The Little Prince (1974) While the groundbreaking films and directors of ''New Cinema' shook Hollywood to its very core, the studios still tried gasping, geriatric attempts at Broadway style musicals ("Paint Your Wagon", "On A Clear Day You Can See Forever", "Lost Horizon").
Every last one of them crashed and burned, leaving the industry awash in savage reviews, ruined careers and a sea of red ink.
As an executive boardroom pitch, I'll admit this must have sounded good. Lerner and Loewe, the fabulously successful composer-lyricist team ("My Fair Lady", "Camelot") writing and scoring a musical version of Antoine de Saint-Expury's classic children's book......and directed by Stanley Donen, one of the prime maestros of MGM's Golden Age of movie musicals,...("Singin' In The Rain", "Seven Brides For Seven Brothers")
What could go wrong? An instant classic, right? Uh.....well.......
Let's look on the bright side. Overall, it's modest little effort, clocking in at 90 minutes and with none of the excess baggage and bloat of typical 60's and 70's film musical disasters.
In fact, it's fundamentally a spare two character piece, interrupted every so often by individual musical comedy turns by solo performers......like vaudeville acts or segments of the Ed Sullivan TV show.....
Though none of the Lerner & Loewe songs sprinkled through the movie hold any sticking power, they're sweet and tuneful to hear......and the film's orchestra swells up with emotion, using Frederick Loewe's melodies for the background score.
The great, underappreciated Richard Kiley sings his heart out as the 'Aviator' who's crash landed in a vast desert. Once there, he's befriended by the curious (and terminally cute) Little Prince (Steven Warner), a child monarch who dropped in from a neighboring asteroid.
The Aviator and Little Prince recall and experience a series of encounters with people and creatures who pop up as metaphors for the follies and pitfalls of the world...a King, a Historian, a General, .a rose, a fox, a snake...etc, etc. .
If you're thinking this massive attack of twee whimsy would've been much better off as an animated film, you're so right.......and indeed it was, in 2015.. In translating this literally lighter than air tale into live action, Stanley Donen runs out of ideas in a hurry. When he shoots one of the human caricature sequences with a fish eye lens, you can sense his desperation.
The separate vaudeville turns include the gentle-hearted Gene Wilder as a friendly fox and the film's singular, one and only showstopping moment.........
It arrives, courtesy of director-choreographer Bob Fosse as a wily snake armed with Lerner and Loewe's best song, "A Snake In The Grass". Twitching, bumping, grinding with pure unadulterated Fosse-ness, in five breathless minutes, Fosse treats his audience to the very essential essence of his artistry. And you can easily see how this number reportedly inspired a young Michael Jackson at the time.....
The final results of Donen and Lerner & Loewe's efforts came out looking odd and stilted, relying on its Broadway theatricality to cover up its lack of any engaging storyline. Much like the failed 1967 Rex Harrison musical of "Doctor Dolittle", "The Little Prince" bored adults and couldn't connect with their kids on any level.
For movie musical and Bob Fosse fans only....2 stars (**) For everyone else, a few entertaining spurts that might amuse kids.....but little else.
No comments:
Post a Comment