The Band Wagon: The Musical That Admits It's Closing

Tony Hunter opens the film selling off his old costumes and props at auction. Nobody bids much. That is the joke, and it is not really a joke — Fred Astaire was fifty-four when he played Tony, and MGM’s Freed Unit, the machine that had built the modern musical, was a handful of years from being dismantled. The Band Wagon is a backstage musical about a man told his kind of picture doesn’t sell any more, made by the people who were about to be told the same thing.

The film everyone compares to the other one

It arrived a year after Singin’ in the Rain, from overlapping talent — Comden and Green on the script, the same MGM machinery — and it has spent seventy years in that film’s shadow. The comparison is unfair to both. Singin’ in the Rain tells the story of the studio system’s last great transition as a triumph, the old guard swept aside by youth and sound. The Band Wagon doesn’t have that confidence. Tony Hunter isn’t being replaced by something better; he’s just getting older in a business built on not being old. Vincente Minnelli, directing rather than choreographing his way through, treats the anxiety straight rather than as set-up for a happy montage.

What earns the ticket

The reason to watch it is still simple: the numbers are extraordinary. “Dancing in the Dark” is the best case for the whole film — Astaire and Cyd Charisse in Central Park at night, no dialogue, nothing sold to the audience, just two people walking into a dance because the alternative is talking about their problems. It’s the quietest number in the picture and the one that justifies everything else. The closing “Girl Hunt Ballet”, a hard-boiled detective pastiche stretched to nearly thirteen minutes, is the opposite move — loud, knowing, and very good at being exactly what it’s parodying. Between them you get a film that understands both registers of the genre: the intimate and the enormous.

The part that drags

Here’s the honest reservation: the middle section, where the show-within-the-film gets hijacked by a self-important director staging a modern Faust, is broad and overlong, and Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray are given more scenes than jokes to fill them with. It’s the kind of comic subplot that exists to get the runtime between numbers rather than to earn its own laughs, and if you’re watching for story you’ll feel it slacken.

This is one for people who already love Singin’ in the Rain and want the version that doesn’t pretend the transition was painless — anyone who wants to watch a genre’s best dancer play a man being quietly told his time is up, and dance his way through the sentence anyway.