BELLS ARE RINGING (1960)

Minor, but endearing Betty Comden/Adolph Green B’way musical (Jule Styne score), written for Judy Holliday, once part of their early club act ‘The Revuers’,  Bought by M-G-M’s Arthur Freed, it turned out to be something of a last call for a generation of film legends.  For producer Freed, his last musical; for Holliday, her last film; for director Vincente Minnelli, his last M-G-M musical; for Comden & Green, their last film musical.  Little more than a showcase for Holliday, but that was enough to get Jerome Robbins and Bob Fosse involved in the stage production.  The story puts Holliday in front of a switchboard at a phone answering service where she assumes different personalities to play Fairy Godmother to a gaggle of needy clients; especially Dean Martin’s struggling playwright.  He calls her ‘Mom.’  Meeting him for real, she assumes yet another identity to hide behind.  Meanwhile, boss Jean Stapleton is involved with shady bookie Eddie Foy Jr, starting up a horse betting syndicate (in code) using the answering service.  And the Vice Squad already investigating the place as a possible brothel.  Yikes!  Songs range from serviceable to tuneful to American Songbook standards (‘The Party’s Over’; ‘Just In Time’).  With this kind of show, you really had to be there for full effect.  (And how, Holliday beating both Ethel Merman and Julie Andrews for that year’s Tony Award.)  But Minnelli finds his way in by using soundstage artifice for a heightened kind of ultra-reality, and by shooting as much as possible in unusually long takes.  Both Martin and Holliday get one-take complete musical numbers that play on the big screen in ways impossible to recreate thru home video.*  But for the converted, once Holliday drops the lyrics and joyously vocalizes (at a moment of intense unhappiness!) in the second verse of The Party’s Over, you’ll be a goner.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *Something Comden & Green discovered when putting together a traveling show of film highlights.  They’d planned to end with, what else, Gene Kelly 'Singing in the Rain,’ only to find that it was impossible to find anything that could follow Holliday’s final number here, ‘I’m Coming Back.’  The combination of Holliday, alone on stage, seeming to be performing live directly at us, with Minnelli’s one-shot approach going against every directing rule to capture a real event happening in front of us by ignoring six or seven obvious go-to-the-close-up cuts during the four minute number is nearly unique on the big screen.  So this all but unknown number wound up as the big finish in their retrospective.

CONTEST:  Did Minnelli have an inkling this would be his M-G-M Musical finale?  Maybe, as he goes all the way back to his first M-G-M film musical for a reference he sticks in the background.  Name the film and find the reference to win our usual prize, a MAKSQUIBS film Write-Up of your choosing.