Gypsy

A couple of months back, TCM ran the movie musical Gypsy. Realizing that I had never done a blog post on it, I made a point of recording it so that some day I could get around to watching it and doing a post on it. I finally did watch it, so here's the post.

The title Gypsy, of course, refers to Gypsy Rose Lee (1911-1970; played as an adult by Natalie Wood), famous for he striptease act. But we don't get any of that until almost the end of the movie. She was born Rose Louise Hovick (called Louise for most of the movie), with a sister June (who in real life became June Havoc). Her mother Rose (Rosalind Russell) had worked vaudeville and was now a single mother with a bunch of ex-husbands, so she's trying to push her two kids into vaudeville. Well, mostly Baby June since she's the one Mom thinks has talent.

An audition run by Herbie Sommers (Karl Malden) goes badly, with Herbie basically walking out on the producer and taking the show on the road, as it were, with the Hovicks. Mom comes up with an idea that has them and a bunch of boys be a child act, but of course they're all going to grow up and the depression is going to come, which is what ultimately kills vaudeville. Mom tries every trick in the book to get bookings for the act, and is also an incredibly pushy stage mother, who seems to care more about the kids' performing than the kids themselves do.

Eventually, they reach the end of the line. The boys are grown up and haven't been paid regularly. One of them has fallen in love with June and the two elope, planning to quit the act, leaving just Rose, Louise, and Herbie. Mom starts all over again, hiring a bunch of no-talent girls to be the new act, and putting Louise in the starring role, even though she doesn't seem to have anywhere near the talent that June had.

Louise's transition to Gypsy comes when Herbie gets the act a booking in Wichita. Only, it's not a vaudeville house but a burlesque house, with the Hovick act, now the Hollywood Blondes, being booked to be the "clean" entertainment between acts, much like Maureen O'Hara in Dance, Girl, Dance or the Britt Ekland character in The Night They Raided Minsky's (in fact, Minsky's Burlesque does get a brief mention in Gypsy). However, Mom is extremely unhappy with this. When circumstances conspire such that the owner needs somebody to do the "striptease" in a pinch, Louise volunteers and becomes Gypsy Rose Lee.

In a montage of her doing her number in a bunch of places, Gypsy becomes successful, enough so that Mom decides to look her up, although that might cause quite a bit of tension.

I think that fans of musicals will probably enjoy Gypsy, while other people will enjoy it somewhat less. Rosalind Russell plays Mama Rose as so obnoxiously pushy that for me she became grating. Wood does well, and Malden provides pretty good support in what I found to be a relatively thankless role. But for me it was the musical numbers, which are of course old-fashioned since the movie is set in the 1920s and 30s, that didn't work for me. I also felt the whole striptease montage was a copout. (I've never seen the stage musical, so I don't know how it's handled there.)

Still, Gypsy shows all the pizzazz that Hollywood studios would try to bring in the 1960s to what was becoming a dying genre, which also makes it a bit of an interesting artifact. It's just one that can be a bit of a slog at times.