Stanley Donen's Career Got Off to A Roaring Start With On the Town and Ended Bleakly With the Cinematic Sex Crime Blame It on Rio
The 1949 musical On the Town brought together one of the greatest aggregations of talent MGM and Arthur Freed ever assembled for the rollicking tale of three sailors trying to get laid and see the sights during a very eventful 24 hour shore leave. The magic happens in New York, New York, a wonderful town where the Bronx is up and the battery is down and the people ride in a hole in the ground, if the film’s lyrics are to be believed.
The geniuses who made On the Town a spectacularly over-achieving triumph weren’t preposterously, preternaturally gifted at just one thing. They were instead multi-hyphenates who did many things brilliantly. Take On the Town screenwriters Adolf Green and Betty Comden, for example. They weren’t just two of the funniest, smartest and fastest minds this side of Billy Wilder and screenwriters of Singin' in the Rain and It’s Always Fair Weather; they also dabbled fruitfully in songwriting.
That was also true of legendary On the Town producer Arthur Freed, who didn’t just go on to produce Singin' in the Rain with much of the core of On the Town; he wrote the theme song to the all-time classic as well (with Nacio Herb Brown) and plenty of others as well.
On the Town star Frank Sinatra was a natural-born movie star and heavyweight, Oscar-winning thespian in addition to being able to carry a tune while his even more multi-faceted costar Gene Kelly could not only sing, dance and act but also choreograph and direct as well.
Kelly’s co-director, Stanley Donen, was another absurdly gifted multi-hyphenate, a hotshot choreographer who made his name and helped lay the elaborate groundwork for not just On the Town but follow-ups Singin' in the Rain and It’s Always Fair Weather as well by choreographing, with Kelly, Anchors Away, including the famous scene where Kelly dances with cartoon mouse Jerry of Tom & Jerry fame.
Donen was certainly not the biggest name in On the Town’s staggering arsenal of talent; he wasn’t even the biggest name among the co-directors but Donen would go on to carve out a magnificent career for himself as a filmmaker, both with Kelly, with whom he had a fraught, complicated personal and professional relationship, and without him, as a director of musicals and later dramas like the acclaimed Two for the Road.
With all of that talent onboard, there was seemingly no way On the Town could fail but nobody could have anticipated just how influential, beloved and iconic it would become.
On the Town opens on the very brink of six o’clock in the morning in New York, the white-hot epicenter of the universe, with three sailors — Gabey (Kelly), Chip (Sinatra) and Ozzie (Jules Munshin) — vibrating with so much energy and excitement that they’re practically walking on air as they disembark from their ship with 24 hours to conquer New York, see and experience ALL of the sights and find love, or at least a girl to make out with, in the process.
First time directors and co-choreographers Donen and Kelly had to convince a reluctant Louis B. Mayer to let them shoot in New York when the MGM lots had plenty of very expensive New York sets at their disposal but there is no substitute for the electricity, authenticity and grit of location shooting. Shooting extensively in the Big Apple didn’t just improve On the Town: it made the movie.
On the Town is the ultimate New York movie. It has New York in its bones, in its soul, in its DNA. Its caffeinated rhythms are the rhythms of the city that never sleeps. It’s an adrenaline rush fantasy of the ultimate New York day followed by the ultimate New York night. Shooting on location freed the MGM musical from the staginess and artificiality of relying on sets, which were located in a city not just very different from New York but damn near antithetical.
Donen and Kelly may be choreographers and dancers whose greatest obligation is to dance but as radically inventive first-time filmmakers they make magnificent, innovative use of editing and montage and location shooting to both give the movie a propulsive, kinetic, percussive, breakneck rhythm and separate it even further from its Broadway roots.
That, my friends, is a good-ass shot.
In a wonderfully, understatedly progressive development, On the Town is a 1940s musical in which the women are overwhelmingly the sexual aggressors and the men innocents caught in their web of seduction. The same is true of Donen’s final film, Blame It on Rio, but when the “woman” in question is a fifteen year old girl-child it suddenly seems less progressive and a whole lot more objectionable.
Even more remarkably, the women here aren’t just more sexually aggressive and assertive than their male counterparts: they’re specifically hornier than sailors on shore leave, a demographic as known for their intense need for sexual release after all those lonely, lonely months sailing the world as their seafaring prowess.
Our heroes set out to chase girls, but as soon as they leave the ship they go from being predators to being prey, from pursuers to pursued. Channeling the emotions and desires of countless women at the time, primarily but not exclusively teenyboppers, sassy cab-driver (Betty Garrett) takes one look at Sinatra and decides that she must have him, whether he’s interested or not.
In the kind of detail that made Comden and Green such an essential, if overlooked component of some of the greatest musicals of all time, earnest Chip comes to New York eager to experience all of the wonders outlined in a 1905 guidebook his dad gave him and Hildy has to gently inform him that most of the performers he’s excited about seeing died decades ago.
Ozzie, meanwhile, is quickly snagged by Claire (Ann Miller), a man-crazy kook who has channeled her ferocious sexual desires into a professional and intellectual fascination with men on a sociological, as well as sexual and romantic level.
Gabey becomes fixated on Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen), a gorgeous mystery woman he idealizes and romanticizes as a figure of class and wealth and sophistication for attaining the title of “Miss Turnstile,” never imagining that in real life she’s a burlesque dancer from the same idyllic small town as him.
On the Town is a quintessential New York movie but it’s as essential an example of movies that limit themselves to a single 24 hour period. In the right filmmakers’ hands, a day can be an entire universe of comedy and romance, music and big city excitement.
With On the Town, two ridiculously talented, hungry and ambitious choreographers/directors roared out of the gate with a debut that looked and felt and sounded like nothing that had come before, that was pure fun, pure joy, pure cinema, pure sublime silliness.
Kelly and Donen did not set out to innovate. They probably did not think too much about how they were single-handedly helping the medium of the cinematic musical evolve by leaps and bounds. Consummate entertainers, they were overwhelmingly concerned with making the most enjoyable movie possible, a crackling comedy rife with pop culture references and meta-textual elements and some of the most extraordinary dance sequences committed to film, including a ballet that recreates the events of the film in abstract, lyrical form and gives this wonderfully lowbrow enterprise an air of class and prestige.
On the Town is gloriously vulgar and wondrously alive, a toe-tapping tribute to being young and in love with the world and New York from some of the greatest artists of the time. Kelly and Donen would continue to accomplish great things as a team before going their separate ways but there’s something about the youthful energy of a great debut that is impossible to beat or re-capture. Debuts don’t get much better than On the Town.
yuck.
Unfortunately, cinematic swan songs don’t get much worse than Blame It on Rio, a rancid, deeply problematic 1984 sex comedy whose complete dearth of laughs sadly only represents the first in an endless series of fatal flaws. Blame It on Rio never should have been made. Then it never should have been released but it seems a little too late to delete the movie from its existence, alongside the similarly offensive, unfortunately simpatico Gerard Depardieu/Katherine Heigl vehicle My Father, The Hero, which similarly made an inexplicable decision to take a long look at the “funny,” lighter side of a middle-aged man having sex with an underaged girl his daughter’s age.
The surreal, unfortunate miscalculations began with imagining that American audiences would embrace the notion of a forty-three year old husband and father having sex repeatedly with his best friend’s love-struck fifteen year old daughter as deliciously risqué rather than morally repellent in a way that crosses several lines that should not be crossed, legally, morally and creatively.
Blame It on Rio’s unfortunate and deeply regrettable existence makes more sense in light of it being part of a wave of tacky Hollywood comedies based on ribald French farces. Blame It on Rio was based on the French 1977 comedy Un moment d’égarement but France and the United States are very different countries with very different attitudes towards sex. What an audience of French libertines might find deliciously insouciant struck American audiences as wrong not just creatively but morally and ethically as well.
Instead of bringing out the continental rake in audiences, Blame It on Rio’s tone-deaf treatment of explosive subjects is more likely to connect audiences with their inner National Legion of Decency scold. Fox might have imagined that sophisticated grown-ups like Donen, co-screenwriter Larry Gelbart, whose credits include co-writing Tootsie and creating the M*A*S*H television show, and star Michael Caine could sell this kind of explosive, toxic material. They were deeply, even tragically mistaken.
gross.
An understandably embarrassed Caine sweats his way through the impossible role of Matthew Hollis, a husband and dad whose long-suffering wife Karen (Valerie Harper) announces just before the big family vacation to Rio that she’ll be going on vacation alright, but not with her husband, their teenaged daughter Nicole (Demi Moore), Matthew’s gruff best friend Victor (Joseph Bologna) or Matthew’s 15 year old daughter Jennifer (Michelle Johnson).
In keeping with its shockingly oblivious take on pretty much everything, Blame It on Rio reduces the entire country and culture of Brazil to a pretty aphrodisiac whose soft breezes, lilting music and free-floating air of tropic sensuality lull Matthew into giving into temptation and having sex with a teenager who still sleeps with a teddy bear, uses a retainer and seems disturbingly much younger than fifteen.
hell no
Matthew feels embarrassed and ashamed but not so much that he does not continue to have sex with the besotted, love and lust-struck child, who is the insatiable aggressor and predator in every way, relentlessly pursuing the older man with a single-minded focus the movie insanely imagines renders the middle-aged man a helpless victim.
Blame It on Rio inexplicably chooses to play up Jennifer’s childishness, whether that means having her take off her retainer before romping with a man twenty-eight years her senior or having the 43 year old man and the fifteen year old object of his criminal lust fondly reminisce, in a post-coital clinch, about the first time Matthew ever kissed Jennifer: on her bottom during her christening as a baby.
What is wrong with these people?
Donen’s deeply wrong sex comedy is a narcissistic male sexual fantasy of unlikely desirability and transgressive conquest masquerading unconvincingly as a comic nightmare about a man who makes what the movie sees as an understandable and easily excusable mistake in the heat of passion. Then he makes it again and suffers comic slapstick consequences when Victor discovers that his daughter has had sex with an older man and enlists Matthew in the hunt for the guilty party, never imagining that his best friend is the one to blame.
Blame It on Rio feels like it was written by Lolita’s narrator-villain Humbert Humbert as a defense, to illustrate that, actually, when a man deep into middle age like himself or Matthew has sex with an underage girl the older man is in fact a helpless victim of a saucy nymphet’s sinister designs and consequently not only blameless but someone who should be pitied because these gorgeous, frequently naked underage girls just will not accept no for an answer.
Good Lord. Humanity may be doomed.
It’s not unusual for a filmmaker to begin their career with a signature masterpiece expressing who they are and how they see the world in the truest, purest, most entertaining sense only to end their career with a creaky, sub-standard project they were able to get made decades into a career full of lows as well as highs.
But it’s rare that a gulf between a first and last film is as great as it is here. Donen began his career with one of the greatest musicals of all time. He ended it with a notorious, infamous disaster that more than lives up and down to its reputation as one of the worst, most problematic and inexcusable sex comedies ever made.
It’s unfortunate that Donen went over three decades without making a feature film at the end of a glorious if sometimes spotty career, in part because it ensued that this insult to public decency and the intelligence of moviegoing audiences would be his rightfully reviled cinematic swan song.
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