy; part of This Boy's Life, where Tobias Wolff describes the antics of him and his tweener friends; Joe Bob Briggs' review of Burt Reynolds' Stroker Ace in Joe Bob Goes to the Drive-In; and Carl Sandburg's poem "Yarns."

I've started a new Facebook game Big Farm.  In the Vikings game I somehow got a package of 100 three-hour speedups, so I've been building so quickly that my resources are getting depleted, except for iron.

The greatest people of the 19th century, Part I

Some time back I did a post with my choices for the greatest people of the 20th century.  Now I'll try it for the 19th century. (I would have done it a few days ago, but couldn't find the sheet I'd written the names on because it was under my desk!)

Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821).  A Corsican-born artillery officer who rose to general, First Consul of revolutionary France, and an emperor who dominated Europe.  Though eventually defeated, he changed the western world permanently.

Muhammad Ali Pasha (1769-1849). An Albanian soldier who took power in Egypt, routing Mamluke power and reducing Ottoman sovereignty to a dead letter, and also spurring modern Arab nationalism.

Klemens von Metternich (1773-1859). Austrian Foreign Minister from 1809 to 1848, he played a key role in creating the "balance of powers" system at the 1815 Congress of Vienna which largely kept the peace in Europe in the century after Napoleon's defeat.

J.M.W. Turner (1775-1849). An English painter whose revolutionary technique anticipated impressionism.

Simon Bolivar (1783-1830). President of Venezuela, who played a key role in Spanish-speaking Latin America's independence movement that made republican government dominant in the western hemisphere.

Abraham Lincoln (1809-65). President of the U.S.A. during a long, bloody civil war, he ultimately defeated the secessionist South, abolished slavery and confirmed the power of liberal central government in America.

Charles Darwin (1809-82). A British biologist who published The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, revolutionizing natural history (and creating controversy) with the theory of evolution.

William Gladstone (1809-98). British Prime Minister for much of the late 19th century, he went from Peelite Tory to Liberal champion of free trade and liberal ideals.

Otto von Bismarck (1815-98). Prussian Chancellor who  created the united German Empire (under Prussian leadership) through a series of wars, and as German Chancellor asserted the Empire's power diplomatically through alliances and brokered peaces.

Emperor Alexander II of Russia (1818-81). A progressive autocrat who  succeeded to the throne after Crimean War reverses showed the need for reform, he abolished serfdom, expanded into central Asia and oversaw the beginning of Russia's industrial revolution.

Dowager Empress Cixi (1835-1908). The dominant figure in China's Qing Dynasty during its last half-century, when it tried to combine traditional power with pragmatic modernization.

I could mention a dozen more, and will next week.

The best-laid schemes...

Napoleon: "Wellington, Wellington, Wellington, Wellington!"--Waterloo

In a few weeks, when it's just a bit warmer, Father will be moving into our sun room out back.  We have a sofa bed out there, but I didn't like the idea of him sleeping in a sofa bed every night. (It seemed cheap to me.) We have a futon bed in the attic, so I decided to take it downstairs and put that in the sun room.

Of course, I couldn't get it all the way down and it got stuck in the small stairwell.  John's coming over tomorrow and he'll help move it back.  Father really doesn't mind sleeping in the sofa bed permanently, so I guess I can accept it.

Last night I saw Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo again, this time with the History Meetup.  The history book about Portugal is fascinating:  I wasn't aware of the tensions that accompanied the 18th-century alliance with Britain. (The Brazilian gold boom largely ended up in British hands, financing Portugal's trade deficit, and helped launch Britain's industrial revolution!)

Yesterday Moira and I went to the garden store next to Fiesta Farms and bought the seeds and plants for this year's garden. (It'll be ready for planting in just a day or two, in time for Victoria Day.)

Today I mowed our lawn for the first time this year.  I also bought some ice and brought our ice-crushing machine. 

I also went to the St. Paul's NDP campaign headquarters, just south of the St. Clair station, to do some volunteer work. (I photocopied a sheet with a notice written three times on it, then sliced them into 300 notices.)

Vikings: War of Clans

Saturday I went to the Toronto City Opera board meeting at a Market Square apartment building. (I was late and missed the boring financial stuff.) I mentioned to Sandra that Debi has experience as a stage assistant.  

Afterward I went to Barbara Frum Library and borrowed A Concise History of Portugal, for next month's History Meetup. (The author compares Portugal to Scotland and Ireland!)

Yesterday afternoon was the Classic Book Club Meetup and Malcolm, Debi and I discussed The House of the Seven Gables.

Today after the memoir session I went to Miriam's apartment building and we had one more editing session before she goes to Italy for a couple of weeks.  Anne was there and mentioned another possible editing job for me. (I still haven't started spending those Chapters-Indigo gift certificates...)

I've started forking the garden and it'll soon be ready for planting.

I've started playing the online game Vikings:  War of Clans.  So far it's all been construction, which I like.  I've passed Level 1700 in Candy Crush Saga!

WALK WITH ME

"And it was in this hour, so full of doubt and awe, that the one miracle was wrought, without which every human existence is a blank.  The bliss which makes all things true, beautiful and holy shone around this youth and maiden. They were conscious of nothing sad or old.  They transfigured the earth, and made it Eden again, and themselves the two first dwellers in it"--The House of the Seven Gables

I finally started spading the garden a couple of days ago.  Today I finished the first phase.  You have to admire those persistent dandelion weeds! (Our back yard is dotted yellow by them.)

Yesterday I was going to see an afternoon movie with Bev, but something came up and she couldn't make it.  I saw the movie anyway.  It was Walk With Me, a documentary about Buddhist priest Thich Nhat Hanh, a refugee from wartime 

Vietnam, and the Plum Village Zen monastery he founded in France.  Every fifteen minutes they ring a bell and everyone stops what he's doing and spends a few moments in meditation before resuming his work!  Some of them went to New York City and meditated in a public square, where a crazy Christian accosted them to say that Jesus was the only way to salvation.  I can see myself as a hermit, not so much as a monk.

Finished The House of the Seven Gables.  It ended with them leaving the house, making me wonder what happened to the house itself later on...

I've decided to resume translating short stories.  I'm now translating David Lewis Stein's "The Huntsman" into Portuguese!

Music clips

"My impression is, that our wonderfully increased and still increasing facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us round again to the nomadic state.... The past is but a  coarse and sensual prophecy of the present and the future"--The House of the Seven Gables

Time to post some new music clips from Youtube!

Ileana Cortruba singing Antonia's Aria from Jacque Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman. This is one of my favorite operas, with a whole lot of music to choose from:  the Drinking Song, Olympia's aria, the Barcarolle, the Hoffmann-Giulietta duet.  But I chose this song, which goes in English, "Your turtledove has flown away..." (This performance is from a 1981 Royal Opera production.)

Wade Hemsworth, "Blackfly." Another funny National Film Board cartoon of a Wade Hemsworth song. (He composed "The Log Driver's Waltz" too.)

Ewan McColl's "Sweet Thames, Flow Softly." A beautiful little love song, which reminds me that I love London too. (McColl was one socialist who never sold out!)

Tommy Makem and the Clancy Brothers, "The Butcher Boy." They sing this song on an early TV show hosted by the great Pete Seeger.

The Irish Rovers, "The Wind That Shakes the Corn." The folk group at their best with this tragic song about Irish rebellion.

John Allen Cameron, "The Four Marys." Back in my youth I heard Cameron sing this Scottish folk song in concert, based on an (urban?) legend about a lady in waiting to Mary, Queen of Scots who got knocked up by her husband Lord Darnley and got hanged for infanticide.  Cape Bretoners sing it en masse in stadiums and rinks, like "You'll Never Walk Alone" and "God Bless America" in other places.

Ian Dury and the Blockheads, "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick." My mother didn't care for most new age music, but she liked this song!

Cheryl Barnes singing "Easy to Be Hard," from the Gerome Ragni- James Rado- Galt McDermot hippie musical Hair.  The 1979 movie of Hair, directed by recently-deceased Milos Forman fell between two stools commercially, coming too late for the original '60s enthusiasm and too early for nostalgia.  But I think it's survived pretty well.

Devo, "Speed Racer" from Oh, No!  It's Devo.  I always liked Devo, and this song, from a late album, makes me laugh!

John Anderson, "Agreement," from Kitaro's Dream.  I find this new age song's message profound. ("Making us want more, making us see less...")

Miscellany

"He had that sense, or inward prophecy--which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish--that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime"--The House of the Seven Gables

Thursday I joined Miriam to participate in the First Thursdays gathering at the Art Gallery of Ontario.  They had food, but I was full from the fettucine alfredo I'd cooked myself.  The music was loud for my tastes.

Friday I baked bread for the first time in over six months! (It was multigrain.)

Saturday morning I went to Grace-on-the-Hill church to help Anne sell fabrics, but it turned out to be an attic sale rather than a fabric sale. (So it didn't matter that I was late...) She had her son in tow, whom I met for the first time, along with her daughter.  I was going to help her with a sale at Timothy Eaton church, but it ended an hour earlier than she thought.  I lent them my graphic history of the Klondike.

Saturday night I went to the Singing Meetup, where we sang Blondie's "The Tide Is High." (That was a hit when I was a teenager!)

In that Empire game, my forts got attacked three times in about a day!  I'm short of soldiers and coins just now.

My post of dance clips last week got over a thousand viewers.  If I decided to specialize in stuff like that, I might get way bigger viewer numbers.  But specialization doesn't interest me!

THE GODFATHER

Vito to Tom (when Michael sends him west): "It isn't that you were a bad consiglieri, it was Sonny who was a bad Don, god bless him"--The Godfather

The other day on my memoir blog I said that I could go on for hours about gangster movies like Francis Coppola's The Godfather, so I may as well write some more.

The 1960s were a time when American society became genuinely "multicultural." (It's telling that the acronym WASP appeared at this time.) Many Italian-Americans resent the Mafia-related stereotypes that movies like The Godfather have promoted, yet the blockbuster success of that movie marked the true "mainstreaming" of their culture.TheGodfather appeared at about the same time as Norman Jewison's hit movie of the Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof, which marks a similar mainstreaming of Jewish-American culture.

And what great storytelling Coppola managed!  I haven't read Mario Puzo's book, but I'm told the movie is better. Coppola takes almost three hours to tell the story, giving texture its due. (Paramount studio head Robert Evans asserts that Coppola offered him a shorter cut, but Evans himself realized that the long cut was needed!)

The Godfather is a crime drama, but it's also a family epic.  The whole idea of a patriarch was a bit exotic to Americans with a WASP nuclear-family background. It's a rather basic, mythical story about a father with three sons:  the testosterone-charged heir who disappoints him, the loser who can't do anything right, and the quiet, thoughtful one who ends up saving the family.  There's also the daughter whose husband never really gets into the inner circle, and the adopted son who serves as consiglieri.

But it's also the story of Michael trying to stay out of the family business, only to be drawn in and ultimately take over. (We first see him in his army uniform, suggesting that he knows something about killing...)  Like Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate, it addressed the identity crisis of baby boomers, the younger generation back then.

The Godfather was so successful that Coppola got a free hand with The Godfather Part II, and he came up with something even more epic. (That version is half prequel, about Vito's emigration to America; and half sequel, about the family's fate under Michael's leadership.) I could write another post about that movie, but I will mention just one detail showing how Coppola's vision evolved.

The first movie has a famous ending:  Michael's just lied to his wife about a murder close to home, and as she looks into his office the door gets closed on her!  In the second movie there's a similar scene, except that it's shown from Michael's perspective, with the subtext that he's cutting himself off from everyone close to him...

Now I want to see both movies again!

Maytime

"Instead of discussing her claim to rank among ladies, it would be preferable to regard Phoebe as the example of feminine grace and availability combined, in a state of society, if there were any such, where ladies did not exist"--The House of the Seven Gables

Yesterday I put on my summer jacket for the first time!  Today was even warmer.  Time to start work on the garden.

Moira liked Mary Pickford's dance scene!

Today we went to the bank and arranged for me to send $400 into Father's account every month to pay bills like utilities.  It's easier than I expected--I thought I'd be handling those bills myself!

Tonight was the History Meetup, back at the Robarts Library food court again.  We talked about Iran.  That Iran book I was reading described the revelation of sending Iran missiles as "an unmitigated disaster for the Reagan administration," but there was one big mitigation:  nobody was punished, which guaranteed that future administrations would see fit to do the same. (Reagan's temporary 
embarrassment was supposed to be sufficient punishment, you see...)

Afterward someone who couldn't find the group posted "What a pity the organizer is so disorganized," and I replied "If you want to organize this Meetup I won't stand in your way."

Dance clips

"His home would include the home of the dead and buried wizard, and would thus afford the ghost of the latter a kind of privilege to haunt its new apartments, and the chambers into which future bridegrooms were to lead their brides, and where children of the Pyncheon blood were to be born"--The House of the Seven Gables

I decided to post some clips of dance numbers I like!

Twenty-five minutes into Mary Pickford's  silent Heart o' the Hills, there's a great dance scene!

"Shanghai Lil" from Footlight Parade. Yankee Doodle Dandy wasn't the only movie to display James Cagney's hoofing talent.  Ruby Keeler was a cutie, though putting her in Chinese makeup may make today's viewers uncomfortable.  Another great Busby Berkeley number, clearly from the pre-Production Code era!

The Piccolino from Top Hat.  Irving Berlin's song has a good beat and you can dance to it, as they used to say on American Bandstand.  Hermes Pan's choreography shows the Busby Berkeley influence, of course.  Ginger Rogers was one actress who could play smart women!

Part of the Broadway ballet in Singin' in the Rain, choreographed by Gene Kelly himself.  Cyd Charisse is doing much the same as that Girl Hunt ballet in The Band Wagon, and two of them are definitely better than one!

The Barn-Raising Dance in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.  Choreographed by the great Michael Kidd, this is what they mean by "rollicking"! (I remember seeing this in London, England at the Museum of the Moving Image.)

The fantasy ballet from Rodgers and Hammerstein's masterpiece Carousel, with Rod Alexander adapting Agnes DeMille's Broadway choreography. Sure, I posted that waltz in my last music clips, and this clip cuts the part where she crashes the fancy party.  But it's a truly compelling ballet, and the final moment is honestly painful. (Carousel is one of those movies that gets better and better with repeat viewings!)

"Step in Time" from Mary Poppins.  Marc Breaux and DeeDee Wood choreographed, and dance numbers don't get much livelier than this one!  The Sherman Brothers became Hollywood's most prolific songwriting team, but they never outdid this early effort.

Lionel Bart's "I'd Do Anything" from Oliver! Onna White's choreography won a special-achievement Oscar.  I've seen that movie half a dozen times, and I want to see it again. (My sister saw it twice in one day!)

Chava's ballet, from Sheldon Harnick and Jerry Bock's Fiddler on the Roof. (Tom Abbott adapted Jerome Robbins' Broadway choreography.) It happens just after Tevye's rejected his daughter Chava because she married a gentile.  This reminds me of the finale of Wagner's Die Walkure where Brunhilde tried to save Sigmund so her divine father Wotan punishes her with suspended animation in a ring of fire pending rescue by a full-fledged hero. They love each other, but they have to be true to themselves!

And lastly, a National Film Board cartoon of Wade Hemsworth's "Log Driver's Waltz," with vocals by the McGarrigle sisters! (Nice sense of Canadian history...)