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Written by Mandroid3000
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ROYAL WEDDING
***1/2 out of *****
Genres
Comedy
Dance
Musical
Romance
1951
Directed by
Stanley Donen
Written by
Alan Jay Lerner
Cast
Fred Astaire .... Tom Bowen
Jane Powell .... Ellen Bowen
Peter Lawford .... Lord John Brindale
Sarah Churchill .... Anne Ashmond
Keenan Wynn .... Irving Klinger/Edgar Klinger
Albert Sharpe .... James Ashmond
Royal Wedding is a breezy and amusing romantic musical. It's largely remembered now for two famous Fred Astaire dance numbers. The first is Astaire dancing solo with a hat rack in a long uninterrupted take. It’s hard to capture what this is like, but it looks like the sort of scene that would have needed 100 takes to pull off. The second involves Astaire dancing up the walls of a room and along the ceiling. They’re the highlights in a film that’s amusing without being hilarious, and entertaining without being memorable.
Tom and Ellen Bowen are brother and sister, and are a successful musical theatre team. They’ve performed together for years, and things have gone smoothly largely because neither wants to get married. When their agent gets them a booking in London around the time Princess Elizabeth is to marry Phillip Mountbatten it’s clear romance is on the way. They both find love, which threatens to break up their theatrical partnership.
Ellen falls for British aristocrat Lord John Brindale (played by future Rat Packer, Peter Lawford), largely because they both catch each other juggling several romances at once. I guess they both find a kindred spirit in another hot and insanely popular person. Tom falls for Anne Ashmond, a dancer who auditions for the show in London. Anne’s not that exciting a character or appealing an actress. There’s a lot of time spent on her supposed engagement to a guy who moved to Pittsburgh. You’d think this would be an obvious passive aggressive break up, but Anne is determined to wait for him to save enough money for her to move to Pittsburgh too (she’s nuts).
The songs are a mixture of the good and the forgettable. There are some amusing supporting characters, such as the Bowen’s agents, British and American identical twins who can’t understand each other on the phone. And as expected for a 1950s musical, there’s some snappy dialogue along the way.
Royal Wedding isn’t the best Fred Astaire movie. I wouldn’t recommend it to someone who isn’t a fan of musicals. But if you enjoy snappy dialogue and dancing you’ll find an enjoyable 90 minutes of entertainment in the Hollywood tradition of singing, dancing and romancing. It may sound fruity, but sometimes you need a dose of the stuff when you’ve been on a zombie-rich diet.
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