Music Fo' Grown Fo'ks

The Swan (1956-US) [104 min, Charles Vidor], C-

Grace Kelly stars in this slow moving “class” picture.  The Swan is a remake of a creaky 1914 manners play by Ferenc Molnár. I guess, John Dighton (the screenwriter for Kind Hearts and Coronets and Roman Holiday) couldn’t spruce up this play without killing its spirit and original intention, but that is just exactly what it needed.

The supporting players: Jessie Royce Landis, Estelle Winwood, and Brian Aherne are terrific as Princess Alexandra (Grace Kelly) eccentric relatives.  Princess Alexandra was groomed to be queen one day and recapture the throne that was once lost in her family.  Her cousin crown Prince Albert (Alec Guinness) is looking for his future queen but is seemingly uninterested in Alexandra; while, her brothers’ tutor Agi (Louis Jourdan) is completely in love with her, and she might possibly love him (but it seems only because he loves her), and he feels bold enough to act upon his feelings after the Princess invites him to the farewell ball for the Prince in order to make the crown Prince jealous.

When Agi is told of Princess Alexandra’s mother’s motives he falls apart and forgets his place as the help.  He gives preachy speeches aimed at the Prince using coded language about class distinctions, and how all people are really equal.  This doesn’t heat up the film it just makes Louis Jourdan even more obnoxious, and it doesn’t make Grace Kelly look any less bored.  Once again she is paired with men whom she shares no on-screen chemistry this time times two.  Her co-stars are unable to coax anything great from her; she has to once again go inside herself to find the right performance to give.  Perhaps, sophisticated male actors only help to maintain this aloof quality that she can have, and they keep her on ice, too cool a blonde screen goddess for hot passionate romance (when in-fact she needed a more rugged leading man like Gary Cooper in High Noon or someone light, funny, and charming like Bing Crosby in High Society).  But Grace Kelly wasn’t ready to say goodbye, not yet.  She still had the role of Princess Grace to play, and that was in her final on-screen role (the documentary The Wedding In Monaco).

Houseboat (1958-US) [109 min, Melville Shavelson], C+

Houseboat is a whatever film made in the years that Cary Grant was an independent player between the end of his final studio contract and his final creative burst with North By Northwest and Charade.  Still, it better than the fluff he made in the nearly years between Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and To Catch A Thief.  But so many of the incidents in Houseboat are just to keep throwing together Tom Winters (Carey Grant), a widower with three children and Cinzia Zaccardi (Sophia Loren), a famous conductor’s daughter who rescues Tom’s runaway son, Robert (Charles Herbert); who is a jerk; we realize his mother just died, and he can’t deal with it, but this kid is a real asshole; we just don’t understand his motivation.  Unlike, in a Bringing Up Baby where Susan (Katharine Hepburn) does whatever pops in her head to keep Cary Grant near her which equals cinema comedy bliss this just feels like poor writing to Hollywood solutions to help them to realize they are right for each other.

High Society (1956-US) [111 min, Charles Walters], B+

People give High Society a bad rap.  “Serious” film-goers like to write-off High Society as pleasant romp that is teaming with top talent and a score to match (the score of musicals often is used as a “scapegoat” that hides a flawed script, but John Patrick only modified Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story.  High Society has its own identity.  It almost doesn’t feel like a remake, and the viewer does feel satisfied.  It is my favorite Grace Kelly film, and her most complex and fully realized performance (she gives us comedy, drama, nuance, and even singing).  She is respectful of Katharine Hepburn’s original screen performance, but she doesn’t allow the notion that Miss Hepburn owned the role to inhibit her from giving a knock-out performance (in one of the most beloved roles previously given by one of the masterful actress).  As much as those serious cinefiles would like to brush it off and forget about it, so they don’t have to examine it any deeper than as a Hollywood confection with beautiful clothes (and they are great, one of the best costume/fashion films), photography, singing, and stars it does remain that the four of the five leads are Academy Award winners: Bing Crosby (for Going My Way), Grace Kelly (for The Country Girl), Frank Sinatra (for From Here To Eternity), and Celeste Holm (for Gentleman’s Agreement).  WHOA!

Grace Kelly was finally was getting good, and she was showing that she really could be absolutely funny not just sophisticatedly humorous. It is such a shame when one sees her in High Society. because we just don’t understand why she stopped acting; we have no closure.  She just turned the lights off.  She just walked away from everything.  We are left unsatisfied by her career, but how could we feel satisfied; she abandoned us.  Even Garbo’s retirement made sense in away.  But she had an unfulfilled cinematic destiny.  I hope, that she was very happy in her life and marriage and that it was worth ending her career to just be a princess.  Today it seems very…um, boring, but then in the 1950’s in must have been very glamourous, very Hollywood, a dream come true, and everyone was doing it or making moves about it.  Marilyn Monroe in The Prince and the Showgirl, Audrey Hepburn had made Roman Holiday at the start of the ’50s, and Rita Hayworth married Prince Aly Khan a few years before Kelly became Princess Grace.  But John Schlesinger got his say, or at least in my mind it is his analysis of the whole Grace Kelly-Prince Rainer marriage with Darling.  The emptiness and dissatisfaction of getting everything we thought we wanted and learning it is not everything we wanted or any of what we want let alone need.

On the eve of her wedding to a bland nouveau riche in the mining business George Kittredge (John Lund), Tracy Lord (Grace Kelly) is forced to learn a lot about herself including just how in love with her ex-husband and jazz musician, C.K. Dexter Haven (Bing Crosby), she is as well as to not be so hard on people who aren’t perfect.  It is remarkable the old attitudes “society” held about the business called show and the people in it.  When having fun with reporter Mike Connor (Frank Sinatra) and photographer Liz Imbrie (Celeste Holm) from Spy magazine, Dexter breaks the illusion of French speaking post-finishing school, society heiress Tracy has created for her “guests”/prying wedding crashers who plan to expose her private life in a “barbershop magazine”.

Tired of all the men in her life giving their judgmental summation of her, it seems Mike’s fresh, revisionist take on what she is all about is very appealing to her desire to change.  It is no wonder that because Mike sees Tracy as a real person and loves her for it just as she is just what she needs when she has Dexter telling her that she is cold like a goddess, or George believing she should be worshiped rather than just loved, and her proper place is on a pedestal, or like her philandering father who become indignant when Tracy can’t forgive him, and he tells her that if her vanity allows then she is like a cold statue of a goddess.

Tracy Lord even offers one of the best catch-phrases when she is intoxicated.  “I’m sensational! Everybody says so.”