Charles Walters

Since we're still in the first week of a new month, we still have to get to the Friday Night Spotlight on TCM. This month, it's Charles Walters, who started out as a dancer at MGM in the early 1940s, before becoming a choreographer and then director. Waters' biographer, Brent Phillips, will be presenting a bunch of Waters' films every Friday night this month.

I've said quite a few times that MGM's Technicolor musicals aren't my favorite genre, so I have to admit that this is a spotlight that I'm not particularly excited about. Of course, it also has to be said that everybody at MGM was very capable at the time, with the result that the movies are for the most part at a high level of technical and articstic quality. It's just that they're not my thing.

The other thing that's bad about it is that we don't get many of the the Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen films since they were for the most part doing their own thing at MGM, with Kelly doing his imaginative choreography himself, and Donen doing a lot of the directing. Summer Stock is the one exception since Walters did the choreography for Judy Garland. And since he Walters did choreography for Garland, we get a lot of Garland films which, as I mentioned yesterday, are another of the things I don't particularly care for.