When On
The Town opened at Radio City Music
Hall in December, 1949, it broke all
existing house records for attendance.
At one point on one day during Christmas
week, 10,000 people were on line (a line
that extended for 7 city blocks). This
means the last person in line would be
waiting out in the cold for about 6 hours
before finding a seat… and warmth.
Co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen,
the
film starred Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Jules
Munshin, Ann Miller, Betty Garrett and
Vera-Ellen.
On The
Town was the first major musical to
film partly on location in New York
City. As you can see in the
movie’s exhilarating opening number, “New
York, New York,” the male stars were filmed
in over 20 locations in Brooklyn and
Manhattan.
And
where they went, mobs followed.
(Sinatra-mania was at its peak at the
time.) The final sequence in the "New
York, New York" number was shot at the
skating rink in Rockefeller Center.
Check out the huge crowd along the railing
in the background, ogling Sinatra and
friends lip-synching to a blaring playback
of the song.
MGM bought the film rights to the Broadway
musical On
The Town (for
$250,000) before it opened and before studio
head Louis B. Mayer saw the show or heard
the score.
When
he did see the show, he hated it, especially
Leonard Bernstein’s score, which was
considered avant-garde at the
time.
Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins, Betty
Comden, and Adolph Green
When MGM made the film 4 years later, most
of Bernstein’s score was jettisoned in favor
of a studio-dictated score that included
this energetic title number:
On
the Town
Although Gene Kelly had a bigger part
than the other leads, all got a chance
to shine. Here is Ann Miller’s
solo, “Prehistoric Man,” featuring what
she called “Hollywood’s most expensive
back-up chorus":
Pre-Historic
Man
The only cast member of the Broadway On
The Town show to repeat in the
movie was Alice Pearce, here making her
film debut (and years before fame as
Gladys Kravitz on the tv show Bewitched).
She joins five of the leads in "You Can
Count on Me" (one of only four songs in
the film with Bernstein music):
You
Can Count on Me
Betty Garrett plays an
amorously-aggressive cab driver in On
The Town. She had
been in a string of hits at MGM, but her
film career came to a screeching halt
when it was revealed that her husband,
actor Larry Parks, had once been a
member of the Communist Party. She
didn’t appear onscreen again until
1955. In this number she comically
puts the moves on Sinatra:
Come
Up to My Place
Gene Kelly loved to put dance ballets in
his movies, and On
The Town is no exception.
Here’s the last part of “A Day in New
York” (which merely recapped - in dance
- what the audience had just spent 90
minutes watching).
Although Kelly and Vera-Ellen dance in
this number, professional dancers take
the place of Sinatra, Munshin, Miller
(who was not at all balletic) and
Garrett.
The lady dancer in yellow is Jeanne
Coyne. At the time she was married
to co-director Stanley Donen. A
decade later, she married the other
co-director, Gene Kelly.
A
Day in New York
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