Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Band Wagon!

The best musical you'll ever see contains the best noir you'll ever see.

The notes from Fred Astaire's first screen test famously pronounced "can't sing, can't act, can dance a little". By 1953, Astaire's status as cinéma's great song-and-dance man was so thoroughly established that you could open a movie by riffing on his trademark top-hat-and-tails motif as easily as you could Boris Karloff's neck bolts or Béla Lugosi's cape. So starts The Band Wagon, in which Astaire sends up his role as elder statesman of the movie musical with the well-judged light touch that characterised everything he did. The opening scene has a hapless auctioneer attempt to sell those top hats, canes and tailcoats to an indifferent assembly of bidders. Fred has fallen on hard times and needs a new angle to revive his once-illustrious career. But before the plot kicks into high gear he has time to pick himself up with a routine about the apparently delirious joys of a shoe-shine. I guess people were easier to please back then.

Not exactly beating those light-in-the-loafers allegations with a sign declaring your routine "the gayest music" right behind you. Everyone's a critic.

"But Pat", you rumble in confused effrontery, "what need have I of such a rec? Musicals are for women and their cooties!" Right attitude, wrong conclusion. The Band Wagon is a compelling thesis film, boldly championing art for entertainment's sake. The plot involves a ham-and-cheese actor-producer commandeering Astaire's comeback piece as a vector for his Very Important Social Message, to the inevitable detriment of the production. But because this is no heavy-handed diatribe, it's played wisely for laughs, and The Band Wagon leads by example by giving over more and more of its runtime to setpieces of defiantly little consequence.

The movie's thesis song and breakaway hit is literally called "That's Entertainment". Strangely none of the verses list smarmy bathetic interruptions or delusional rants about "cat calling".

By way of an example so self-consciously trite that YouTube video essayists could stain their pants over the meta-non-metaness of it all, the Pride & Prejudice-esque rom-com antagonism between Astaire and co-star Cyd Charisse kicks off over his age (162) and her smoking (cigarettes), in an exchange so petty and childish it almost qualifies as parody. It's like the writers are telling you "this formula works even when it's telegraphed and played for laughs", and when you doubt them, they show you.

Dancing partners squaring up must be like Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef squinting at each other for homosexuals.

Many of the best movies wind their way up to a grand setpiece: the climbing of the department store in Safety Last!, the tanker chase in The Road Warrior, the star gate in 2001. The Band Wagon pays off in an extended sequence more-or-less alluded to in prior dialogue but almost out-of-left-field in its content. The "Girl Hunt Ballet" is a roughly 12-minute movie-within-a-movie so surreal, that so encapsulates the knife-edge balance of the sublime and the ridiculous that is the heart of great kino, and so completely gratuitous to such petty nonsense as the "plot", it might just make you want to take up torch and pitchfork against what the movies have become (in Minecraft).

This sequence hits like the Dalí-art-directed dream sequence in Spellbound. Audacious.