Cyd Charisse is commonly
recognised as the greatest female dancer the movies have ever known.
Time can be cruel. It is not impartial.
It erodes the reputations of some stars, but enhances the status
of others. To contemporary audiences, some of the great female stars of the
past are ludicrous, while others seem timeless. Today, when dancing has been
debased by the pop music business, Cyd Charisse's work is even more admirable
than it was when new. During her peak years Cyd had her detractors, but time
has not been charitable to those critics. Their carping now seems idiotic.
Being
a brilliant dancer was not the only reason Cyd Charisse became a great star.
Her background in ballet made her ideal for the narrative dance routines that
became popular after 1945. More than any other dancer, male or female, Cyd could
express moods, emotions and attitudes with her body and limbs. In addition,
she was a very good-looking woman with possibly the sexiest legs in movies.
She was also a reliable, disciplined worker who never had tantrums. There
was something else. Her dancing could be highly erotic. Because Cyd was an
expressive dancer and also good-looking, with certain material her dancing
had a pronounced sexual charge. Cyd's performances in "The Girl Hunt" sequence
and in the "Frankie And Johnny" routine make a jolting contrast with Vera-Ellen's very accomplished work in "Slaughter On Tenth Avenue" in "Words
And Music". The main difference between Cyd and Vera-Ellen is not their
dance techniques; it is their impact on the audience.
Cyd Charisse was born Tula
Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas in 1921. Her father was a ballet enthusiast
and arranged for Cyd to have lessons. Immediately her gift for dancing became
apparent and, when Cyd was fourteen, she was sent to a special dance school
in Hollywood. Very soon she was invited to tour with The Ballet Russe De Monte
Carlo. Cyd continued to receive dance instruction from Nico Charisse whom
she married while still in her teens. Together they ran a ballet school and
obtained some work in movie shorts. Hollywood began to be aware of her.
In
1943, working under the name Lily Norwood, Cyd appeared in both "Something
To Shout About" and "Mission To Moscow", a film that Jack Warner
later, during the McCarthy period, wished he had never made. In the 1940s
the premier studio for musicals was MGM, and they wanted Cyd for a balletic
dance sequence in "The Ziegfield Follies". MGM gave Cyd a contract
and the name Cyd Charisse.
As a contract player with
MGM, Cyd was merely one of a large stable of highly skilled dancers, very
few of whom ever became stars. Cyd was kept on the sidelines for years, supporting
stars like Esther Williams and Kathryn Grayson, and doing small, not very
noticeable dance routines in a variety of films. In "Till The Clouds
Roll By", she had a few seconds of screen time, dancing with Gower Champion
to "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes". In "Words And Music" Cyd had rather
more screen time as Perry Como's female companion. She danced a few solo steps
to "The Blue Room" while he serenaded her, and then, together with Dee
Turnell, she danced in an extended but uninteresting routine to a medley of
"On Your Toes", "This Can't Be Love" and "The Boyfriend".
Although MGM regarded Cyd
as no more than a supporting player, they were not unaware of her pin-up potential.
The late 1940s was the period when movie pin-up photographs concentrated on
legs and figures, and few legs and figures were more worthy of attention than
those of Cyd Charisse. A very large number of pin-up pictures of Cyd were taken during her
years with MGM, and many are still in circulation. By contrast, there are
surprisingly few photographs of her dancing.
In 1952, more than six years
after signing with MGM, Cyd made her breakthrough in "Singing In The
Rain". Originally Gene Kelly had planned a comedy dance duet for himself
with Donald O'Connor. However the movie was behind schedule and O'Connor had
a television commitment, so a new dance idea became necessary. The result
was one of the legendary moments in cinema.
A hick (Gene Kelly) has arrived
in the big city. He has made a round of the agents, and one has introduced
him to society. The hick dances joyously and innocently until confronted by
a long, sexy, female leg. Awestruck by such imposing femininity, he cannot move.
The girl surveys him disdainfully. She rises from her chair and swirls around
the bewildered hick, gradually enslaving him. She removes his glasses, wipes
them languidly on her thigh, then brushed them away with her foot. Unable to resist, the hick
responds.
The tempo quickens and the atmosphere intensifies until the girl's gangster
boyfriend intervenes by proffering jewelry. The girl knows which choice to make.
She deserts the hick who is restrained by the gangster's two henchmen.
As
the gangster's moll, Cyd Charisse was sensational. Years later in "The
Great Movie Stars", David Shipman opened his essay on Cyd by describing
that dance routine's effect on audiences. However, the impact made many forget
that Cyd had a second dance number in the movie. Kelly has gone to a smart
party where he is surrounded by glamorous women. Through the crowd he sees
Cyd Charisse. In his imagination he is alone with her, the girl of his dreams.
They dance on vast steps while a strong breeze wafts her giant shawl about.
In this second routine, Cyd expresses a completely different personality,
romantic and yearning. In neither routine is she given any dialogue: everything
is expressed through dance.
MGM now recognised how good
Cyd was, and she was given a starring role in "The Band Wagon",
with Vincente Minnelli as director and Fred Astaire as co-star. Cyd's role
in "The Band Wagon" was a part she was to play repeatedly over the
next few years, an aloof woman whose reserve conceals sensitivity. She meets
the right man, falls in love and develops a more open and spontaneous personality.
Cyd was given three big dance numbers and was brilliant in all three. The
first was a ballet sequence, "Giselle", not to Adam's music but
to Arthur Schwartz's "Beggar's Waltz". The second was the
"Dancing In The Dark" number, another classic moment in movie musicals. The
third was "The Girl Hunt", a balletic spoof of thick-ear crime stories. Again,
Cyd played two roles and again she demonstrated that with appropriate material
her dancing could be intensely erotic.
Minnelli, one of the great
directors of women, was ideal for Cyd. More even than George Cukor, Minnelli
knew how to bestow elegance on an actress by giving her the right clothes,
make-up and hair style, and by obtaining a performance than revealed the humanity
of her character. Minnelli ensured that although Cyd was dressed informally
for most of "The Band Wagon", she was always chic and stylish. Cyd's
acting was quite good and only faltered when she had to break down and cry.
Her declaration of love at the close is touching, and shows that she
could be expressive with acting as well as with dancing.
After "The Band Wagon"
Cyd was incontrovertibly a star, but in some ways she did not conduct herself
like one. She avoided personal publicity and gave few interviews. Glamorous
photographs of her continued to be issued, but less frequently than previously.
She never displayed any temperament at work; in fact she was admired because
of her uncomplaining self-discipline, and to this day no-one who has worked
with Cyd has a bad word to say about her. Both fan magazines and gossip magazines
seemed to sense that Cyd was less of a prima donna than is normal with movie
queens, and showed little interest in her.
For
the next three years Cyd was kept busy in the last of the great Hollywood
musicals.
She gave her best all-round
performance in "Meet Me In Las Vegas", a film that has always been
under-rated because the central premise is so absurd. (One ignored element
of the film is the superb sound quality.) With a different hair style, Cyd
was at her most beautiful. For the first time she had a tall leading man -
neither Astaire nor Kelly was particularly tall - and looking up at Dan Dailey
gave Cyd a different persona. She played her usual role, a dignified woman
who falls in love, but with a more responsive personality and more humour,
and she demonstrated once again that her acting was far better than her critics
acknowledged. In one scene where she is drunk, Cyd is hilarious pretending
to be out of her depth in a burlesque routine.
She had several dance numbers
in "Meet Me In Las Vegas", all of them quite different, all of them
brilliant, all of them showing that her dancing range was limitless. "Frankie
and Johnny" is one of her classic routines and deserves to be better known.
Frankie is a bawdy gal, besotted with Johnny (John Brascia) who takes her
for granted and extracts money from her. Arrogantly he drags her about and
she responds with energetic passion. They strut out together, she flaunting
her sexuality, and they dance athletically. While Frankie 'powders her nose',
another girl (Liliane Montevecchi) flirts with Johnny. When Frankie returns,
she is not amused. She starts a most unlady-like brawl with her rival, and in her
fury grabs a gun from the sheriff and shoots Johnny dead. The sheriff arrests her, but
Frankie vamps him and soon has him under her spell.
"Meet Me In Las Vegas"
was not Cyd's only film which was under-rated when first released. Many
now regard "Silk Stockings" is a masterpiece, but on release it was hammered
by Garbo idolaters who in the mid 1950s were still thick on the ground. ("Silk
Stockings" has the same source material as "Ninotchka".) Unfortunately
the Garbo fanatics were not only thick on the ground: they were thick in general,
and they sniped at Cyd, proclaiming she was not as good, not as funny as Greta
Garbo. They failed to grasp that Cyd was not trying to be like Garbo, nor
did they identify why the film was not particularly funny. "Silk
Stockings" is not perfect, the screenplay is not witty enough and Rouben
Mamoulian drew over-emphatic comedy playing from Fred Astaire which further
diminished the humour. In addition the ending is too pat, too easy. There
is no sense of relief when Ninotchka arrives back in Paris.
Whatever failings
"Silk
Stockings" has, Cyd Charisse is not one of them. In every way, she is superb
throughout. Even her walking is perfect: as she comes briskly down the hotel
stairs and through the lobby, the audience senses exactly her personality
and character. Cyd had four important dance routines and one, "The Red Blues",
gave Cyd the opportunity to express yet another personality in dance: bohemian,
youthful and exuberant.
"Silk
Stockings" was the last authentic musical Cyd made, because the accountants
moved in and declared that musicals were loss makers. In the 1950s,
television took a large part of cinema's audience away, and it was essential
that the movie industry re-assessed its economics. Within this climate of
fear, musicals were an easy target because they used a huge army of supporting
talent. It was not difficult for accountants to argue that by not making any
musicals, all the supporting talent could be jettisoned, eliminating a vast
overhead expense. Whether valid or specious, the assertion was accepted
by studio bosses, and super talents like Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse were
suddenly out of work.
Cyd had one further movie
before her MGM contract expired. "Party Girl" was a gangster film with
a rather sordid
premise in which Cyd played a variation
on her usual role. (A scene of graphic violence in "Party Girl"
was brazenly
plagiarised many years later in the movie "The Untouchables".) As Vicki Gaye, Cyd had two dance numbers
which utilised imaginatively her ability to suggest eroticism. Louis Canetto
(John
Ireland) is sexually intoxicated by Vicki, and takes a girl to the
club where Vicki is dancing. At the end of Vicki's incandescent routine, he
stares at her with open-mouthed
longing, then turns and kisses his girl, but promptly shoves her away in distaste and looks
once again at Vicki. It is perhaps the best manifestation of lust ever placed on celluloid,
partly because it is done so economically. (Warners issued a Region
2 DVD of "Party Girl" in France in March 2006 under the title "Traquenard". This
is a high quality DVD with the original English language soundtrack available.
The picture quality is excellent, faithfully reproducing Robert Bronner's
painterly use of light and colour - rich and expressive but glossing out the
smallest details - and is in the original Cinemascope aspect ratio. At present there
has been no announcement of a release in English-speaking countries.)
With the termination of her
MGM contract, Cyd's film career ran into difficulties. Like many refugees
from the Hollywood musical, she worked in television, clubs and theatre, often
in partnership with her second husband, Tony Martin, and seems to have kept busy.
She also made a few non-musical pictures. "Twilight For The Gods"
is notable only for a scene where, by calling Arthur Kennedy's bluff, Cyd
demolishes his carnal aspirations,
while "Five Golden Hours" is rarely
seen. "Black Tights" is also rarely
seen and is something of a cult movie, being a series of ballet sketches in
70mm Super Technirama.
Apparently, no decent print exists today. (There are two DVDs, both of dubious provenance and poor quality.) Significantly,
although Zizi Jeanmaire, by any standards a great dancer, played Carmen, a
classical femme fatale, Cyd is sexier and more charismatic as a non-sorrowing
widow.
In 1962 Cyd suffered two
strokes of bad luck. She played the new wife in "Something's Got To Give",
a film that was famously abandoned because of Marilyn Monroe's absences. (One
aspect of this fiasco is never discussed. As is shown by the
footage now available on DVD, Cyd was so good looking that it was essential
to have Marilyn Monroe play the woman who distracts Dean Martin from the wife
he has just married. Dean Martin was entirely sensible to refuse to make the film
without Marilyn Monroe opposite Cyd Charisse.)
Cyd had further misfortune
with "Two Weeks In Another Town", a film that was butchered at the
editing stages. Vincente Minnelli's autobiography "I Remember It Well"
gives an account of what happened to this movie, and reveals that Cyd suffered
most because an entire scene which explains her character was cut out.
In recent years Cyd has been
frequently called upon to provide information and comments on the great days
of the Hollywood musical. She was a major player in the compilation movies
"That's Entertainment", and she has provided interviews for DVDs
of both "Silk Stockings" and "Something's Got To Give".
It is very much to be hoped she will also provide interviews for forthcoming
DVDs, and that those DVDs will feature as 'extras' routines like "Two Faced
Woman" from "The Band Wagon" which were cut from the released movie.
(The recently issued Region 1 DVD of "The Band Wagon"
does contain the "Two Faced Woman"
routine as an 'extra'. However this 'extra' is missing from the DVD in Regions
2 and 4, even though in all other respects they are identical to the Region
1 DVD.)
Cyd Charisse's legacy will
be a collection of movies that will entertain long after the people who made
them are gone; and within those movies, a display of dancing that will never
be equalled. Cyd is one of the three legendary dancers of the Hollywood
musical. Fred Astaire established his credentials within five movies but built
up his legend over twenty-five years. Gene Kelly had sixteen years to achieve
legendary status. Cyd Charisse did it in five.
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