Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: The Sky's The Limit!

Article theme: War - Edwin Starr

"Psst - Fred, don't look now but I think you're featured on Pat Bastard's blðg again."

Not only the best and most overlooked Hollywood musical, but also the greatest accidentally anti-war movie of all time, it's too obvious a pun to call RKO's 1943 opus The Sky's The Limit Fred Astaire's shining hour (because that is the title of its main theme song), but I just did, so now what, bitch?

Actually, I'm assuming it was unintentional - even a kino factory like RKO wouldn't have dared commit a major star like Astaire to a based isolationist peacenik project at the height of the hostilities - but, just as every Hollywood attempt to marry pozzed messaging with actual artistic talent ends in divorce, so too this effort to keep proto-neocon support for the worst and most destructive war in history high undermines itself so hard you might just start to wonder.

Never forget that the same balding twinks who smirk media literately over the ebin propaganda satire in Starship Troopers also soyface into lockjaw over the Holy War Against Fashism based on this sort of farcically corny agitslop.

Astaire plays Fred (perhaps a clue that this complex character is closer to the real him than his typically airy persona), a fighter ace directed to perform a PR tour from coast to coast on his fleeting leave from the Pacific theatre who goes AWOL instead. The reason suggested is just boredom with his obligations and a yen for anonymity in a country that sees him as a hero for killing le ebil Japs, but this is surface level motivation. Disaffection with the whole war fits better and is supported by the scenes where Fred berates an aeronautical tycoon over the fitness of his aircraft for combat purposes at an obsequious works party in his honour. Through this point he's been a charming prankster, trying to lose himself in the escapism of civilian life, but in this scene his unloading becomes impassioned, showing-without-telling of psychological scars a studio propaganda flick of the period would otherwise have swept under the rug.

"Young man, what are you saying?"
"Look, personally I just prefer allies who don't sink our ships, send letter bombs to the White House, bomb our buildings and frame the Muslim Brotherhood for it, buy all our politicians and run pedo blackmail rings on our own soil."
"I simply won't hear such Woke Right Anti-Semolina-Pudding! Out I say!" - actual dialogue.

But the unravelling of Fred is gradual, a calendar in which he ticks off the days of his dwindling leave acting like those clocks in Rumble Fish, reminding us of the time elapsing before his freedom runs out, serving as a minimalistic motif to keep the rude awakening ahead in mind throughout the dream that plays out for us in between. First Fred goes looking for romance, and finds it by inventing photobombing and otherwise trolling Joan Leslie's qt3.14 photographer into falling for his impish charms.

Remember, boys: if she never looks at you like this...

...She'll never look at you like this.

It's a great romance of the cinéma and our foreknowledge of its doomed fate only makes it more poignant and none the less enjoyable as comic entertainment. Crack all the celluloid-closet jokes you will about our Fred, his chemistry with Leslie speaks of straightness you or I can but aspire to (well, you, anyway). Nor can we deny the sack required to smash his "One For My Baby And One For The Road" routine, in which the great danceman opened a leg shattering glass this way and that in an outpouring of sorrow as primal as it is precise. "Can't act" my taint, guy who wrote his infamous first screen test notes, this is a performance physical and emotional that mogs the talents of every pretentious thespian ever to don tights and also unrelatedly play Shakespeare.

On this b└og we stan a STRAIGHT king.

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.