"Sing out, Louise!": "Gypsy" Filmed Triumphantly in 1962 by Mervyn LeRoy, with Roz Russell as Rose
Full disclosure: My parents sent me to Catholic school, something for which I am not entirely grateful. Dad was a Catholic, although an excommunicated one - excommunicated because the woman he married, my mother, was Jewish and divorced. Mom was decidedly not practicing in terms of religion. Far from it. She was more of an agnostic (I take after her), but she went along with my dad, which is how I landed in Catholic school.I bring this up to explain exactly how I happened to end up in Radio City Music Hall with my friend David Gretzkowski on Thursday, November 1st, 1962 - the opening day of Mervyn LeRoy's film version of "Gypsy." It was important that I get to Radio City that day for the opening and, luckily, it was All Saints' Day - we had the day off. The theater was packed, curiously with a lot of nuns, one of whom was our school principal, Sister Mary Salvine, who I genuinely liked. A musical theater freak, Sister Salvine feigned embarrassment at being caught at a movie about a stripper. She made us promise not to say that we saw her there.
On the other hand, she seemed unconcerned that we were there.
That moment - the entire day - is burned in my brain. I had a keen interest in the film of "Gypsy" because, as I said in the previous post, it was the first Broadway show I saw. I liked the film even more than the play and, over the years, I've come to cultivate an appreciation for LeRoy's defiant fidelity to his stage source. Accustomed to MGM's routine bowdlerization of Broadway musicals (see "Bells Are Ringing" and "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" from the same era, or "On the Town"), I was impressed that Warners elected to transfer "Gypsy" to the screen nearly word-for-word, courtesy of playwright/screenwriter Leonard Spigelgass, who actually improved on Arthur Laurents's excellent stage script.
I could pontificate ad infinitum about the glories of the film "Gypsy" - and I have - but, today, I'd rather share the insight and astute comments that British film historian Douglas McVay brought to his seminal book, "The Musical Film," arguably the definitive take on a uniquely American film form - certainly a rare intelligent film-musical tome miles apart from the highly disposable, lovelorn hackwork usually devoted to the subject.
Here are select excepts from McVay's lengthy analysis of "Gypsy" (which immediately followed his take on "West Side Story" in the book):
"Fine as 'West Side Story' is, though, it is equaled and, arguably, surpassed – in a rather different idiom – by another filmed Broadway hit: Mervyn LeRoy’s “Gypsy.” Arthur Laurents’s book (for) 'West Side Story' (adapted for the screen by Ernest Lehman), though largely craftsmanlike, falls short of his libretto for 'Gypsy' (scripted on celluloid by Leonard Spigelgass), based on the memoirs of the transatlantic stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The dialogue and situations in 'Gypsy' have more wit, bite and emotional range, and the characterizations are more complex.
"And although Jerome Robbins has more consistent choreographic opportunity in 'WSS,' at any rate one of his numbers in 'Gypsy' is on par with anything in the other show and movie. Last but no less important than these considerations, 'Gypsy' on celluloid boasts two performances – by Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood” – immeasurably superior to any of the acting in the 'West Side Story' film.
"In the main, LeRoy’s mise-en-scène is a perfect compromise between the evocatively theatrical atmosphere of the original, and shrewdly filmic innovation. All the best numbers reflect this. One thinks of 'Some People,' where the marvelously urgent words and rhythms of the song (delivered by the possessive Rose, mother of the little girl Louise whom she is to transform into strip-queen Gypsy) are put across by Russell with knife-edge timing of gesture and facial espression, most notably in her contemptuously comic grimace as she plunges a hatpin into her hat on the climatic line, 'Well, they can stay and rot – but not Rose!' Or again, of the way in which the vivacious chorus (for) 'Mr. Goldstone, I Love You' is followed (with a change of mood as daringly impressive as anything in Capra or Ford) by a cut and a slow track-in to the crouchingly isolated form of Louise (Natalie Wood), cradling and singing softly to a nuzzling 'Little Lamb' as she sits lonely on her noisily spoiled birthday. LeRoy’s shooting of the numbers is never static – except when it helps so to be, as in most of this ballad.
"Miss Wood and Ann Jilliann (as Louise’s younger sister, June) do a staircase duet, 'If Mama Was Married,' which ends on an exhilarating, long-held reprise of a low-angle close-shot, taken from lower down the stairs, of them peering at us over the banister, right of the frame (the grouping decoratively balanced by a candelabra on the left), and then hanging on to the final ringing note.
"And in the film’s greatest sequence, the 'All I Need Is the Girl' routine (in which Jerome Robbins exceeds even his 'WSS' dance-design), LeRoy’s command is masterful. A youthful hoofer (played by Paul Wallace) demonstrates to the enthralled Louise the fabulous number with which he hopes one day to conquer New York: and it becomes a celebration of his show-business ambition and an orgasmic symbol of her hopeless amorous yearning for him.
"LeRoy preserves the potently blue-shadowed alley and yard setting (plaudits to art director John Beckman and Technirama-Technicolor camerawork by Harry Stradling), by largely holding the action in medium-shot: but his camera not only tracks in a little on Louise as she longingly stands, stretching out her hand or pressing voluptuously to her body, it also moves with Wallace during his terpsichorean solo laterally- unobtrusively yet tellingly. And finally, it pulls back to view them both when Louise at last does join in, and they caper and twirl together, Wallace yelling exultantly to her as they leap, 'Again! Again! Again!...' This number, a choreographed sex-act, rates for me (with 'Niña' in 'The Pirate' and 'The Man that Got Away' in 'A Star Is Born') as one of the three most inspired I have seen in the film-musical genre.
"Strandling and Beckman deserve our thanks, too, for the atmospherically misty-blue railway station décor which is the background to 'Everything’s Coming Up Roses,' Rose's bitterly intransigent song of resolve – when June, her original protégée, unexpecedtly quits to get married – that Louise shall take her place. It is handled by Rosalind Russell with neurotically pile-driving brilliance: nowhere more so than in her mortified gaze and vocal emphasis on the lines 'You’ll be swell!' and 'Mama is gonna see to it!' And at the finish of her solo, her arms come up and freeze above her head, while the camera pans slowly above and to the left of her (we see her arms and face at the bottom of frame) to take in the railroad vista – and we hear the faint, melancholy, poetic hoot of a train ... the train carrying June away from her?
"Gypsy" - En Francaise"As Louise – now Gypsy – prepares to go on-stage to peel for the first time, LeRoy tracks with her, first out of her dressing-room, then away in front of her as she walks towards the stage, then laterally – until we join her behind the curtain. This lengthy track conveys all Gypsy’s nervous excitement. The director’s share in the marvelous portrayals by Russell and Wood is surely indisputable: and these portrayals culminate in the riveting quarrel scene – in the way that Miss Wood looks almost shyly down at her ritzy gown and says in a quiet, breaking voice, apropro of her new fame, 'Mama – I love it' (later repeating this several times in a furious tirade which the actress gradates faultlessly, never quite losing our sympathy); and in the flickering combination of rage, guilt and misery in Miss Russell’s face, after her exasperated rhetorical query, 'What did I do it all for?,' has been answered (unawnswerably) by Gypsy’s softly accusing 'I thought you did it for me, Mama...'
"Now that Louise-Gypsy no longer seems to need her, Rose, defiantly alone on an empty, crimson-glowing stage, does a bravura song and mimed striptease, 'Rose’s Turn.' Once more, Russell is magnetic (who cares if Lisa Kirk dubbed a few of her high notes?): especially in her final, orgiastic repetition, 'For me! For me! For me!' But the silence after this number is broken by the applause of the smiling, watching Gypsy: mother and daughter are reconciled; and the film’s last line, appropriately, is 'Madame Rose – and her daughter … Gypsy!,' delivered with beamingly affectionate élan and a raised, annuniciatory sweep of the arm by Russell to Wood (LeRoy lifting his camera slightly to echo Rose’s raised arm). The two of them turn and walk away from us, arm in arm (the camera tracking slightly away from them, to increase the formalized finality of the image), to a triumphant, measured orchestral surge on the soundtrack of the “curtain up” passage in 'Everything’s Coming Up Roses.' "This grand finale is only paralleled in impact by that of Cukor’s 'A Star Is Born.' One regrets all the more that Warner Bros. (as in the case of 'A Star Is Born') saw fit to make certain cuts in the versions of 'Gypsy' released in Britain and widely in America." Say no more. A brilliant analysis of a brilliant film.
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