‘Freed’ Recalls Modernizer of Musicals

“Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM,” airing on PBS tonight, is an incisive, irresistibly entertaining documentary on MGM’s most sophisticated producer of musicals.

“He changed the look of musicals,” says one of his most dazzling stars, Cyd Charisse. “Suddenly they were not old-fashioned-looking anymore.”

Clips from such landmark films as “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), “An American in Paris” (1951) and “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) bear out Charisse’s observation.

Whether period or contemporary, whether set primarily out of doors--e.g., “On the Town” (1949)--or on elaborate fantasy sets--e.g., “Ziegfeld Follies” (1946)--Freed-produced musicals have a terrifically stylish, modern feel, incorporating a bold, dramatic sense of design and an easy, flowing sense of the cinematic.

Freed’s daughter, Barbara Saltzman, says it all when she observes, “My father was at the right place at the right time for the kind of pictures he made.”

Freed and Nacio Herb Brown had been a highly successful songwriting team when Freed signed on as an associate producer to Mervyn LeRoy on “The Wizard of Oz.” From there he teamed with director-choreographer Busby Berkeley to make a popular series of Judy Garland-Mickey Rooney musicals, but he soon struck out in a new direction, bringing Vincente Minnelli from New York as his untitled assistant and then turning him loose on the highly stylized “Cabin in the Sky” (1942).

Freed would draw upon Metro contractees like Garland, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire, taking them to career peaks, but also would constantly import such major Broadway talents as Betty Comden and Adolph Green, choreographer-dancer Michael Kidd and many others.

To his credit, David Thompson, the documentary’s director, gives recognition to the various members of the Freed unit and their contributions. (Nonetheless, it would have been good to hear what George Sidney, who directed “Show Boat” and “Annie Get Your Gun” under the Freed aegis, might have said about Freed.)

By the end of the 1950s, which brought the explosion of rock ‘n’ roll, musicals began to fade in popularity. Therefore, Freed, who died in 1973, never got to produce the ambitious “Say It With Music” with his friend Irving Berlin. It was Berlin who said of him, “His greatest talent was to know talent, to recognize talent and to surround himself with it. And he had style. . . . He had an eye for it. He had to decide what to do--to put his stamp on it--like the president of a country.”

* “Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM” airs on “Great Performances” at 8 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.