Jump Cut 2 - SINGIN' IN THE RAIN Right in the middle of the gigantic 'Broadway Ballet' musical number in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, there is the oddest Jump Cut. Gene Kelly is standing fairly still, holding Cyd Charisse in his arms as she is turning, and they suddenly pop to a really different position. They most certainly do. Just as Cyd swings her leg across, she indeed pops position. Sometimes jumps like this can be attributed to missing frames, or broken film. In James Bond fight scenes, the editors created their own style by intentionally removing selected frames in the middle of the action, cleverly making some movements more abrupt and violent looking. In this case, what you are seeing is also an intentional Jump Cut, but one that appears to be the result of artistic compromise. Part of the basic style of the classic MGM musicals was to present dancers full-figure and with as little cutting as possible. The performances are presented in a way that proves, for instance, that Fred Astaire can tap dance for 45 seconds at a clip without error. How impressed would we be if we saw Fred only from the waist up, cutting every once in a while to a pair of legs dancing? The theory was that, in musical movies people generally want to appreciate great talent, not performances created by the fast cutting of editors. FLASHDANCE has some really sharp filmmaking in the dancing scenes, but there's little evidence there that any of the performers can really dance! W.C. Fields understood this principle perfectly when he did his juggling tricks only in long takes, proving that his talent wasn't provided by camera trickery. The individual Broadway Melody dance numbers are no exception to the MGM rules - the camera shows all of the dancers' bodies and the camera cutting is kept to a minimum. The dances are shot in Masters - that is, carefully planned shots that record a lot of dancing, with complicated camera moves and sometimes even special effects working. A good way to appreciate this is to see the amazing behind-the-scenes shots of Eleanor Powell dancing THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT 3. An army of coordinated activity works feverishly just out of camera range to move cameras, curtains, and pianos just so, to create a seamless flow of dancing action. The Jump Cut we are talking about occurs right in the middle of Kelly and Charisse's very involved cabaret dance. At UCLA, we male film students naturally theorized that frames had to be removed because Cyd's leg motion revealed too much, a la Jessica Rabbit of WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? fame. I have since had my ignorant college imagination corrected by THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT 3 producer Peter Fitzgerald, who stated that every dancer faces that particular concern and that it can be assumed that a pro like Miss Charisse wouldn't be performing if it weren't under control. Shame on me. What is probably the case here is that Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly really liked the performances of parts of two different takes, necessitating that they be grafted together at the least intrusive moment. The dance is so fluid that using a cutaway to mask a switch between mastershots would be more jarring than the slight jump that we do see. Remember that in a musical number the editor doesn't have the usual freedom to slide shots forward and back in time, because the music is a mostly unchanging constant and each shot must stay in exact synch with the music track. A somewhat similar problem occurs in DAMN YANKEES, in the 'Shoeless Joe' musical number. Amid a large number of split-second-timed mastershots that match the music exactly and flow together in perfect rhythm, is an arbitrary cutaway to the 'umpire' character with a big grin on his face. Obviously, the shot was made and inserted to fill a gap where two masters didn't quite reach one another. Another similar Jump Cut is in the musical number in PAL JOEY where Frank Sinatra, Kim Novak and Rita Hayworth are spotlighted peeking out from behind large colored scenery flats. At one point the picture awkwardly Jump Cuts, and the three stars pop from one position to another, very dissimilar one. As this cut doesn't really happen in the middle of any difficult action, it looks all the more clumsy. Rather than fault the filmmakers, in this case I prefer to believe that the well-publicized complications between the actors on that film resulted in scenes not being filmed as thoroughly as they might have been. Text © Copyright 1997 Glenn Erickson [Savant Main Page] [Savant Links] [Article Index] [Review Index] [Savant 5 Year Report] DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2007 Glenn Erickson Advertise With Us Review Staff | About DVD Talk | Newsletter Subscribe | Join DVD Talk Forum Copyright © DVDTalk.com All rights reserved | Privacy Policy | Terms of Use