Ann Miller

  • Tarnished Angel (1938)

    Tarnished Angel (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) Tracking down an interesting actor’s filmography can take you places you don’t necessarily expect, and that’s how recording a day’s worth of Ann Miller movies can land you in the middle of Tarnished Angel, a 1930s crime drama lambasting religious swindlers. The story begins in Manhattan, in a nightclub where the entertainment (including a young Ann Miller, playing the sidekick) is scared off by a police raid. Unwilling to subject themselves to such further shenanigans, the protagonist (Sally Eilers) flees town and eventually decides on a new career: religious faith-healer shows, helped by “cripple artists” and some showbiz flim-flammery. This is not meant to be a particularly dramatic film—even the most suspenseful moments are handled in a broad audience-friendly way—but there’s some substance underneath the plotting. Watching the film for Ann Miller is not particularly rewarding, but then again—she was at the beginning of her career here, playing in supporting roles that didn’t account for much cumulative screen time. At least she gets to open the film strong with a good singing number before fading into the background as the third wheel in the protagonist’s entourage. There’s a quick conclusion that upends the idea of the charlatan, but much of the film’s best moments are spent dealing with an unscrupulous heroine amazed by the success of her own racket. Tarnished Angel is watchable, even intermittently fascinating in its depiction of 1930s faith healers, but not exactly an enduring classic.

  • Room Service (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) In the Marx Brothers filmography, Room Service is perhaps more distinctive for being the one film not written by the Brothers themselves. As a theatrical play adaptation, it’s clearly different — more cohesive, less anarchic, but also less tailored to their own strengths. Still, you can see the Brothers doing what they can to bend the material to their preference — Harpo doesn’t speak, Groucho does and Chico hustles. Much of the action takes place in a hotel room where the protagonists are plotting to put on a show despite acute financial problems — there’s a white whale that can solve all of their problems, but hooking him won’t be easy, considering the interference of the hotel manager who wants them out of there right away. Ann Miller shows up in an early-career appearance, and it’s hard to believe that she’s only 15 here: having lied about her age by five years to get her RKO contract, she easily looks older but doesn’t have that many scenes to shine. The comedy is decent and sufficiently outside their screen persona to be interesting, but clearly not up to the Brothers’ usual standards. It’s much better when you grade it not against other Marx movies, but against other 1930s theatrical comedy adaptations: it’s funnier than most, certainly more absurd than others and faster-paced as well.

  • Small Town Girl (1953)

    Small Town Girl (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) The best movie musicals of the 1950s manage to combine an interesting premise with great individual set-pieces, and while Small Town Girl isn’t much more than a second-tier MGM musical, you can clearly see how one feeds into the other to create something remarkably entertaining. Of course, I’m twice-biased in saying so: Ann Miller is one of my favourite stars of that period, and the film provides her with both a meaty role as a romantic antagonist and a pair of good dance numbers. Furthermore, I’ve been curious about the “Take Me to Broadway” hopping dance that opens That’s Entertainment II for a while, and this is the film it comes from. The premise is not that bad, especially when measured against so many of the Broadway musicals of the time: Here, a rich young man eloping with his fiancée (Miller) is caught speeding through a small town, and the local judge orders him to remain detained in the town jail for thirty days. Attempts to lighten the sentence are (relatively) successful, and so from his vantage point on the main square, he becomes part of the town’s day-to-day life to the point of falling for the judge’s daughter and having serious second thoughts about his fiancée. (Which is just as well, since she’s a shallow fortune chaser who starts making plans with another man while he’s inside. Just so there’s not discomfort with the plot.)  There are other attractions as well — Bobby Van is magnificent in the exhausting “Street Dance” in which he hops around town, S. Z. Sakall turns in a great supporting role, and an uncredited Busby Berkeley provides choreography. Small Town Girl is not meant to be particularly deep or spectacular—this was clearly a B-grade effort for MGM—but it works more often than not, and offers further proof that in its heyday, the movie musical could be perfectly entertaining even when it wasn’t at its best.

  • Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

    Two Tickets to Broadway (1951)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2021) I probably need to slow down my intake of 1950s musical comedies, because they’re all starting to blur together and I’m having a harder time holding on to the spark of joy that attracted me to the genre. It doesn’t help that Two Tickets to Broadway plays in the exact same playground than many other musicals from the previous two decades—that of a backstage musical about young women heading out to Broadway to seek fame, fortune and romance. The tropes are very well worn, and the film has a harder time than it should in distinguishing itself. Which isn’t saying that I did not enjoy it—1950s movie musicals have graceful failure mode, and the worst thing you can say about the worst of them is something along the lines of “well, that wasn’t as much fun as I was expecting.” So it is that Two Tickets to Broadway feels familiar: a bit lazy, not terribly memorable nor particularly well executed. But there are highlights: My own favourite Ann Miller shows up in a fetching green dress in time for a great little tap-dancing number (although the film’s production history tells us that she was injured on set). Tony Martin and Janet Leigh bring some charm as headliners (they later married and stayed married for a decade), the film has good-natured fun in starring Bob “brother of the more famous Bing” Crosby and the script shows signs of having been written in the 1950s by featuring television rather than theatre as the heroines’ ultimate goal. Two Tickets to Broadway certainly isn’t a top tier 1950s musical, but keep in mind the ferocious competition—it’s not a dishonour to settle for mere entertainment.

  • Reveille with Beverly (1943)

    Reveille with Beverly (1943)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I won’t try to hide that I watched Reveille with Beverly solely because of Ann Miller—and while the film itself is now almost obscure for understandable reasons, it’s quite a delight for her fans. Here Miller, barely twenty years old (and possibly even nineteen when the film was shot—she played loose with her age early in her career), plays a radio station assistant with dream of having her own show. Opportunity presents itself when the stuffy host of a morning classical music show goes on vacation, leaving her free to shake things up with more modern music. Since Reveille with Beverly was designed as a home-front wartime propaganda film, it’s no surprise if her program is picked up by the local army training camp and then by the wider military forces. There are a few romantic shenanigans between her and two soldiers (resolved by shipping both of them to the front), but the film is primarily an excuse to showcase musical numbers. As the titular Beverly spins the tunes, the camera zooms in on the record and an optical effect takes us to what is essentially a music video of the performance. What’s noteworthy here is the unusually heavy percentage of black artists in the mix—from Count Basie to The Mills Brothers, to Duke Ellington. Musically, there’s some interesting material here—acting as an anthology of 1943 pop music, there are a few classics (“Take the A Train,” and “Night and Day” as sung by Frank Sinatra), plus a few fun surprises: “Cow-Cow Boogie” is fun (sung by Ella Mae Morse), but my favourite is probably “Sweet Lucy Brown.” Non-musically, the film does feature one of Miller’s relatively rare leading roles—and while much of the character is about non-dancing, non-singing comedy, she gets a very brief tap number at the start that foreshadows her climactic tap-dancing singing number. It’s not a great film, and we can understand how the thin plot, sometimes-dated material (including a comedy routine that’s maybe a fourth intelligible to modern audiences given how heavy it is on contemporary references) and wartime nature have made it a bit of a forgotten curio today. But fans of Ann Miller will get quite a kick out of it, and so will students of circa-1943 American pop music.

  • The Kissing Bandit (1948)

    The Kissing Bandit (1948)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2020) Movie history is not kind to The Kissing Bandit: It’s recognized by Wikipedia as “one of the least successful musicals in MGM history,” and “an acknowledged low-point in the careers of Frank Sinatra and Kathryn Grayson.” Is it such a terrible film, though? Of course not. While almost obscure these days, it’s quite entertaining to watch if you’re a fan of Technicolor MGM musical. Gorgeously shot against California mountains with very colourful costumes, the film clearly doesn’t take itself too seriously. The premise alone does a lot of mileage out of blending Robin Hood with Zorro as a Boston-educated young man comes back to 19th-century California to take over his father’s inn, only to discover that he’s expected to step into his father’s true occupation: leader of a masked gang, otherwise known as “the Kissing Bandit” for his habit of, well, kissing female victims. That premise wouldn’t fly today for obvious reasons, but even then—the film seems determined to minimize any unpleasant connotations this may have: our hero spends nearly all of the film shying away from any kissing, and the film spares no means (opening titles joke, comic sound effects, overacting) to let us know that this is a big broad comedy and nothing bad is ever going to happen. A young Sinatra with relatively long hair does well in the lead role, while Grayson is simply lovely as the governor’s daughter. Still, I’m burying the lead here because the single best reason to watch the film as far as I’m concerned is a single number toward the end of the film that has two of my biggest MGM crushes, Ann Miller and Cyd Charisse, in billowing dresses dancing a number with none other than Ricardo Montalban—whew! Let’s not argue that The Kissing Bandit is a great film—it has trouble with tone, and the rather promising opening act somehow doesn’t quite lead to a satisfying middle before the film picks up again toward the end. But it’s fun, funny and offers some great Hollywood stars doing some singing and dancing. Its relative obscurity may even mean that even fans of the era haven’t seen it yet.

  • The Great American Pastime (1956)

    The Great American Pastime (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) The more I dig into the classic movie catalogue, the more I’m amazed by the number of perfectly decent films that simply have been nearly forgotten since their heyday. The Great American Pastime is not what we’d call a great movie. It’s patrician, simplistic, and definitely belongs as an exemplar of the 1950s “Father knows best” social norms. It’s about a family man who is convinced to coach a little league baseball team for his son, but quickly finds himself besieged by unhappy parents, and falsely convinced that a widow is hitting on him. Predictable pushback follows from both his wife and the widow herself. It’s not always convincing, lacks a bit of polish and remains a slight comedy. But it’s rather charming in its own way. TCM unearths it once in a while, often because Ann Miller plays the widow – a rare non-singing, non-dancing, non-tap-dancing movie for her, but also the last of her MGM years: she wouldn’t appear again on the big screen for another twenty years. Tom Ewell plays the harried father (the film amusingly begins with him bemoaning the mountain of trouble that befell him after trying to do good) while Anne Francis plays the wife with firm understatement. Perhaps The Great American Pastime’s funniest sequence has him accepting a dinner invitation from the widow, and being completely oblivious to his wife’s increasing desire to go back home. A blend of sports, parenting and relationship comedy, the film does hit the right spots and unknowingly becomes a symbol of how people could idealize life in small-town 1950s. It’s easily watchable even in its voluntarily simplistic nature… and it currently doesn’t even have 200 votes on IMDB. Clearly, The Great American Pastime ranks as the kind of film that more people could know about.

  • The Opposite Sex (1956)

    The Opposite Sex (1956)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) Knowing that The Opposite Sex is adapted from the same novel that led to 1939’s classic The Women, and having a look at its great cast, and watching its roaringly cynical start in which a woman speaks tartly about other women, you could be forgiven for having high expectations for it. Alas, the reality is a bit more pedestrian: The script settles into a lower-pitch struggle between women arguing about men. It’s certainly watchable, but there are many missed opportunities to do better. Bizarrely enough, I’m against the decision to include male characters in the film—The Women showed how to do it well, and they don’t add much to the arguments between the female protagonists. The musical comedy nature of the film is hard to grasp, considering that seasoned signer Dolores Grey barely sings, and noted triple-threat Ann Miller doesn’t dance nor sing. While the bon mots can be biting here and there, the script settles into a routine pace as the film advances: the women complain about men to other women, then complain about other women to yet other women. At least there’s more to see than to hear—I watched The Opposite Sex because of Ann Miller and was slightly disappointed in this regard, but that disappointment was more than nullified by seeing a lot of a young and radiant Joan Collins. Many other second-string notables populate the cast, from June Allyson, Joan Blondell, Ann Sheridan and Leslie Nielsen in a very serious role. Also worth noting is the garishly oversaturated Technicolor, which for some reason doesn’t really feature a lot of greens but does push the MGM Technicolor style about as far as it could go. Somehow less modern than the 1939 version, this mid-1950s romantic drama isn’t that bad by itself, but there are a lot of questionable choices made here knowing what else could have been done with this material and these performers.

  • Hit the Deck (1955)

    Hit the Deck (1955)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2020) By itself, there isn’t much that’s strictly wrong about Hit the Deck. It’s about sailors on leave in San Francisco, and their romantic adventures along the way. Three couples means three subplots, several love interest characters involved in show business and with their families involved (some of them including high-ranking naval officers), you can argue that the story is a bit denser than your average musical. But if you’ve seen the crop of the movie musicals, chances are that you’ve already seen a handful of films partially or entirely focused on similar navy themes, from On the Town to Always Fair Weather to Shore Leave and so on. By the time the film ends on a battleship-on-a-stage singing and tap-dancing climax, thoughts of Yankee Doodle Dandy and the climax of Born to Dance are almost inevitable. I still enjoyed the result, but more because of Ann Miller than anything else: She has a substantial role as a woman tired of her six-year engagement to a military officer, and a handful of enjoyable musical numbers in which she gets to sing and tap-dance. There aren’t that many memorable songs, but it’s still a solid film. It’s worth noting the historical context here: 1955 was the beginning of the end for the MGM musical—Arthur Freed was retiring, audiences were getting over MGM’s fantastic 15-year streak that peaked with the late-Freed movies (Singing’ in the Rain, The Band Wagon) and while Hit the Deck may be a wholly average example of the form, it does carry the burden of the form as well—While quite watchable and enjoyable, it’s just nothing special for anyone but Miller fans.

    (Second viewing, August 2020) It’s a measure of how average Hit the Deck can be that I had to take another look at it two months later just to make sure I wasn’t misremembering it. But no—it’s still fairly generic, and buoyed only by Ann Miller’s numbers. She does get one good role here as one of the female leads, which is all the better considering that she would retire from the big screen shortly after.

  • Deep in My Heart (1954)

    Deep in My Heart (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, April 2020) Sigmund Romberg is largely forgotten these days, but once upon showbiz history, he was considered famous enough as a Broadway composer of successful operettas to warrant a full-length MGM musical about his life. Deep in My Heart, in assembling a jukebox of his most famous hits loosely arranged in-between fanciful sketches about the composer’s life, wasn’t even an outlier but the latest in a subgenre that tackled other composers’ work. (I have a specific fondness for Till the Clouds Roll By, but more for Lena Horne than Jerome Kern.) The advantage of a revue-style structure is that beyond the main biographical cast (featuring no less than José Ferrer, Merle Oberon, Walter Pidgeon and Paul Henreid), you can bring in very special guest stars in specific musical numbers. This is where Deep in My Heart may be most interesting, because the mid-1950s MGM roster was stacked with great bit performers. Here we get Gene Kelly in a fun vaudeville dancing duet with his brother Fred (Fred’s only screen credit despite an accomplished dancing career). We get Cyd Charisse (dubbed, but spectacular), Ann Miller looking terrific as the “It” girl, Ferrer dancing romantically with his then-new wife Rosemary Clooney, and a few other distinctive numbers as shows-within-the-show. Ferrer’s performance is occasionally terrific: at one point, he gets a breathless showcase with a one-man-show presentation of an upcoming show; at others, he speaks magnificent French dialogue. Alas, those individual performer highlights are really what Deep in my Heart is about—the film itself is fairly unremarkable and classical in matters of execution. Director Stanley Donen’s heart was obviously in the musical numbers more than the rest of the film, and who can fault him? Working with stars to deliver their standalone numbers ensures that the film is still worth a look today for fans of mid-century musicals.

  • Too Many Girls (1940)

    Too Many Girls (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) In Hollywood history, Too Many Girls usually gets a footnote mention as “the movie where Lucille Ball met Desi Arnaz,” leading to their long and fruitful marriage/partnership. Some commentators often feel compelled to comment in the same breath on the film itself being not good. Well, phooey to that—I’m here to tell you that Too Many Girls is a perfectly entertaining blend of college comedy, implied naughtiness and some football thrown in for good measure—plus the excellent Ann Miller tap-dancing. The premise is something that could have become a splendid 1980s sex comedy: As a millionaire’s daughter (played by a good-but-not-yet-great Lucille Ball) decides to attend a college far in the west, the rich man hires four strapping lads to act as bodyguards unbeknownst to her. Complications ensure when the four young men turn around the winning record of the college’s football team and one of them falls in love with the heiress. While an adaptation of a Broadway Musical, Too Many Girls is curiously forgettable when it comes to the songs and dances. Also not present enough is Ann Miller—while she’s there and performs, she’s clearly in an early-ish supporting role with little opportunity to shine in the spotlight. OK, all right—Too Many Girls is, at best, an average musical of the era for low-budgeted RKO: watchable, even amusing, but not all that memorable. It would be far less fondly remembered (and for that, largely for Ann Miller’s filmography) if Lucy and Desi hadn’t met on set. [April 2022: Being the Ricardos even features a scene meant to recreate the film—complete with what’s supposed to be Ann Miller’s legs!]

    (Second viewing, On Cable TV, March 2021) As a silly college comedy (yup, they had those in the early 1940s!), Too Many Girls is perhaps more interesting for its setting than its content, although it does have an unusual spark to its premise. Everything begins as four ace football players are convinced (somehow, by a billionaire) to let go of a bright college career in order to act as bodyguards/chaperones to his rebellious daughter going to study in the American south-west. What makes the film a bit unusual is the location of the college, and its refusal to stick to Ivy-league atmosphere: “Pottawatomie College” in New Mexico is proudly set in a desert, and the Mexican influence is felt throughout: Too Many Girls is colourful despite being in black-and-white, and Ann Miller plays a character meant to be of Hispanic origins (which mostly consists in letting her curls run wild and calling her “Pepe”) – her signing segments are predictably some of the highlights of the film. Many musical set-pieces take the form of vigorously choreographed crowd dancing, which is not a bad thing at all. The cast does have its attraction as well – other than Miller, who really plays a supporting character, there’s Lucille Ball as the supposedly rebellious daughter (she’s mildly energetic at best), the very likable Desi Arnaz as one of the bodyguards (not the one who romances her, but no matter – in real life, they married two months after the film was released!) Perhaps overly slavish to the original Broadway musical, the plotting sort of loses its way midway through and the ending doesn’t quite satisfy. Too Many Girls is a pleasant-enough time, but there are many ways in which it could have been better: Shooting in colour, letting go of Broadway in order to focus on more cinematic qualities and working on the film’s last half would have been obvious starting points. Still, it’s fun enough, the scenery is a change of pace and the parallels with other, more modern campus comedies are intriguing enough.

  • Time Out for Rhythm (1941)

    Time Out for Rhythm (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2019) One of the certitudes about tracking down lesser-known movies from favourite actors is that the more obscure they get, the less good they are. (Well, usually.)  Time Out for Rhythm will never make anyone’s list of best movies—not in general, not for musicals, not for films of 1941. It’s almost obscure these days, but never mind me—I’m here for Ann Miller, who gets a substantial supporting role here in addition to singing and dancing. Others will focus on the scattering of appearances by The Three Stooges, but they’ve never been my kind of comedians in the first place. The rest of the film is a bit dull: It’s another showbiz comedy set in New York, with talent agents having a falling-out when an opportunistic woman (played by Rosemary Lane) comes between them. The production values are fair, with a highlight being the glow-in the-dark “Boogie Woogie Man” number. Thematically, mentions of a television show are unusual for a film of the early 1940s—While movies of the 1950s obsessed over TV as more and more sets made their way into homes, it was still fancy new technology back in 1941 and having characters speak about the potential of TV shows marks them as forward-looking. Time Out for Rhythm doesn’t hold a candle to many other musicals of the time, but it being a musical, it’s never uninteresting for long: there’s usually a musical number or a comic routine to perk up our interest at regular intervals. As for myself, I got to see Miller tap-dance through a few more good numbers showcasing her, so at least that’s it. I doubt I’ll remember much of the film in a few weeks, though.

  • Stage Door (1937)

    Stage Door (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2019) The links between Hollywood and Broadway remain an enduring source of fascination, especially in the early years of sound cinema where stage shows could finally be portrayed on film with some fidelity. Consider Stage Door, which takes us to a 1930s boarding house dedicated to young women trying to find a place in showbiz: an ideal environment to feature many young actresses, and to riff on themes of interest to movie audiences without quite talking about movies. To modern viewers, much for the initial attraction of the film will be its cast. Not only do we have Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, and Lucille Ball in leading roles, but Ann Miller (who was, amazingly only 14 at the time) is unmistakably recognizable in a smaller role. But as Stage Door begins, it’s the quality and the snark of the free-flowing dialogue between the ensemble cast that holds our attention. The women here have fast wits and some of the film’s best moments consist in merely hanging out in the building’s foyer with them as they chat about their careers, their dates and their shared dislike of the house’s food. Hepburn is magnificent as a haughty upper-class girl wanting to make it as an actress and becoming far more sympathetic in the process. She’s not the only one that changes quite a bit along the way, as the film goes from fast-paced comedy to drama somewhere around the beginning of the third act. Despite the sobering (but not entirely unpredictable) shift, that change of pace works rather well and provides to the film a dramatic heft that a purely comedic approach may have lacked. It certainly improves the ultimate impact of the result, with Stage Door surviving admirably well even today.

  • Watch the Birdie (1950)

    Watch the Birdie (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2019) Comedy is a weird genre: what’s funny today may not feel as amusing decades later, or even with an entirely different audience. So it is that comparing Watch the Birdie soon after its silent-movie inspiration The Cameraman shows the difference between the dumb loquaciousness of Red Skelton’s humour in stark contrast with the smart physicality of Buster Keaton. The correspondence is very, very loose, of course: We’re talking about Watch the Birdie riffing from a bare-bones plot summary of The Cameraman, as a sympathetic gaffe-prone protagonist grabs a camera in an attempt to impress a love interest. But whereas Keaton could only count on gesticulation and title cards, Skelton starts talking over the beginning credits (the film’s funniest sequence, actually) and never stops. He plays three characters (the protagonist, his father and his grandfather), which is one too much—the father character never makes much of an impression, let alone becomes funny in his own right. His humour is hit or miss—he likes making funny faces and looking confused a lot, whereas I think that’s reaching for the dumbest, least subtle comedy there is. As a result, much of Watch the Birdie feels forced—I won’t deny that it has a few laughs (the ending sequence, featuring a car chase with a tall Hyster lumber loader, feels very Keatonesque which may be explained by Keaton being an uncredited advisor for the film), but much of it labours mightily through pratfalls and grimaces. The film feels too long even at 72 minutes, especially considering its structure of gags strung along a loose plot. On the other hand, my first reason for watching the film is justifiable: Ann Miller is not only gorgeous but quite funny as well as she plays an intentionally dumb beauty queen who gets knocked around by male and female characters alike. I take it that Red Skelton did a lot of similar movies in the post-WW2 years, but that none of them are particularly well regarded today—indeed, I probably would have overlooked Watch the Birdie if it hadn’t been of its link to Keaton and Miller.

  • Kiss Me Kate (1953)

    Kiss Me Kate (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) The early 1950s were some of the best years for MGM musicals, and Kiss Me Kate is a pretty good example of the form. It’s not next-level terrific like some of its contemporaries (I’m specifically thinking of thematically-similar The Band Wagon, also released in 1953), but it’s pretty good as a straightforward musical with no compulsions about what it is. While Kathryn Grayson and Howard Keel both star as a divorced couple rediscovering each other over the course of a theatrical premiere, I frankly watched the film for my own favourite Ann Miller, who has a secondary but substantial role as a dim-witted but skilled dancer/actress. Much of the plot revolves around a staging of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, around which revolves a romantic reconnection plot and a pair of not-so-threatening gangsters holding the production hostage. I probably would have enjoyed the film more if I was more knowledgeable with Shakespeare’s comedies, but the final result is somewhat fun even for uncultured viewers. The song and dance numbers, after all, are the thing. “Too Darn Hot” doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the story, but it gets the film off to a roaring start with Miller vamping her way through a naughty song. “Wunderbar” gets the romantic subplot going, while “…any Tom, Dick or Harry…” gets Miller another chance to shine. “I Hate Men” is a cute number, and “Always True to You in My Fashion” has a few laughs—as does “Brush Up Your Shakespeare.”  The gender roles are 1950s-ish to the point of being uncomfortable today, but keep in mind that the plot of the original Broadway show reflects a late-1940s attitude toward a Shakespearian text: not exactly a hotbed of progressivism. It’s all in good fun, mind you, and the public spanking of the heroine (yes, really) has its mitigating factors. But you don’t watch MGM musicals for their liberalism—you watch them for the songs, the dances and the carefree fun. On those qualities, Kiss Me Kate certainly delivers.