Mitzi Gaynor

  • Les Girls (1957)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, September 2021) Just as I thought I had run out of high-profile Gene Kelly musicals, here’s one I had missed: Les Girls, an expensive production signed by none other than veteran director George Cukor that marks Kelly’s last MGM contract movie. The plot has to do with a tell-all exposé about a dancing troupe, leading to different versions of the same story. Kelly plays the troupe manager, with the three leading dancer roles filled by Mitzi Gaynor, a very funny Kay Kendall and a rather bland Taina Elg. Often heavier on comedy than music, the result nonetheless has some very good numbers — including Kelly riffing off Marlon Brando in a number with Gaynor. For Kelly, Les Girls had the opportunity to play with very familiar themes: ballet, Francophilia, choreography and portraying a bit of a cad. The result is fun, even if it’s not as memorable as many of his other musicals from earlier in the decade. Indeed, the late 1950s were the end of an era at MGM with contracts not being renewed and the Freed unit down to its last musicals. Les Girls marks another solid production — a step short of being a classic, but still wonderfully polished and enjoyable by itself. I have a feeling I’ll enjoy revisiting this one eventually, even if it doesn’t play as often as its more famous contemporaries.

  • South Pacific (1958)

    South Pacific (1958)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, July 2018) I like musicals a lot and fifties musicals are among the finest every made, but I do have a marked preference for musicals made for the screen rather than adapted from the stage, and I seem to have a specific lack of affinity for anything adapted from Rodgers and Hammerstein stage musicals. South Pacific is a case in point: A big bold musical set on the Pacific front during World War II, it features a young nurse taken with a creepy older Frenchman, with various hijinks from the US soldiers stationed nearby. It’s not that funny, which is a shame considering that the film’s most interesting moments are its funniest ones. Mitzi Gaynor and Rossano Brazzi star, but Ray Walston is a highlight as a hapless soldier, while Juanita Hall is fantastic as a strong-willed islander woman. As is often the case, the film opens strong with good upbeat numbers (“Bloody Mary” and “There’s Nothing Like a Dame”), only to become duller and more romance-focused in its second half, with some comic interludes along the way. The cinematography of the film is a bit too out-there for the material—the use of strong colour filters is particularly annoying in washing out scenes that would have been perfectly good without them. There’s enough here to make South Pacific worth a watch for fans of musicals, but it hasn’t stood the test of time very well—especially considering that it was one of the top-grossing films of 1958.