Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of The Band Wagon
1953 · Vincente Minnelli · The Band Wagon on Sightlines
A man gets off at the end of a journey and nobody is waiting for him. Fred Astaire, playing Tony Hunter, a Hollywood song-and-dance star the industry has quietly written off, sings "By Myself" in warm amber light. It is a small number, almost a shrug. He isn't fighting anything. He walks, he sings, and the color does most of the feeling for him. Hold on to that amber, because The Band Wagon is a film about what happens when a man who can no longer change his situation by acting on it finds that the world will move for him if he dances.
Start with the plot, which is as sturdy as a Broadway marquee. Tony comes to New York for a comeback. His friends Lester and Lily Marton (Oscar Levant and Nanette Fabray, playing Comden and Green's fond portraits of themselves) write him a light musical. Then Jeffrey Cordova, a grandiose director-star played with relish by Jack Buchanan, hijacks it into a doom-laden modern-dress Faust. It flops, and the troupe has to decide what to do with it. This is the old backstage engine 42nd Street built in 1933: troubled rehearsals, the second-act crisis, the redemptive opening night. Deleuze would call it an action-image. A situation presses on the characters and they act to transform it.
Notice, though, how little of that action Tony actually does. The film keeps finding him stalled. He is too old for the part the industry wants, outclassed by Cyd Charisse's ballet-trained line, swallowed by Cordova's ambition. Deleuze has a name for a hero whose ordinary chain of seeing a problem and answering it with a deed has gone slack: the crisis of the action-image. Plenty of postwar films answered that crisis with emptiness and wandering. The MGM musical had a different answer, and Minnelli gave it its most beautiful form.
Deleuze calls it world-movement. In ordinary life, and in the action film, we move through a world that stays put. In a dance number like Minnelli's, the movement passes from the body into everything around it. The décor, the light and the camera pick up the motion and carry it on, until the dancer is less steering than being carried. Watch the penny-arcade number "A Shine on Your Shoes," a carnival of neon and primary colors, or the moonlit "Dancing in the Dark" in Central Park, all nocturnal blues and greens. The camera holds the dancers in full figure, as Astaire always insisted, but Minnelli's cranes and tracking shots make the frame breathe with the number. Tony and Gabrielle have spent the film quarreling. They don't settle it by talking. The park and the music take up their steps, and by the end the reconciliation has already happened in the space around them. Nobody acts. The world moves, and they let it.
This is why the lens matters here. It explains something every viewer of the film feels and the plot can't account for: the dances don't just decorate the story, they're where the story's real problem gets solved. Tony's obsolescence is a problem of action. He's past it. The dance answers it by not requiring action at all.
The long take is what makes this possible, and it's a debt the film owes directly. Top Hat and Swing Time fixed the Astaire doctrine: shoot the whole body, in unbroken takes, and keep the cutting out of the dance. Albert Akst's editing honors it, trimming dialogue for wit and leaving the numbers alone. André Bazin, the critic who argued that some events must not be cut up because their truth lies in their continuity, would have recognized the principle. You're watching a real body do a real, uninterrupted thing. The difference in Minnelli is that the continuous space the body moves through has been entirely painted.
That painting is Minnelli's invention, carried over intact from Meet Me in St. Louis. He thinks of the frame as a stage he can color, building in depth and height inside the squarish Academy ratio, one of the last big MGM musicals made that way before CinemaScope arrived the same year. Deleuze would point to the colour-image here: color that soaks up a scene and becomes its feeling. Amber is loneliness, and night-blue is the hesitant tenderness of the park.
Then comes the twelve-minute "Girl Hunt Ballet," where world-movement turns into something stranger. Its prototype is the dream-ballet Minnelli and Astaire built in Yolanda and the Thief: a self-contained set piece that tells a story through dance. Here the story is a hard-boiled detective picture made of all-red backdrops, dime-novel signage and exaggerated sets. Charisse is a smoldering noir icon, and Astaire narrates over it in mock-Spillane prose. This is a dream-image, a fantasy circuit that isn't anyone's memory and doesn't belong to the backstage world at all, though it's nominally part of the show. It is also a sharp case of what Deleuze calls the consciousness of clichés. The noir it dances through is assembled from secondhand pulp, and the film knows it. Astaire's voice-over makes the sound a joke on the genre while the dancing takes it completely seriously.
The film is arguing something through all this. Cordova's Faust is "art" in the pretentious sense, and it dies. The revue is "entertainment," and the film is on its side. Yet the Girl Hunt Ballet, the revue's crown, is as formally daring as anything Hollywood made in 1953. In Deleuze's terms, the film turns its debate into a reflection-image: the argument gets staged as spectacle and is never resolved in dialogue. Then the one new song written for the film, "That's Entertainment!", sings the thesis outright. Popular pleasure and artistic worth aren't enemies. The song became a standard and later lent its name to MGM's compilation films. The Pirate had already shown Minnelli's fascination with the performer playing an idealized self. Here the performer is Astaire, in his fifties and thinking about retirement, playing a man the business thinks is finished. The ache is real, and the dancing stays weightless anyway.
Which leaves a question. The plot asks whether the show can save Tony, the classic action-image question. The numbers suggest he is saved some other way, every time he stopped trying to win and let the world dance him. Watch it again with that in mind. When the frame starts to breathe, ask who is moving: Astaire, or the city painted around him.
Concepts in play
- movement of world — In 'A Shine on Your Shoes' and the Central Park 'Dancing in the Dark', Minnelli's crane and tracking moves make the frame breathe with the number, and the quarreling couple's reconciliation is carried by the space and music rather than achieved through action
- onirosign — The twelve-minute 'Girl Hunt Ballet': a self-contained noir fantasy of all-red backdrops and dime-novel signage, descended from the Yolanda and the Thief dream-ballet, belonging to no character's memory
- consciousness-of-cliches — The Girl Hunt Ballet spoofs the hard-boiled detective picture from inside a musical, assembled from pulp signage and mock-Spillane voice-over narration
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Tony Hunter, a washed-up star considered finished, keeps finding himself unable to change his situation: outpaced by age, outclassed by Gabrielle, his show hijacked by Cordova
- action-image-large-form — The 42nd Street backstage armature: troubled rehearsals, the Faust flop as second-act crisis, the troupe regrouping on the road to rebuild the show
- affective colour — Three-strip Technicolor keyed to mood: the warm ambers of the 'By Myself' arrival, the neon-and-primaries arcade, the nocturnal blues and greens of the Central Park duet
- the Figure — The art-versus-entertainment debate is staged as spectacle (Cordova's failed Faust against the revue, the Girl Hunt parody, the anthem 'That's Entertainment!') rather than settled in dialogue
- the closed set (cadre) — Minnelli's conception of the frame as a painted stage, composed in depth and vertically within the Academy ratio, one of the last major MGM musicals before CinemaScope