TCM is showing it again tonight, and once again, I've tried to wish it to be better than it is. The book of the initial iteration was ambitious, but the 2nd act -- with all new characters, all new locales, and the emotional suspense built around the obligatory scene that gives the show its title -- but on film, it's just not much of a story. It keeps re-asserting the same obstacle, hard-wired classism against newly monied Molly's rise, without finding enough ... enough ... what? ... good scenes. The Europeans, royalty always wearing jewels and attitude to make sure we appreciate the imprimatur they bestow, are dragged in to issue withering comeuppance. And when we get to that obligatory scene, it has one of the most earned reprise triggers ever conceived. Molly tells a boat full of weeping upper class women she'll teach them "Belly Up the the Bar, Boys," and then ... then ... we cut away. Reynolds is actually at her very worst in that scene, phony, arch, screechy (if brief) which is painful. She doesn't know how to play it, and it's a moment that might've had real drama, had Molly actually been shown teaching a vulgar ditty to a boat of pampered women whose PTSD is already present. No one knows what to dramatize, what's relevant, what is the center of the story, other than the marriage. It's just great character in search of a worked-out story. It's a show about an idea, which gave musical theater a helluva title.
Oh, and the great score is gutted. Yeah, there's too much of everything in the Willson original. But the film takes 4 songs and reprises and recycles the melodies incessantly. |
