The Pirate (1948, Vincente Minnelli) (Patreon)

63/100

A superlative musical grafted onto (by all appearances) a mediocre play. Maybe it's just that the tone and/or the energy level is off when nobody's singing or dancing—Behrman's plot, at least as adapted by Hackett and Goodrich, gets pretty damn zany, and it's not terribly difficult for me to imagine, say, Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo starring in a more aggressively antic version. Plot twists like "Woman romantically obsessed with famous pirate is wooed by hammy actor pretending to be said pirate, while the boring, unattractive middle-aged mayor to whom she's engaged actually once was said pirate" really demand fast-paced mugging; you can't successfully underplay that level of sprightly nonsense. Kelly does have a fair bit of fun with his John Barrymore impression, but Garland looks a bit lost, whether due to her personal troubles at that time or simply because the role doesn't particularly suit her. Emblematic sequence is the one in which Manuela discovers Serafin's ruse and briefly plays along, praising his phony swashbuckling prowess while simultaneously enraging him by badmouthing actors and the theater. It's the best non-musical scene in the movie, with a fully energized Garland leaning into the absurdity (Manuela goes even hammier than Serafin)...but then, rather than develop that comic dynamic, the screenplay just trashes it, having Manuela drop the façade and proceed to throw everything in a very large and ornate room directly at Serafin's head. When you've got two of the most charismatic stars in Hollywood onscreen together, having one of them hurl objects and the other one repeatedly duck for several minutes qualifies as an unconscionable squandering of mega-wattage. And Manuela falling for Serafin happens far too abruptly to be satisfying, even adjusting for hostility-as-foreplay. The book needed to be all-around funnier.

Fortunately, the musical numbers are strong enough to compensate (though I wish there were more of 'em). Cole Porter's on fire, rhyming Niña with seen ya and neurasthenia. Kelly engages in athleticism that's sometimes not even dancing per se, clambering all over the fanciful period sets; at one point, he goes from wooing a woman on the building's balcony to wooing another woman who's perched on a stone support connecting that building to another, using the building's awning to swing himself into a fully reclined position on the stone support, in one fluid motion. (Hard to describe in words, looks glorious as executed.) And while this isn't among my favorite Garland performances, she's in fantastic brassy form for "Mack the Black," so unabashed that it's genuinely affecting when Manuela's face instantly shifts from triumphant to alarmed (the hypnotic effect apparently having worn off) midway through the song's final note. (I also love that one of the anonymous dudes surrounding Garland was assigned the task of very casually yanking away the ribbon holding her hair in place. It's done so subtly that you don't grasp for a moment why Manuela suddenly looks wilder.) As always, I watched these sequences with a strange amalgam of joy and sorrow, the latter in response to what we've lost by no longer cultivating talents like these. (Somewhat less true of Minnelli, who does a beautiful job of employing a pastel palette throughout, so that the imagined pirate ballet can be a contrast in fiery reds and blacks. An art that continues to be practiced; nobody's hiring the directorial equivalent of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone.) Wish Mayer hadn't not only cut but destroyed the reportedly salacious "Voodoo" number, and that "Be a Clown" didn't unfairly suffer, for those of us not alive ca. 1948–52, from having been shamelessly ripped off to create one of the most beloved and awe-inspiring routines in cinema history.