Mervyn LeRoy (1962)
Harry Stradling (Sr)’s camerawork and lighting give an impression of space and a plushy sheen to this adaptation of the Jule Styne-Stephen Sondheim-Arthur Laurents musical, first produced on Broadway in 1959. You get no sense from the visuals that the monstrous stage mother, Rose Hovick (Rosalind Russell), is prepared to go anywhere in the theatrical world of Depression-era America to keep afloat her show business ambitions – embodied in her younger daughter June (Ann Jillian), then the elder one, Louise (Natalie Wood). Rose, refusing to believe the days of vaudeville are numbered, is determined that June will be a song-and-dance variety star. June knows better and wisely escapes from her mother by eloping with one of the backing dancers in the ‘Dainty June’ act. When Rose and Louise are reduced to an engagement in a supposedly grungy burlesque joint in Wichita, Kansas, three of the performers there educate Louise in the ground rules of striptease: the lesson takes place in a large, airy dressing room. After one of the trio of strippers is arrested for shoplifting, Rose orders a reluctant Louise to take her place. Louise gets off to a nervous, timid start but her burlesque career – as the famous Gypsy Rose Lee – soon takes off and Mervyn LeRoy uses a montage to summarise her rapidly increasing self-assurance and success. The montage shows her performing at what are clearly meant to be more and more fashionable venues; Natalie Wood’s gowns get more elaborate as Gypsy Rose Lee’s striptease routines become more confidently daring. But there’s no texture to the images – and, as a result, no palpable contrast between the upmarket joints and the showbiz lower depths from which Gypsy has risen.
Lack of nuance is a pervasive and crippling fault of Hollywood’s Gypsy. It’s reflected in the staging of the vaudeville numbers: they’re meant to be bad – but they have a polished, movie-musical mediocrity, and a lack of vulgar energy. It’s reflected in the Wichita strippers (Faith Dane, Roxanne Arlen and Betty Bruce), who are essentially and awkwardly wholesome, and the competent, flat caricatures of stage managers et al in crummy clubs. The backstage personnel merge with the onstage performers and the lack of distinction comes across not as making a satirical point but as Mervyn LeRoy and the screenwriter, Leonard Spigelgass, playing unimaginatively safe. It’s reflected most and worst of all in Rosalind Russell’s Rose. Perhaps the rasp in her stentorian voice is meant to convey the character’s grim, desperate toughness but Russell’s naturally authoritative, almost grand manner is wrong for the part. The Orry-Kelly costumes that she wears merely accentuate this. Louise is frustrated that she can’t get through to her mother but the impermeability feels more like Russell’s, who performs in a vacuum, than Rose’s. When June and Louise, in their different ways, both get away from her, the mother’s breakdown is quite unmoving because the endlessly proficient Rosalind Russell is always, and conspicuously, in control. Nor is Natalie Wood right for Louise, at any stage: she works hard but unavailingly at being dowdy and unconfident. There’s no sense of her feelings of excited liberation when Gypsy becomes a star. In the thankless role of Herbie Summers, Rose’s agent and ardent admirer, Karl Malden is a relief from the prevailing busy acting and ‘colourful’ dialogue. At a railway station, Herbie asks if his train is late and gets the answer, ‘It ain’t late … but I will say you got time for a bowl of chili’. (Thomas E Jackson makes the most of his station master cameo, to put it mildly.) ‘Thanks’, replies Karl Malden in a politely resigned tone, perfectly in character.
6 April 2015
