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BRIGADOON
Rating:  ½
USA. 1954.
Director – Vincente Minelli, Screenplay/Lyrics – Alan Jay Lerner, Based on the Musical by Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe, Producer – Arthur Freed, Photography – Joseph Ruttenberg, Music – Frederick Loewe, Special Effects – Warren Newcombe, Makeup – William Tuttle, Art Direction – Preston Ames & Cedric Gibbons, Choreography – Gene Kelly. Production Company – MGM.
Cast:
Gene Kelly (Tommy Albright), Cyd Charisse (Fiona Campbell), Van Johnson (Jeff Douglas), Barry Jones (Mr Lundie), Hugh Laing (Harry Beaton), Albert Sharpe (Andrew Campbell), Virginia Bosler (Jean Campbell), Jimmy Thompson (Charlie Dalrymple)
Plot: Two Americans, Tommy Albright and Jeff Douglas, are on a hunting holiday in the Scottish Highlands. They stumble upon the village of Brigadoon where the inhabitants appear to still be living in the 18th Century. They learn that in 1754, when the village was threatened by witches, the villagers prayed and in answer the village became one with the mists, only able to emerge for a single day every century thereafter. When Tommy falls in love with one of the village girls he must decide what he is to do before the village returns to the mists at nightfall not to return for another century.
Brigadoon, produced in 1947, was the first Broadway hit of lyricist Alan Jay Lerner and librettist Fredreick Loewe. They would together go onto huge successes likes Paint Your Wagon (1951), My Fair Lady (1956), Camelot (1960) and On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (1965).
The screen adaptation of Brigadoon is a film that is at once both spectacular and slight. Lerner and Loewe customarily write their emotions on a larger than life canvas. Their Scotland is an absurdly caricatured never-never land of tourist hyperbole where everybody wears a kilt and sporran and the hillsides are covered entirely in purple heather. Despite an intriguing premise, the story is slimmer than slim, even seems padded to facilitate the stultifying song and dance numbers. And there is little appreciation of greater dramatic possibilities – for example the Brigadoonians, who emerge from the mists once a century, seem remarkably well adjusted for the fact that it has been only two days on their time-scale that have passed since they left their own time period. And the happy wrap-up ending is quite feeble. There is a dreadful silliness to much of the film – a number choreographed with pots and pans and women in mustachioed drag singing about waiting for their laddie to come reaches a particularly scatterbrained height.
The plus side of the film is sly, warm-eyed Gene Kelly. He choreographs the film too – one number dancing up around stone walls in celebration of his love for Cyd Charisse is quite exhilarating. The hunt around the woods shows Minelli getting loose on the desire to imbue the film with some real energy, which the rest of it forces him to clamp down on. The opening scene with people vanishing as the sun touches them would be impressive were it not for its cloyingly sugary sweetness.
The film was remade for tv in 1996. The concept of the village out of time has proven quite a popular one and has appeared in various guises in places as varied as the splatter film Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964) and episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94).
Copyright Richard Scheib 1990
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