‘On the Town’ or — Narrative Goes AWOL?

The cliché goes that there are several pitfalls a musical must overcome to really “work”: can it cram in both a compelling narrative plus a truck-load of songs into a reasonable running time; and do the musical numbers drive this story forward? Kelly and Donen’s ‘On the Town’ (1949) successfully avoids these problems by taking a surprisingly radical step — why even bother with a compelling story at all?!

Look, I’m not saying that ‘On the Town’ doesn’t have its pleasures: you’ve got Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Ann Miller in dazzling Technicolor; a Leonard Bernstein score, the book’s by Comden and Green and it was produced by Arthur Freed. What more could you want? Well, how about something to keep me genuinely engaged for starters?

Three US navy sailors — Gabey, Chip and Ozzie (Kelly, Sinatra and Munshin) — arrive in New York for 24 hours of shore leave where they plan to take in the sights and meet some girls.

And that’s it! Seriously, there is nothing, and I mean NOTHING, more to ‘On the Town’ than precisely and exactly that. They see some sights and meet some girls with practically nothing else of notable interest occurring. At one point they get chased for destroying a dinosaur skeleton so that’s something, I think.

I also noticed whilst watching this that I do possess a certain upper-limit threshold to how much Comden and Green I can withstand. Now don’t get me wrong as I love their work but I can’t deny that, after a while, their Comden and Green-isms — excessive mugging, corny gags, a somewhat free-floating hysteria, aggressive cuteness, occasionally highly irritating lyrics, etc — can start to grate on the nerves. They also throw a number of “contemporary” jokes into the mix here meaning that unless you find punchlines about Mickey Rooney or the recent smash movie ‘The Lost Weekend’ (1945) hip and relevant then the humour might feel a tad dated.

However, this lack of a strong narrative does mean there’s plenty of room for song and dance numbers although with the exception of the opening ‘New York, New York’ I was shocked at how few of the melodies stuck in my head. The orchestration’s great, nice and punchy in that typical Bernstein way, but I never felt hooked into the tunes themselves and the ones that did stick slightly to the inside surface of my mind did more so through their annoyance and idiocy (there was something about prehistoric men that I have fuzzy recollections of even if the overriding one was of me thinking “exactly why is this in this movie?”).

Oh yes, there’s also a song where Sinatra tells the woman he loves that “she’s awful… awful nice to be with” that is and I found myself cursing Comden and Green and their lyric writing again.

‘On the Town’ isn’t terrible by any means as it’s a super easy watch that’s filled with colourful costumes and sets, great location work and featuring some nice dance sequences… but that’s about it. Still, I guess like 24 hours of shore leave in New York it’s a brief slice of light distraction and, taken like that, it works just fine.