Crush of the Week : Cyd Charisse

From the "Two Faced Woman " number in The BandWagon, deleted before film's release.

Another still from The BandWagon

 Fred Astaire once called her beautiful dynamite and a more apt description of Cyd Charisse would be hard to find. Charisse was a main stay of the fabled Freed Unit at MGM in the 1940's and 1950's, appearing in such musicals as Singin' in the Rain, The Band Wagon, Brigadoon, Silk Stockings and many others.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  Born Tula Ellice Finklea [ what a name, right ? ] in Amarillo, Texas in 1922,  her nick name was " Sid " because a family member had trouble pronouncing " Sis ". A frail girl, Cyd took up dancing after she had contracted polio, to help build up her strength. At 14, she studied ballet under Nijinsky in Los Angeles . In 1939 Cyd married fellow dance Nico Charisse while on a tour of Europe. They had one son born in 1942. Her film debut came in 1943's Something to Shout About, in which she was billed as Lily Norwood. As result of that film she came to the attention of choreographer Robert Alton who worked at MGM. She was signed up by that studio in 1943, her first film for them being Mission To Moscow. Her first few roles were as a dancer only, her first speaking part was in 1946's The Harvey Girls opposite Judy Garland. For the next 3 to 4 years Charisse danced away in such films as Ziegfeld Follies, Till the Clouds Roll By, Fiesta, The Unfinished Dance and Words & Music. In addition to musical films MGM tried her out in straight dramatic parts in 1949's East Side, West Side which was based on a big best selling book by Marcia Davenport, low budget but high quality noir sleeper Tension, playing the good girl along side Audrey Totter's bad girl with hapless Richard Basehart in between the two.

With bad girl Audrey Totter, Tension 1950

Need I tell you?

 Cyd divorced Nico in 1947 and married singer Tony Martin in 1948. That union produced a son also, and Tony and Cyd were married until Cyd's death in 2008.By 1952, Cyd had appeared in over a dozen films in supporting parts and " guest " bits in several of them one of the most memorable routines she performed was with Gene Kelly in the " Broadway Melody " section from 1952's Singin' In The Rain. In the only portion of the film she appears in, Cyd is all vamp, tramp and gangster moll to Kelly's eager young hoofer ready to make it big on Broadway which morphs into a ballet with Cyd looking angelic and virginal in white. It was a showcase number and Kelly & Charisse pull it off beautifully.  By this time in her career Cyd was 30, not an easy age for an actress or a dancer. No one accused her of being an actress before, yet she was about to become just that and a star too, not just a featured player and not just in musicals. 

Again, shouldn't have to tell you, but I will: With Fred in The BandWagon, the Girl Hunt ballet

Look at those legs

MGM in the 40's and 50's had a fondness for making films of the lives of the Great Musical Theatre composers : Words & Music about the songwriting partnership of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, Till The Clouds Roll By about Jerome Kern were two producer Arthur Freed served up. An American in Paris  though not a bio of either George nor Ira, fairly drips as an homage to them, Singin' in the Rain used nothing but the Nacio Herb Brown/Arthur Freed songbook, and now The BandWagon in 1953 celebrated the New York theatre with backlog of songs by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz. The film starred Cyd with Fred Astaire for the first time, though they danced together in films before with adequite results, in BandWagon they are in kind of trance of dance and movement. The acting in the majority of musicals are kind of beside the point, it's what the performer conveys while singing  a song or twirling on a Hollywood soundstage that matters. The BandWagon meets that test. The " Dancing in the Dark " sequence, repeatedly parodied in the 70's and 80's, it a magnificent moment when two radically different performers and personalities can indeed work together. With an added adventure of romance between the two lead. But for me, the" Girl Hunt " ballet is the show stopper. Running almost 15 minutes the ballet follows Astaire in a parody of noir, Raymond Chandler and Mickey Spillane. He encounters Cyd as two different people.

Isn't it romantic? ' Dancing in the Dark ' with Fred from BandWagon

Directed with a sureness of time and place by Vincente Minnelli, The BandWagon has gone down as one of the last of the great original musicals, though the music was as old as dirt as most of the catalog used was  Schwartz & Dietz in the 20's & 30's Broadway, with notable exception of " That's Entertainment " a song that is still known today if only because of the 3 movies that share the name: That's Entertainment Parts 1,2 & 3 and became a sort of anthem for show folk movie folk in particular.

The BandWagon

The film, which hit theaters in August 1953 it did strong business and drew stellar reviews. With her first lead a hit MGM sensed that maybe they had been undervaluing Cyd's talent. She never was a good actress yet she had a presence on screen and when she danced? Forget it. Nobody is looking at anyone else on screen when Cyd also occupies it. In 1954 MGM and the Freed Unit cast her in a big lavish production of Lerner & Lowe's Brigadoon, a somewhat lackluster affair with Gene Kelly and Minnelli again taking the reigns as director. Everyone expected big things from this film but it failed to materialize. Critics and moviegoers yawed. Next up was Deep in My Heart a featured dance number, It's Always Fair Weather with Kelly again but Charisse has only one dance scene, Baby You Knock Me Out, and none with Kelly which seems to me a almost fatal flaw in the picture.

With Kelly, Brigadoon 1954

Time was running out. Age was not the only thing encroaching, there was television keeping people away from the the movie palaces, the popularity of musicals had peaked. The form was beginning to lose the interest of the average movie watcher. By 1956 when Cyd made the silly yet entertaining Meet Me in Las Vegas with Dan Dailey, the MGM studios was also facing tough economic times, times that eventually caught up with the studio and devoured it. The great stars were leaving MGM by 1954 so by 56 there weren't alot left except Robert Taylor, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Sinatra, and many more had left to take their chances free-lancing.  Mgm had bought the rights to Cole Porter's new Broadway musical smash " Silk Stockings " which was based on the 1939 Garbo film Ninotchka . No one would mistake Cyd for Greta, but the Freed Unit cast her in the part Garbo had made famous nearly 20 years previous. The resulting film, directed by master craftsman Rouben Mamoulian, was one of the last great MGM musicals along with George Cukor's Les Girls also from 1957 with original songs by Cole Porter.                

Captivating : Silk Stockings 1957

                                                                                                                                         
Silk Stockings represents what is probably Cyd Charisse's most substantial role in film. She is dominate in it to the point that one almost forgets her partner is the incomparable Fred Astaire. Unlike The BandWagon, Silk Stockings belongs to Cyd Charisse. Although no Garbo in the dramatic end, Cyd more than holds her own with her estimated co-star. Unlike so many other films she appeared in, Silk Stockings is one of the few films Charisse made that revolves around her character. So Cyd gets to do more acting [ not really her strong suit ] and puts on a phoney Russian accent that is thick as molasses. Like many of Charisse's other films Silk Stockings is saved by her dancing. Her transformation from all-business operative to lovely young woman is positively intoxicating in it's sensuousness. It may be the best example of a catapiller-to-butterfly I've  ever seen. 
                                                                                              

L:ikewise, the 'Red Blues' number is an exhilarating piece of syncopation and movement of a different kind.

Despite it's well crafted production, Silk Stockings wasn't a tremendous money spinner when it opened back in July 1957, though no bomb it wasn't a B.O. bellringer either. The Golden Globes did  nominate it for Best Film and Charisse got nominated in the Best Actress in Musical/Comedy department, so that must have been nice for her. Her last film at Metro was 1958's Party Girl with our gal in the title role and Robert Taylor, also approaching the end at MGM after 23 years, as a mob lawyer who Cyd falls for, helps escape the clutches of the mob and go into a straight law practice. Oh, Cyd also helps Taylor with his gimpy leg [  no jokes, please ]. She is a showgirl in Chicago in the late 20's who moonlights as a party favor for Lee J. Cobb's gangster friends on the side for the extra loot. Cyd has a couple of dance routines but the Nicholas Ray directed film is a straight dramatic one and colorful, with Cobb shooting out a framed picture of Jean Harlow because she got married and it wasn't to him, bad guy John Ireland calling Cyd's character 'puss' and Charisse's roommate committing suicide. Whether due to Ray's influence or an identification with the part, it's probably her finest hour as a dramatic actress.

Party Girl, 1958

But that was it. As far as MGM was concerned she was on her own to free-lance, something most movie stars were doing by the late 50's, so Party Girl was the swan song, under her original contract, for the studio she had toiled in for over a decade. I have seen alot of  interviews from the Metro stars of the 40's and 50's about this perilous time in the the film industry, most express a fear, an anxiety, about their future in film. After being protected and nurtured by a studio when an actor is released of their contract how could they feel otherwise? So it was  for Charisse. After her departure Charisse played in a  few movies: Twilight for the Gods with Rock Hudson,  which must have seemed a good opportunity at the time as Hudson had been a voted number one box office star of 1957 and was riding a crest of popularity that would last until the mid-60's, didn't generate any wave of popularity and today is rarely seen [ I have never seen it ].Terence Young's Black Tights from 1960 is four stories performed in ballet, Minnelli's Two Weeks in Another Town co-starring Kirk Douglas, fresh from freeing the slaves as Spartacus was near the peak of his popularity, but the film failed as a moneymaker for MGM, though Cyd did have a juice part in it as Douglas' evil ex-wife. Later that year she would sign up for Something's Got To Give which was the movie Marilyn was making when she died. In 1966's The Silencers, the first of four Matt Helm spy movies, was made for the money by Dean Martin and company, bringing a slow fade to the ring-a-ding years. In the revealing part of a stripper, Cyd was allowed  to show another side of her talent

Hubba-hubba! Stripper Cyd in The Silencers, 1966

Cyd Charisse passed in June 2008, she seemed to have a good, stabile life in semi-retirement with hubby Tony Martin and occasionally appear on a TV show or host a documentary. But when she was at the top of her game from somewhere around1952 to 1958 she was awesome.