Letterboxd Season Challenge 2019-2020! Theme five, part one - stage to screen adaptations!
I'm normally picky when it comes to older musicals. Broadway showstoppers from the mid-century boom of plays with stories and serious issues on their minds rarely do much for me due to the focus remaining squarely upon melodrama and spectacle, while leaving their slight plots to mill about in the margins as mere excuses for the main action. I prefer the songs to serve as primary means of storytelling, and the classic standards always treat them as entertaining diversions from the story, not really exploring any emotions or ideas beyond rapturous love, silly antics, or witheringly light tragedy through the music. It's additionally frustrating when a work with an interesting conflict or unique setting is made to play home for yet another meet cute, fall in love, fall apart, get back together narrative with only trivial intersection with the ostensibly main conflict. All in all, a Broadway musical from the 50s has some massive hurdles in its path if it wants to leap into my heart, and The Pajama Game hits on all the little things that annoy me about this style at a scan.
After watching George Abbott and Stanley Donen's adaptation of Abbott's hit 1954 play, I SHOULD come away with a tongue primed full've venom. Why not? The whole business about the pajama factory workers striking for a seven-and-a-half-cent raise serves as background dressing for the romance between Sid and Babe, which ignores the conflict for long stretches of screentime before driving a gulf between the two with a token upset, and subsequently puts no energy into their getting back together beyond "Well they're the main couple, so y'know." Multiple musical numbers run on as little more than filler entertainment divorced from character motivations, and when they ARE character motivated, one gets situations like Babe and Sid duetting about how passionately they adore each other for two songs in a row. As a piece of filmic work, the movie's fairly limited - despite a lively enough camera, many of the musical numbers are limited in scope and activity by the trade-in from live stage to sound stage, with only Once-A-Year-Day roaming a larger location and Hernando's Hideaway getting at all cinematic with the staging and editing. A jealous boyfriend's murderous rage is played for laughs, the union's victory over the company is treated as overly uproarious for its eye-raising simplicity, and the overall romantic arc comes across as little more than the script asking the audience if they want these hot people to flirt some, so it SHOULD be actively hitting at every "dislike this movie" button across my entire figure.
So, why are we coming away from the experience with me metting out a four star rating?
Familiarity bias might play into it some. I chose The Pajama Game for this theme because I'd seen a performance back in middle school, when my English teacher took the class on a field trip to watch the Tucson Community Theater's production. As with much media I viewed at the time, I've forgotten most of the details in the intervening decades (not as big a surprise here, considering it's the only live theater show I've seen in my life, and something watched for a school project at age 12 or 13), but the standouts definitely stand out in my memory. Snatches of Steam Heat and Hernando's Hideaway occasionally drift across my stream of conscious in free moments, and a lot of this watch was consumed by periods of "Hey! I remember this song now! It's great!" That I spent an entire evening editing the Wikipedia page for the play to include details of the production from the playbill I brought home before I understood what notability constituted probably helped stick the play in my mind as something worth remembering fondly, however dimly, and primed me to think of this film as a grand ol' time regardless of elements I'd otherwise find annoying.
This doesn't quite satisfy, though. The Pajama Game may sit in my mind as "that play I saw in middle school," but this film, divorced from my memories, still has quite a lot on offer. Forget notions of doing something uniquely cinematic with the filmed material or using songs as a means of communicating story; the music and performances here are infectiously bouncy and varied enough to blow such preconceptions right out the door. There's a trend towards allowing the actors' vocals to strain and fray on longer or higher notes in a way which feels highly controlled, granting moments like Doris Day's increasingly atonal response to the calls in Not At All In Love or her interplay with John Raitt on There Once Was A Man an extra degree of skin-tingling satisfaction. The Broadway music team clearly had tons of fun tweaking at the call-and-response style of structuring, playing with swinging waltzes, rapidly shifting verbal tempos (consider the stretched out notes followed by babababababa rapidity on the verses to I'll Never Be Jealous Again, the breakneck/leisurely contrast in Small Talk, or the radically different paces on both go-arounds of Racing With The Clock), and even players dueting with themselves. Though I'd entirely forgotten about it from the stage play, Raitt's work on the opening warning half of Hey There followed by his interplay with his recorded voice as a doubting counterpart in the second stretch was an unexpected highlight, and Day's reprise in a new, sorrowful context sold me on her status as a musical superstar better than anything in Calamity Jane. And, of course, it helps to have big showstopper numbers like Once-A-Year-Day, which just keeps going and going and building and building without losing any of its energy or fun, and the matchlit, darkroom tango of Hernando's Hideaway, which contains the film's most well-crafted visuals. It's an uncommonly good soundtrack all the way through, whose density only gets one charged and willing to leap from number to number with little resistance.
Beyond the music, I also think the performances help the movie along towards a higher rating quite a bit. Looking over Wikipedia, the cuts made in adaptation rob most of the supporting cast their numbers and sideplots (Prez seems to suffer the most in this regard), but the original Broadway cast is still here minus Janis Page's Babe and Stanley Prager's Prez, and they're still giving it their all in roles they'd inhabited for three years by this point. Carl Haney stands out in particular when the spotlight shines her way towards the end, given she's afforded the leads on both Steam Heat Hernando's Hideaway, a riotous drunken routine in the following scene, and a turn towards the climax that allows her to just wild it right the hell up with out of control screams and erratic mannerisms. Such high-effort, high-reward mania defines the film's comedic routines, which involve large chunks of the cast getting caught in their own conflicting priorities, and blustering and shouting over one another until someone barges in to straighten the situation. While it does not MEAN much in the way of exploring the labor conflict or romances at play, it is endearing to an extreme I cannot deny, and couples well with the same performers when they launch into song and dance. I don't particularly need a well-defined romantic arc when Day and Raitt are giving it their all to make the all-too-short courting period seem natural before the dizzying highs of Small Talk and There Once Was A Man. Call it emotional cheating if you will (it absolutely is), but damn if it doesn't work, and work well.
Effectively, I think the movie clips past any and all grievances I can and do raise to land at an overall positive place by doing what a Broadway entertainer does best: taking the material it has on hand, rehearsing it to perfection, and then performing with such finesse and bombast, you hardly notice or care about whatever cracks show. Taking The Pajama Game and transplanting it to the screen with little more than some cut content and more realistic locations conducted in transit probably should break the thing in the process, and I'd be made a liar if I claimed a few elements didn't almost push me down to, at least, a 3.5. The way Gladys and Hine-sie's little subplot resolves with them jokingly wearing prison stripe pajamas with built-in handcuffs makes me choke on my tongue a little for how bitterly 1950s it tastes, honestly. With such strong musical and performative elements in tow, though (not to mention the production design - it's a minor thing comparatively, but I'm kinda in love with the costuming here), the film can skate right past any and all problems to convince me to go with the flow and enjoy what it has to offer. As I've said time and again, one should strive to level with films on their level and, where possible, count a final positive experience as more important than whatever grievances come up. In this particular case, the film's all about making good with a grievance committee, so I've an extra layer of cover for my less than professionally critical perspective than usual.
(Someone kindly tell me how Ralph Dunn wasn't made known to me as a comedic talent until last night, please.)
Lookit 'em go.
4/5
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