Gaily, Gaily (1969) A damn shame..........boy, did we ever want to love this movie........
Instead, we had a hard enough time just trying to like it a little.........
How could we resist the set-up.......a rip-roarin', rambunctious semi-biographical account of writer Ben Hecht's early days as a cub reporter in bustling, riotous 1910 Chicago......directed by Norman Jewison right after his multiple hits "The Thomas Crown Affair" and "In The Heat Of The Night".......
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And the cast backing up young flavor-of-the-month Beau Bridges? To die for.......Melina Mercouri as the powerfully connected Bordello Madame Queen Lil, holding sway over two dueling, corrupt politicos (George Kennedy, Hume Cronyn)......Margot Kidder as the sweetest, gentlest whore in Lil's well-staffed house......and Brian Keith chewing up the scenery as a hard-charging, heavy drinking reporter...(who's not above pumping shots of Adrenalin into a recently hanged convict to see if he can get a "He rises from the dead!" headline out of it.....)
And the re-creation of 1910 Chicago is as sumptuous and eye-catching as you'd expect in a major studio film.......trains, trolleys, and boisterous crowds in constant motion.......with additional gorgeous production design in depicting Mercouri's ornate mansion and the cacophonous chaos of a Chicago newspaper office.......
Everything's in place for a great film.........except the script.
What's depressing here: the filmmakers settling for nothing more than an antic farce.....reducing the actors to chasing each other around as if they've stumbled into a Three Stooges two-reeler that runs before the real movie starts......(and coming from Jewison, it's about ten notches down from his normal abilities.....)
And watching Cronyn, Kennedy and Keith clearly having a wonderful time with their characters, you ache for the movie to give them some situations and dialogue worthy of their strenuous efforts. That never happens.......
No question "Gaily, Gaily" is a handsomely appointed little jewel-box of a movie......but with nothing much on its mind other than randomly bouncing its many colorful characters off each other......to little or no effect. It ends up as collection of superb separate elements in search of a movie they never find......
We don't know what to make of the film's final, startling images.......a rapid series of still photos that pull back to reveal the entire studio sound stage.......to us, a perverse choice, rubbing our noses in the artifice of the film, especially when detailed artifice is the only thing it had going for it.....
2 stars (**) for the cast, the sets and and what might have been....
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