On the Town (1949)It's hard for me to believe that this movie came out in '49 because the colors, costuming, and choreography all make it look and feel so high-school musical that I can't believe it's not a production put on by some overachieving magnet school in Georgia.
It would have to be in Georgia because it's so very blithely white, and a very particular type of white that to me is all about being rich in the Deep South and growing up in a racially homogenous suburb. Not because there's anything particularly Southern about these characters, just because I think that's one of the few enclaves where this specific cultural attitude still survives largely unchanged from 1949: superficially cosmopolitan, superficially cultured, totally blind to everything but the narrowest sliver of human experience.
This story is ostensibly set in NYC and it makes a huge deal out of being in NYC and then it completely whitewashes everything to an amazing extent, which is particularly striking because the actual Broadway musical was unusually inclusive and equitable for its time -- there were black actors who had regular roles and were treated like regular people (whereas they're all just servants and caricatures in the movies of the period), one of the three main female leads was Asian, etc.
Not so much in the movie version!
The "Prehistoric Man" song-and-dance number in the museum of natural history is particularly bad. It's ostensibly about cavemen, but the whole dance is ooga-booga African and Native American... mockery? cultural appropriation? I don't even know. It's super cringeworthy, anyway, not least because these grinning white people are conflating them all together as a cartoon "prehistoric man" primitive enough to be shown next to the equally trivialized, equally wiped-out dinosaurs (who also get casually knocked down for lols!).
I thought about this section of one of Charles Pierce's fulminations in Esquire. He was writing about Elizabeth Warren's Pocahontas speech, but it could as well have been about that scene:
It was about so many other things—among them her family and the kind of weaponized American mythology that has been used against all people of color down through the centuries, but notably against the indigenous peoples of North America. It was a speech against genocide, cultural and otherwise. It was an appeal to a truth nurtured for hundreds of years by people who saw themselves and their culture first destroyed, and then rendered into amusements for the people who’d destroyed it.
That is pretty much how this all came off to me.
The movie's also pretty cringeworthy in its gender politics. All the women are perpetually throwing themselves at the men, always for comic effect but also with a note of "yeah, they really
are that desperate" under it. Hildy and her roommate are both particularly bad (although the roommate does at least get a gentlemanly brush-off from Gabey, so it's not as cruel as it could be), but it's all of them -- Claire pretending to be interested in intellectual pursuits solely as a distraction from chasing men, Ivy putting on airs and then being outed as a burlesque dancer (the tamest one I've ever seen, but then she does work the boardwalk at Coney Island), all three of them promptly losing their sailors at the end of the 24-hour shore leave.
I did like Gene Kelly. I always like Gene Kelly. He seems like a supremely likeable person and he has the most benevolent smile lines. He's really the only likeable thing in this movie, since the women all play caricatures and Frank Sinatra is clearly an enormous dick serenading himself in all his love songs.
5/10