Royal WeddingRating:
Release Date: 01 January, 2003 Retail Price: $3.95 OUR Price: $3.95 You SAVE: $0.00! Cast: Complete Cast (10 total) |
Royal Wedding Reviews
Good Times Video--The Best of a Bad Lot
Unfortunately, "Royal Wedding", one of the best of the Technicolor MGM musicals, is not available on a high-quality DVD. However, of the several cheap DVDs available, the Good Times Video edition is the best. Not great, with rather poor colors (especially flesh tones), but watchable and well worth the few dollars it costs to hold you over until the film is fully restored and transferred to a good DVD.
Good natured and charming, with Fred Astaire, Jane Powell and a fine love song, Too Late Now, by Burton Lane and Alan Jay Lerner
Royal Wedding is a great example of how a charming movie with many excellent qualities can be consigned to the critical scrap heap because it fell into the public domain. The movie for years has only been available in execrable DVD transfers.
Fred Astaire and Jane Powell play the Broadway headliners Tom and Ellen Bowen. They are brother and sister; he's a workaholic, always wanting to rehearse; she's a vivacious flirt. If this sounds familiar it's because the screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner takes elements of Astaire's life when he was teamed with his sister, Adele. Just as their hit Broadway musical, Ev'ry Night at Seven, is closing the two get an offer to bring the show to London at the height of the excitement over the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip. On the boat over, Ellen meets Lord John Brindale (Peter Lawford) and in London, Tom Bowen meets Anne Ashmond (Sarah Churchill). Of course, love develops. However, if everyone marries can the Tom and Ellen Bowen team continue? The modest conflicts are happily resolved by two marriages that take place on the day of the royal wedding. The story-line might be slight but it's not treated too seriously. Most importantly, it provides composer Burton Lane and lyricist Lerner an excuse for a series of clever musical numbers and one outstanding love song:
--Ev'ry Night at Seven opens the movie with a production number from the Bowens' Broadway smash. Astaire is a bored royal and Powell is a saucy maid. Sung by Astaire and danced by him and Powell, it's a pleasant, undemanding number.
--Sunday Jumps. On the ship to Britain Astaire rehearses in the gym. Astaire was so good he could make a clothes rack look like a talented dancer. And he does. He uses the clothes rack, pull weights, a punching bag, parallel bars and weight pins. His work with the clothes rack is complicated, precise and as smooth as cream. I can't imagine the amount of work he put in to make the number appear so effortless.
--Open Your Eyes is a number to show off Powell's singing. It's a sweet waltz. Then it moves to an amusing dance routine played on a polished floor as the ocean liner plows through heavy seas. Astaire and Powell wind up sliding into laps and plants and trying to avoid rolling fruit.
--The Happiest Day of My Life. Lerner was noted for clever and unsentimental lyrics. Here, with all seriousness, Powell rehearses a song from the show while she and Lord John gaze at each other. These are some of the ickiest lyrics Lerner ever wrote. They don't seem to be a spoof:
I'll be dancing by your side, my love,
The happiest day of my life.
How my heart will swell with pride, my love,
The happiest day in a life time.
--How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love You When You Know I've Been a Liar All My Life is a raucous, low-comedy number sung and danced by Astaire and Powell. Picture Astaire and Garland doing A Couple of Swells, but even more low down.
--Too Late Now. In my view, this is one of the best love songs to have been written for a movie. Lerner's lyrics are very good, but it's Lane's melody that gives it feeling and distinction. Powell sings this as she's walking with Brindale. She's explaining that what they have found together she could never find in another:
Too late now to forget your smile,
The way we cling when we dance awhile.
Too late now to forget and go on to someone new.
Too late now to forget your voice,
The way one word makes my heart rejoice.
Too late now to imagine myself away from you.
All the things we've done together
I relive when we're apart.
All the tender fun together,
Stays on in my heart.
How could I ever close the door
And be the same as I was before.
Darling, no, no, I can't anymore.
It's too late now.
--You're All the World to Me. This is an immensely clever tour de force by Astaire, danced to an outstanding rhythm melody by Lane. Astaire joyously sings to himself his love for Anne in his hotel room, and dances on the walls and ceiling as well as the floor. How he and director Stanley Donen pulled this off mystified people for years until it was learned the set for the entire room and the camera were fixed to a giant, slowly turning wheel, and that Astaire precisely timed the choreography to the wheel's movement. It's a great number with a first-class song.
--I Left My Hat in Haiti, the movie's big production number, sung by Astaire and danced by him, Powell and a large cast. It's a fine, witty, big song.
June Allyson was scheduled to play the part of Ellen Bowen. When she became pregnant the part was assigned to Judy Garland. It wasn't long before MGM fired Garland for seldom showing up. Finally, Powell was given the job. She does a good job, particularly since she was a singer with a strongly chirpy personality and had little background as a dancer. She must have worked as hard as Astaire. She acquits herself very well.
The movie works as well as it does because it's genuinely cheerful, it has Astaire and because Burton Lane, with Lerner, in my view came up with some stylish numbers as well as that great love song. Lane spent most of his creative life doing songs-for-hire for the studios. He started out on Broadway but seldom returned. Too bad, because when he did he wrote two magnificent scores...Finian's Rainbow and On a Clear Day.
The Alpha Video release of Royal Wedding is barely acceptable. The picture is about on a par with a poor, second generation video copy. The audio is not much better. I understand that the other public domain issues are much the same. There are no extras. What is particularly irritating is that Alpha has only inserted four chapter stops, arbitrarily placed in the film. It's impossible to get to the musical numbers -- the whole point of chapter stops in a musical film -- without laboriously fast-forwarding through the entire movie. Royal Wedding deserves better.
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