THREE LITTLE WORDS
1950
Directed by Richard Thorpe
Written by George Wells
The musician biopic can feel like it has one of the lowest reputations of any genre, and it's easy to find someone irritated by the inevitable stumbles they make. Pick one or more: it disrespects the facts, or doesn't celebrate the musician's music any more profoundly than a greatest hits album would, or exists solely to trade on their name and pick up polite awards nominations, or it shouldn't exist at all, because it's failing to prove that just because an artist made interesting art it means they had an interesting life. Three Little Words checks every box, and so if it's a superb example of the form anyway, it's because it barely even bothers using the form. It's a musical comedy, not so unlike any given musical comedy made by MGM between the end of World War II and the middle of the 1950s, that this time simply happens to be about lyricist Bert Kalmar (Fred Astaire) and composer Harry Ruby (Red Skelton), along with their wives, Jessie Brown (Vera-Ellen) and Eileen Percy (Arlene Dahl). And we really don't even need to look further than those names, or at least those first three: that's absolutely one "any given musical comedy made by MGM" cast list, except one highly likely to make it above average.
It was MGM's third go at its nominally musician-biographical subgenre of musical, and while I don't know for sure if it's the best, I'd bet no small amount of money on it. My intuition is that they grew out of the Ziegfeld series that had been largely successful and had wound up a triptych examination of the enterprise of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., not a musician but an impresario whose accomplishments included helping build American musical theater out of vaudeville. 1946's Ziegfeld Follies, in particular, revived the "revue" style of film musical, long out of fashion by then. Ziegfeld Follies wasn't profitable, but mainly because of costs; it was a big enough deal, regardless, to kick off Till the Clouds Roll By, a kind of revue focused on one songwriter that shaped itself, I can't say how pleasingly, as a biopic of Jerome Kern. It was a success. Next came Words and Music in 1948, about a lyricist-composer team, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, and now I actually can say how pleasingly it shaped itself around the story of their shared lives: not very. It satisfies one's desire, somewhat, for a greatest hits compilation—my actual biggest problem with it is how tiresomely shackled its choreography is to its stagebound diegesis, but my second biggest problem is how my first biggest problem emphasizes how little I like Rodgers & Hart's music—but it also desperately wants to be a hefty biographical drama. This proves ironic, given that Hart's personal life was impossible to depict under the Production Code, so instead they cast Mickey Rooney and made him sad that he's short, rather than even sad about the non-gay things Hart was sad about, like his mom's death and—you know—Oscar Hammerstein.
That brings us to Three Little Words, concerning Kalmar & Ruby, whose true story has no drama at all. I like to think producer Jack Cummings looked to Arthur Freed's production of Words and Music and asked, "who are you trying to kid?", while screenwriter George Wells (veteran of Till the Clouds Roll By) added, "how about we just make a movie?" Accordingly, Three Little Words cheerfully relies on no more than three or four actual facts from Kalmar & Ruby's lives: the former was a vaudeville dancer (sometimes magician) alongside Brown, who sustained an injury; Ruby married a film actress, Percy (his second wife, not something you'd learn here); the songwriting team, never monogamous, "broke up," spending some years working apart; and, oh, Ruby apparently really was a baseball fanatic. It also, by default, gets the basic state of popular music in the early 1920s right, with a song's hit factor evidently depending on how well it predicted the trend of which geographically/ethnically-stereotyped setting would be hot right now.
Everything else is an invention of the dream factory, because those facts are it for anything narratively interesting about Kalmar & Ruby, though even with them, you're already begging the question. Okay, so there are five facts: the two guys did make some decent songs, though the film happily includes songs made by "Kalmar and X" and "Ruby and Y" with cavalier abandon. It posits such an insane genesis for what is probably their most enduringly-famous song, "I Wanna Be Loved By You," that merely failing to mention co-composer Herbert Stothart is the least of it. This song arrives in a vignette that's more of a batshit parody of such "artistic inspiration" just-so stories, finding Bert and Harry wandering aimlessly, whereupon they stop a bunch of movers in the middle of the street so they can use some random New Yorker's piano to play the song they've been knocking around between them, and then, for the batshit part, comes Helen "immortalized as Betty Boop" Kane (baby Debbie Reynolds, dubbed by Kane herself), who effectively pops out of another dimension to finish their song for them, incorporating the iconic squeaks that made her performance of it so memorable. I trust that this indicates how much Cummings's, Wells's, and director Richard Thorpe's goal here must have been, "just make a movie."
With that in mind, we do have a plot, and I can't just send you off to Wikipedia. So: somewhere around 1918-1921, we have Bert and Jessie, who have an extremely successful dance duo and, also, a subdued, slow-burning romance that Jessie won't commit to, thanks to her perception that Bert has stretched himself and will continue to stretch himself too thin to be a good husband, when all she even wants is to be a wife (this seems very "of 1950," but maybe it's even a sixth fact, I don't know). Besides his dancing success, Bert occasionally writes lyrics, and nurses a succession of unproduced plays. Most aggravatingly to Jessie, he wants a whole second career as a magician despite, so they say, not even being good at magic. (Though he ain't bad: one of the cool things about Three Little Words is that it finds time to deliver some pretty awesome magic tricks that Thorpe makes sure get captured in single takes.)
Well, absconding into the night to practice the art of illusion, "Kendall the Great" winds up in what I guess we'd call "off-vaudeville," where he makes the acquaintance of aspiring tunewriter, present-day song-plugger (the guy who performs sheet music at sheet music stores), and quasi-dipshit, Harry. Assigned the task of assisting Bert, Harry ruins his act, and so when they meet again in Tin Pan Alley, Bert gets very hostile upon recognizing him—but, they've already spent the afternoon writing the makings of a hit, so while Bert storms out, Harry persists, and despite Bert giving him a hard time, a fast friendship is formed. By now, you see, Bert needs a lyrical career, because he's busted his knee and his dancing career is, at least, on hold. It's already wrecked his relationship with Jessie—over her objections, he's effectively sent her off to find someone new to dance with—and, above and beyond their working relationship, this is where Harry becomes Bert's pal, when he contrives to get Bert back together with the woman he loves, even though he's afraid that this means that their partnership, and so the exigence for their friendship, will be over.
It isn't—Bert quits the stage for good for Harry—but it is where the movie sort of develops its thematic throughline, or at least its curious motif, of good friends manipulating or attempting to manipulate the living shit out of each other, with apparently the sincerest of good intentions. I suppose that could make it sound "heavy," but it's all just the fizziest nonsense right up until about twenty-five minutes before the end of this 102 minute movie, where—at long last—an actual dramatic conflict begins. It probably could've come earlier, when Bert and Jessie conspire to separate Harry from his evil starfucking fiancee (Gale Robbins). But Harry never even finds out about that. And, to be fair, what Harry does is a hundred times worse than tricking Harry into going to celebrity baseball camp for the week it takes for his wretched fiancee to marry a random dude. So it takes Bert discovering that Harry has sabotaged his long-nurtured dreams of producing his own play. Furious, and rightly so—even if Harry's motive was to save him from humiliating himself with what the entire cast, including their agent (Keenan Wynn), agrees is one wretched play—Bert walks out.
So that is a flaw. It's a full act, but it's the shortest—maybe "the only," because I'm not sure Three Little Words has "act structure"—and it's given itself the bare minimum of time to develop its drama. But it's so nearly unique in the Golden Age musical that you can forgive it some klutziness in getting there. It's a musical comedy where almost the entirety of the emotional hook comes from the friendship between two men. (That's true even though Bert and Jessie's courtship can activate some feelings, and Vera-Ellen is quite good here, making a very solid character out of a figure who starts instrumentally and gets moreso. Mostly, this is through the way she combines sarcasm and indulgence for just about every single interaction she has with Astaire, tilting the mix one way or another, except when the subject is his passion for magic, where she displays amusingly unadulterated contempt. For all I know, Three Little Words invented the "lame magician" comic archetype.)
But the core of it belongs to the rise, fall, and rise again of Bert and Harry's love for one another, and I think that's special and sweet, with Astaire doing great work but not unexpected work, mostly pulling his thoughtful/baleful/self-reproaching faces as the situation dictates, in line with his persona; which leaves Skelton, who's tremendously good, not really departing from his own fundamental persona of oafish sweetness, either, but through somebody's intervention he winds up tamped down hard, so that he's doing "a Skelton" that's fully capable of being a dramatic figure, "actually" sad and "actually" angry and "actually" bitter, as his situation dictates. Not to imply he isn't fully doing "a Skelton": restraining him probably makes him funnier, because it's more surprising when the film generously dumps a slapstick module into his lap. (The catastrophe at Bert's magic show, involving Skelton's backstage incompetence and Astaire's heightening humiliation on the other side of the curtain, is the best, but the baseball vignettes are cute. I likewise adore the two-part "elbows on the table" gag that's deftly inserted into an actual dramatic scene.) Astaire's causticity and Skelton's passivity work well together, too, even if my favorite beat is probably Skelton's smiling-not-to-cry long gaze at Astaire, specifically, after Harry's successfully reunited Bert with Jessie.
Thorpe, for his part, is in as fine a form as I've ever seen him, especially in this genre, though this might be the only time he comes off like he might've enjoyed making any movie. He's a good enough director to stay out of his performers' and craftspeople's way (as is so often the case, of the department heads, costume designer Helen Rose is the champ), maybe even helping them on occasion—with this musical comedy, he knows when to underline Wells's script's feelings with lonely singles or emphasizing reverse angles, while surrendering anything that requires serious authorial command to choreographers Astaire and Hermes Pan, or montagist Peter Ballbusch. So it's lovely stuff, probably enough to have made this a good time at the movies, even without any of the bells and whistles.
But as we adore Golden Age musicals precisely for their bells and whistles, bells and whistles we get, even if Three Little Words has a reputation for not providing as many as people prefer, hence making a buy-in to its dramatic friendship story and made-up celebrity biography more of a necessity than it perhaps should be. I understand this reputation without wholly agreeing with it; a lot of it seems to be based on the terror experienced by many latterday viewers that Astaire's character breaking his knee might mean he won't dance for the whole rest of the film. Of course he does. (Three Little Words was very well-received in its day—why, Astaire won one of the first batch of Golden Globes, to the extent that matters at all—so I guess it didn't frighten those ancients.) But I will give its detractors this, it peaks way early.
Still: if you had to make a musical biopic of songwriters, and I think we can safely assume Cummings did, it was a canny choice to go with Bert Kalmar, whose biographical data does provide access to the stuff any right-thinking person would actually want out of an MGM musical. It made casting Astaire and Vera-Ellen a rational possibility at all; how couldn't it be the best of MGM's songwriter biographies, when this one is actually a dancer biography? Astaire was happier with this assignment than many MGM sent his way—he was always nostalgic for his own history in vaudeville, vaudeville nostalgia being something Three Little Words gets at in ways large and small (for instance, casting Gloria DeHaven as her own singer mom, Flora Parker DeHaven)—and Astaire and his sister Adele often watched and learned from Kalmar and Brown back in the day.
They open the film with what I have to imagine was a Kalmar/Brown routine, which Pan treats with somewhat deliberate primitivism and staginess. (It's pretty good even so, thanks to our dancers, though the use of the thin straight lines of prop canes in the choreography emphasizes—surely not on purpose—that in the takes they're using they're actually a bit off.) For the most part, Three Little Words isn't straining to reinvent the cinematic dancing wheel, but it certainly uses the tools that had been invented up till that point, and it's always got something fun going on, like Vera-Ellen's Astaireless showcase (one of those regionally/ethnically stereotyped Kalmar & Ruby hits, the allegedly-Gallic, and French-accented, "Come On Papa"). Here she does a dockyard-themed ragdoll routine that is every bit as overwhelming (and in Technicolor!) as Eleanor Powell's similar exploits back in the 1930s, and even adding her own flourishes—Vera-Ellen's a trouper for a climactic leg lift, up to about twelve feet in the damn air, requiring one of her supporting chorines to have an arm jammed up her ass like she was a hand puppet. If that's still too stagey for you, we do have Astaire's solo, which is even integrated dance, as Bert makes his first ginger attempts to put his bum knee back into action, transpiring in a forlorn and empty auditorium. It unfortunately begins with a downright barbaric jump cut—bad Astaire! where's your coverage?—but it's well-designed for demonstrating his tender insecurities, and the music that comes from nowhere is a more inventive touch than that sounds, since the intercutting of Skelton, peeking his head in to ensure his friend's physical and emotional safety, grounds that music-from-nowhere (it is, after all, his music) in a meaningful, even moving, rationale. Astaire and Vera-Ellen have their final pas de deux in the second hour, partly an acknowledgment that the movie with dancing stars stopped having dancing sometime back, and it's great—Harry plays "Thinking of You" on the piano, while they romp on furniture with what I'm told are some interpolated Latin stylings, and, more importantly, some delightful prop work—in a way that glues the couple together, albeit about a half hour after the story more-or-less concluded their romantic arc. But it's very pleasant, and I wonder if I perceive some framerate manipulation, or if Astaire and Vera-Ellen really were able to make themselves seem to float so dreamily through the room.
So it's not arid of dance, even if the best comes no later than fifteen minutes into the movie and has just about nothing to do with nothing, except—I suppose this is crucial—to demonstrate Kalmar & Brown's skill, at the expense of being nothing like anything Kalmar & Brown would've ever done on stage, wholly "1950 film musical" in every way, from the music to its narrative to the hyperreality (and hypercontemporality) of Rose's color-coordinated costumes, dominated by a freakishly bright acid bath green. It's not the most artistically ambitious sequence Vera-Ellen and Astaire did together, nor my favorite, but it's an easy second-favorite, a comedy dance on the subject of "what if two dancers got married?" (goodness, you'd have to stretch to see how this connects to Bert and Jessie's story, which already is "what if two dancers got married?", at best you can point to how its sheer mania contrasts with "Thinking of You's" gentleness). It's called "Mr. and Mrs. Hoofer At Home," and it's just about thirty or forty dance-based pantomime jokes in a row, notably a spring-loaded baby that they treat as a football, which isn't even the best or second-best joke here: the second-best, I think, is how dancers clear their table, not even with dance, just like assholish slobs, and the best-best, I won't spoil, but it's perfectly placed as the very final beat of this top-tier MGM musical number that's so unusually one hundred percent successful in its comic buffoonery. Between this and the magic farce that precedes it, I kind of get the middling reputation of Three Little Words—you would think this is the funniest musical comedy ever made from its first twenty minutes, but then there's eighty left—but these extraordinary scenes are still here, and it's always good. Not uncommonly, in its sensitive treatment of its odd couple friendship, it's great.
Score: 9/10
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