Pal Joey Blu-ray Review
Rodgers and. . .who?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, February 28, 2012
The film version of
The Sound of Music has a lot of achievements to its credit. It pretty much single handedly
brought 20th Century Fox back from the brink of bankruptcy after the debacle that was
Cleopatra. It was in
many ways the last big family musical blockbuster, capping an era that had been going strong since at least the Golden
Era of Hollywood. With five Oscar wins, countless tens of millions in box office receipts, ancillary profits that have
stretched from the long playing record to CD, from VHS to Blu-ray, also stuffing its coffers,
The Sound of Music
has
earned its joking alternate title of
The Sound of Money. (We'll set aside for a moment co-star
Christopher Plummer's somewhat less monetarily themed alternate title for the film,
The Sound of Mucous.) But
one sort of weird achievement that can be traced to
The Sound of Music is that an entire couple of generations
has become so firmly imprinted with the musical's iconic pairing of Rodgers and Hammerstein that many of them are
completely unaware that Richard Rodgers had had a long and extremely productive compositional life long before his
collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II, including another iconic pairing with another legendary lyricist, Lorenz Hart.
Hart was in some ways a
cleverer (which is not to say
better) lyricist than Hammerstein, and if the
Rodgers and Hammerstein
oeuvre was often kind of rural and folksy, the Rodgers and Hart
oeuvre is
often decidedly more urban and sophisticated. Rodgers wasn't the easiest man in the world to work with (as even his
family is on record stating), but his collaboration with Hart was especially tumultuous, something probably more
attributable to Hart's drinking problem and erratic working habits than to any prickliness on Rodgers' part. The team
was nearing the end of their incredibly fruitful and successful professional relationship when they adapted John
O'Hara's
Pal Joey for the stage in 1940, but the musical's incipient cynicism may have been the biggest
impediment to it making it to the screen right away. It wasn't until 1957 that a film version of
Pal Joey
appeared, and even then it was not the original Rodgers and Hart conception, but instead a somewhat bowdlerized
and Hollywoodized amalgamation that played to star Frank Sinatra's strengths while eschewing some of the salient
characteristics about Joey Evans that Sinatra was certainly capable of playing.
Pal Joey initially sprang to life as a series of
New Yorker short stories by John O'Hara, which were then
stitched together as a novel, one which consisted entirely of letters supposedly written by Joey to his friend Ted. Joey
was a down on his luck nightclub entertainer who had a somewhat cracked moral compass, but who was a likable guy
nonetheless. O'Hara himself brought the material to Rodgers and Hart and suggested a musical adaptation, offering to
write the book (libretto) himself. The musical version saw Joey (played in the original Broadway version by a newcomer
named Gene Kelly) on the make with a wealthy socialite, one he feels can set him up in business with his own nightclub,
while he simultaneously woos a more innocent girl. Joey is a cad, a user who's constantly scheming to latch on to that
next rung on the ladder of success, and as such he bears a certain similarity to another anti-hero whose story was
musicalized some two decades later, Budd Schulberg's Sammy Glick, who came to life in the person of Steve Lawrence
in
the musical
What Makes Sammy Run?. Both
Sammy and
Joey have a rather jaundiced view of
show
business, and both posit a pretty venal lead character at the core of their stories.
Joey is a fantastic role for any actor, and it catapulted Kelly to overnight stardom (it also provided Bob Fosse with his
only acting Tony nomination for a revival in the early sixties). Sinatra was a perfect choice to play the role, at least in
terms of
persona if not the original conception of the character (Joey was a dancer, not a singer, in the
Broadway version), but for whatever reason, the filmmakers decided to soften Joey's rougher edges, making him a
charming scoundrel more than a scheming womanizer. The fact that Sinatra was also at the top of his game vocally
makes any attempt to paint Joey as "second rate" laughable, something that would ironically color Fosse's film version
of
Cabaret years later, when the supposedly talentless Sally Bowles was inhabited by the stellar Liza Minnelli.
Scenarist Dorothy Kingsley twists and turns various characters around, and jettisons several of the Rodgers and Hart
tunes that graced the original stage version, while at the same time inserting a handful of their classics from some of
their other shows. In other words, if you know the stage
Pal Joey, the film will seem like a somewhat strange
mélange; if you've never seen the stage version, the film perhaps is a bit more cohesive and less bothersome.
In this somewhat bewitched, bothered and bewildered (to quote one of the classic Rodgers and Hart songs form the
score) reworking of
Pal Joey, Kim Novak portrays Linda English, the "innocent" from the original version, now
transported from a life of stenography to being a nightclub dancer with aspirations of singing. Rita Hayworth is the
other above the title billed star, playing Vera Simpson, the wealthy society dame who agrees to fund Joey's plans for a
nightclub, but who in this film version is given the patently odd back story of having been a stripper, seemingly for the
sole reason of having Hayworth perform the delectable "Zip". Several minor characters from the stage version have
been completely jettisoned, and a couple of others have been rethought. A whole subplot is also missing in action, and
the bulk of this film is a sort of strange
ménage a trois, interrupted now and again for nightclub performances
(something this film has in common with Fosse's film version of
Cabaret), with the only real plot arc being
whether Joey will choose Vera or Linda, or neither (without spoiling anything, it's noteworthy that the original stage
version gives this "choice" to the women).
This is a colorful and brash musical entertainment, lifted miles above its kind of turgid elements due to the star power of
its lead trio, as well as some knock your socks off arrangements by Sinatra's leading collaborator of that time, Nelson
Riddle. Even though Sinatra, Novak and Hayworth are all immensely winning in their roles, the music here is
undoubtedly one of the chief allures of this film, and Riddle's inventive reimaginings of these Rodgers and Hart classics
are elegant showpieces not just for Sinatra's mature vocalizing, but for the art of orchestration itself (actual
orchestration duties fell to Arthur Morton). (Neither
Hayworth nor Novak did their own singing, not to state the obvious.) This may not be the "real"
Pal Joey in any
sense of the word, but it still remains one of Sinatra's best screen outings. Sinatra certainly could have played the
character as originally written (albeit probably without the demanding dance elements), but even toned down here for
this "kinder, gentler" approach, he manages to convey a bit of Joey's smarm lying just beneath the charming surface.
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