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Gypsy
List Price: Unknown [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Some movie musicals get rediscovered, and some don't. For every Singin' in the Rain, MGM made a Pagan Love Song; nowadays the dramatic passages of a 'classic' like South Pacific are tolerated mainly to hear the great musical numbers. Gypsy wasn't all that well-received in 1962 ... but it still has qualities beyond its several hit songs (Some People, Small World, Everything's Coming up Roses), that aren't necessarily going to be appreciated by people too young to have been there when it was new. Doris Day is still a tough sell, so trying to convince people that the amazingly talented Rosalind Russell is worth watching is even harder. Can you tell Savant had no luck talking anyone into seeing this picture? Arthur Laurents' play is standard showbiz biography material. Stage mother Mama Rose (Roz) has enough energy and life to keep a showbiz husband (Karl Malden) and push one of her daughters into the limelight - only to have the shy one, Louise, blossom into a sensational career as a stripper, as the famed Gypsy Rose Lee. Given that this is stage material, Rosalind Russell is at her best, looking twenty years younger than her turn as an old-maid schoolmarm in Picnic, seven years earlier. She's brassy, warm and heatbreaking and connects with the screen audience as if projecting from the footlights. Karl Malden is too professional to be miscast in almost anything, and offers solid support. Much maligned is Natalie Wood, who does the almost impossible by playing a stripper who is also a sweet and nice person. Reportedly Gypsy Rose Lee was just that, but the fleapit theater millieu is by necessity so squeaky clean in this family film, that you'd expect to see kiddies in the burlesque audience. Savant assumes here that the stage original had to be a little more randy than this. It would take the relaxation of censorship and William Friedkin to bring a more believable naughty-but-sweet vision of burlesque to the movies in The Night They Raided Minsky's. The pity of Gypsy is that with all that performing effort put into it, it is so slackly directed. The camera just sits there. Ms. Russell sings in her father's front room while the shot just holds wide on the scene, expressing nothing and stranding her. When the MGM musical style was supplanted by the 'Broadway adaptation,' there was always too much of a tendency to throw stylized broadway hits into realistic sets and then expect the actors to make the difference, and here it hurts. Nobody expects a tour-de-force like West Side Story, but Mervyn LeRoy's visual direction is so minimal as to be nonexistent. The topnotch Warner production values and the distinctive brassy Warner soundtrack are doing all the work.
Warners' DVD of Gypsy is a beauty, easily eclipsing all those pan 'n scan television prints and showing off the Technirama camerawork, which is at least put to good use in the theatrical scenes. There's the usual trailer in good shape. Warner's rarely added trailers to their laserdisc offerings, Savant just recalled, so it's nice that they've broken down and included them on DVD when possible. The best bonus for fans of Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim are two musical numbers dropped from this already long film, a duet version of You'll Never Get Away From Me and the wonderful Together, Wherever We Go.
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