Easter Parade

OP, you might find these old threads of interest.

Astaire is such an underrated singer: his voice is as light and charming as his dancing.

I guess THIS is the 2020 edition

How did she look so good in this and so awful in those Annie Get Your Gun clips just a year later?

Not quite perfect, that salad scene is always excruciating

Everybody sing!

What presence, what a voice (and i even like the white dress!)

Is this an advertisement for Playtex Living Gloves?

I thought she looked tired. Non-stop movies and squeezing-in a baby, all the while popping pills.

OP, your post is gayer than an actual parade of Easter bonnets along Fifth Avenue on a sunny April Sunday! Congratulations!

I don’t really know MGM musicals very well, I guess. This seemed like a really odd musical to me. I enjoyed its different components, for sure, but who was Peter Lawford supposed to be? He was always just there. I also thought there’d be more to the parade finale. I enjoyed it, it was a favourite of my late grandmother. Never thought it would be so flimsy.

"The entire cast was at its peak of talent and beauty -- Judy Garland, Fred Astaire, Peter Lawford, Ann Miller."

That's funny because they're all so plain.

I love this movie too, OP

It's on again tonight at eight on TCM, in what I am sure will be a crystal-clear print.

Fred and Judy make an excellent father and daughter act.

I think Fred Astaire's age/persona was one of timelessness, allowing him to be paired up with actresses much younger that he, and yet it not seeming weird.

For example, Judy Garland, Vera-Ellen and Cyd Charisse were all about 23 years younger, Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron were each about 30 years younger. Even Ginger Rogers was 12 years younger than he.

I wish they would play that on the movie channel and not Ben Her. I have never wanted to see Ben Her, never!

[quote] and not Ben Her. I have never wanted to see Ben Her, never!

Ben Her was the drag version of Ben-Hur. That's where his famous Planet of the Apes line comes from (in milder form of course): Get your hands off me, you dirty ape! (vicious slap with glove)

So glad Gene Kelly didn't get to do this. All his movies are unwatchable due to his hamminess.

Kelly was great -- until he stopped dancing.

Watched it this morning with my mom. I loved the pairing of Astaire and Garland. They looked right together - she wasn’t taller or too beautiful to be believable with him. Great songs.

We did laugh at the old timey magazines (Delineator?) and how the models were a little basic.

Also, Judy was 26ish and was already looking a little rough IMO.

This is a wonderful movie, one of Garland's best and one of Fred's best too. What a shame that they didn't make Royal Wedding and The Barkleys of Broadway together!

Great songs. Astaire's opening number in the toy store is fabulous. Ann Miller does a great job and only had praise for both Fred and Judy afterward. She spoke glowingly of Judy until the day she died.

I know that some of the songs were written especially for this movie, but I cannot find the breakdown

"I think Fred Astaire's age/persona was one of timelessness, allowing him to be paired up with actresses much younger that he, and yet it not seeming weird. "

I disagree, by the 1950s his age began to be an issue. It wasn't too bad in "The Band Wagon" in 1953, because he and Charisse danced so divinely together and the script admitted to a big age difference, but by the time he made "Funny Face" in 1957... yeah, pairing with Hepburn seemed weird. She was so girlish and he was pushing sixty, and they didn't dance particularly well together, it looked all wrong.

That might explain why the movie Funny Face was not a box office success

I don't think Fred Astaire was creepy with younger actresses because NOBODY ever thought he wanted to touch a vagina.

In one scene, I noticed Judy looked like her 1960s self. It was weird. Then I read that this was exactly one year into her severe depression and suicide attempt that was followed by an intense barbiturate and even morphine pill habit - supplemented by alcohol. It was just at the beginning of the crash and descent into hardcore addiction. Crazy - only 25-26 but she had already been a hard working actress kept in perpetual motion by pills for over a decade. But she really started to unravel and hit the downers hardcore right around Easter Parade - you can see hints of it in the less manic energy that had been in her earlier roles.

Yeah, she just not her "Meet Me in St. Louis" self, where she was so alive and awake.

I watched this movie Sunday, and she seemed like she was being pulled around in her performances. No motivation of her own.

I also never bought in to the 1912-era setting; it looked like the late 1940s. They should have just set it in the current time.

Wasn't Peter Lawford sexy??? YUM!!!