Not the Same Old Song and Dance

Musicals are magical. They sing, they dance, they fill the room with melody and movement. But as “Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance,” the exceptional series examining that beloved genre at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, points out, they can be all that and so much more.

Though we may look on musicals as exclusively American, they have been made all over the world. And because they’re usually little seen outside national borders, foreign-language musicals are privileged windows into very different cultures. They are a country’s most personal cinema, films that have not been the least bit homogenized for international tastes. These movies are the face a country presents to itself, the face we’re not really supposed to see. And they are an awful lot of fun as well.

This is especially true of some of the musicals UCLA will be showing at the James Bridges Theater in the campus’ Melnitz Hall. So obscure they’ve never even been subtitled before (the archive will use a new electronic system to project titles just for its screenings), these films take on subjects as unlikely as ecstatically happy peasants taking part in a wheat harvest choreographed to the clanking rhythms of massive farm machinery. And, in a completely delightful film screening today at 2 p.m., they even make Japanese swordsmen sing and dance.

“Samurai Musical” (“Oshidori Utagassen” is the Japanese title) is only 69 minutes long, but it is an enchanting film. Directed by studio veteran Makino Masahiro, who turned out 261 films between 1926 and 1971, “Samurai” was just the kind of escapism Japan’s 1939 audiences, already involved in a war with China, obviously appreciated.

We’ve all seen comic samurai, but we’ve never seen them break into song as often and as felicitously as these do. With a rudimentary plot involving two women who have a crush on the same poor but honest swordsman, “Samurai Musical” has the kind of jazzy, syncopated soundtrack and lilting voices we’d more expect in a Betty Boop cartoon.

Director Masahiro had a strong visual sense that is especially apparent in the film’s wild and woolly finale, when deadly sword fighting is expertly choreographed to ‘30s dance band music in a way that inevitably makes you think of Kurosawa.

Screening tonight at 7 is the 1953 Hungarian musical “State Owned Department Store,” which is about, yes, the highs and lows of working in what looks like the Nordstrom of Budapest. Not surprisingly, almost all the employees in a people’s republic emporium are cheerful and smiling, especially when they go off for simultaneous vacations in spotless state-run health spas. It’s a workers’ paradise for sure. On the same bill is another Hungarian “operetta of optimism,” the 1950 “Singing Makes Life Beautiful,” a proposition no good socialist citizen was about to dispute.

As viewers of the wonderful 1997 documentary “East Side Story” will remember, the Soviet bloc, improbably enough, was home to numerous musicals, and the UCLA series will show several of the best, including two that will make even the most blase cinephiles rub their eyes in wonder.

Showing on May 13 at 7:30 p.m. is the USSR’s 1936 “The Circus,” which should be seen for its opening sequence alone. It begins with an English-language newspaper filling the screen, headline blaring “Marion Nixon, Human Bombshell, in Center of Sensational Scandal.” Next we see Marion, with a baby in her arms, keeping just one step ahead of an enraged lynch mob howling for her blood. She just manages to get on a train as rocks smash the windows.

Next we see Marion in the Soviet Union, working as the Human Bullet before adoring crowds who love the way she mixes scat singing and tap dancing with her trapeze act. But Marion has a secret--her baby is biracial--something her evil manager, speaking in English so heavily accented it sounds like Russian, never lets her forget. But those Russian crowds, Lenin love ‘em, turn out to be bighearted in a way those socially unconscious Americans could never understand.

Playing on the same bill, though unsubtitled, is Stalin’s favorite musical, the legendary “Volga, Volga,” which the great man saw more than 100 times and gave as a present to a presumably grateful Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Not showing until June 4 at 7 p.m. but well worth the wait is 1949’s “Cossacks of the Kuban,” which opens with 4 1/2 minutes of that amazing happy-workers-singing-through-the-wheat-harvest sequence referred to earlier.

Briskly directed by Ivan Pyriev and winning him one of his five Stalin Prizes, “Cossacks,” with its couldn’t-be-cheerier peasants and piles of goods ready for the buying, is fantasy of the highest order, with dynamic cross-cutting leavened with enough musical numbers to stock a Cossack version of the Grand Ole Opry.

If there is any country that might be expected to embrace the musical, it is France. On Saturday at 7:30 p.m. UCLA will be showing a particularly deft Gallic item, 1934’s “La Crise Est Finie,” directed by American-born, German-reared Robert Siodmak who later (go figure) made a name for himself in Hollywood with brooding B-pictures like “Phantom Lady” and “The Killers.”

“La Crise,” a classic backstage musical, is all lively French gaiety. When a troupe of musical performers is thrown out of work for trying to get a deserving understudy (future star Danielle Darrieux, only 17 years old) a shot at the big time, they go to Paris and come up with an idea for a show. Money to put it on, however, is another story, and all kinds of stratagems, including drinking only tap water at cafes (“What is this, a swimming pool?” a waiter demands), are employed to save pennies.

The result is a “super-revue and grand spectacle,” called “La Crise Est Finie,” which plays like a road show Busby Berkeley production. It’s such a huge hit it ushers in a wave of international prosperity, with thousand-franc notes raining on Paris and American bank robbers putting money back into vaults. And you thought movies were just entertainment.

One of the more unexpected films in the series is 1957’s “Pyassa,” a 2-hour, 33-minute musical fantasy from India, stylishly shot in black-and-white, that mixes delicate singing with social consciousness and bogglingly melodramatic plot twists.

Directed by and starring the gifted Guru Dutto (who died in 1964 at age 39), “Pyassa” (screening at 7 p.m. on May 28) follows an unappreciated poet named Vijay, who finds life to his liking in the slums of a big city and in the arms of a woman of questionable virtue. Vijay’s work takes off when he is mistakenly reported dead and, among other things, he eventually gets to crash his own memorial service. Yes, its like that.

The UCLA series, which will run all through the year, has room for familiar and unfamiliar musicals. Just the next month includes a Fred Astaire double bill (“The Gay Divorcee” and “A Damsel in Distress” on next Sunday at 2 p.m.), a pair of less-seen American musicals (“Cabin in the Sky” and “Carmen Jones” on May 9 at 7:30 p.m.), even a couple of Hong Kong standards (“Princess Cheung Ping” and “Orioles Banished From the Flowers” on May 23 at 7:30 p.m.) When people want to sing and dance, there is apparently no stopping them.