Easter Parade

With it being Easter today, TCM has a traditional lineup of movies with religious themes. But one other movie that they seem to pull out every Easter is an appropriate one not just because of the title, but because the opening and closing scenes are set on (secular) Easter: Easter Parade.

The movie opens on Easter Saturday, 1911, although the movie doesn't quite mention dates until much later in the movie. Fred Astaire, playing dancer Don Hewes, is singing a song and doing some gift shopping. Eventually, he goes into a toy store to by a stuffed rabbit, but that's really just an excuse for a fairly spectacular dance number involving him and the little boy from whom Hewes is going to get that bunny.

The gifts are for Don's kinda-sorta girlfriend, Nadine Hale (Ann Miller). But Nadine isn't just a possible romantic partner; she's also Don's dance partner in the dance pair Nadine and Hewes who do revue shows and the like. I say "is", but it's about to become "was". Don has signed the two of them up for another road show, but Nadine has decided she wants to try to make it on Broadway. With that in mind, she's signed a contract to appear in what is going to become the latest edition of the Zigfeld Follies.

Don can't convince her not to leave him, so he goes to a bar to try to drown his sorrows. Except that this is an odd little dive bar in that it also has a floor show, complete with numerous chorus girls. One of those chorus girls is Hannah Brown (Judy Garland), and Hewes is so taken with her that he decides to tell her she should come see him the following morning since he wants her to be his new dance partner. She thinks the guy is crazy, and even rips up his business card, until she finds out that he's the famous Don Hewes.

After rehearsal the next morning, Hannah runs into Don's best friend, Jonathan Harrow (Peter Lawford). Jonathan is also taken with Hannah, and proposes to take her out to dinner, but you know Jonathan is going to be the third wheel in any relationship in the movie. Indeed, he later winds up pursuing Nadine for reasons that don't really make much sense and don't do all that much to advance the plot.

Don and Hannah go out on the road and are able to work steadily if not spectacularly, at least not for several months. Eventually, Don signs a contract for the two of them to star in a musical revue of their own, which after rehearsals and road previews, is set to open on Broadway on Easter Saturday 1912. The premiere is in fact a success, but when the two go to the Ziegfeld Follies to celebrate, Nadine asks Don to do one of their old numbers with her, leading Hannah to think he only used her to get back at Nadine. This was in fact Don's original intention, but along the way he truly fell in love with her.

Easter Parade is a movie that has a very slight story -- indeed, it's the sort of on-again, off-again series of misunderstandings that I could easily have seen Fred Astaire doing with Ginger Rogers at RKO a decade earlier. Here, the story is set against a series of songs written by Irving Berlin that are used as the basis for dance numbers. The story isn't much, as I said, and frankly it's by far the weakest part of the story. Indeed, in that regard I'd rate the movie a notch below one of Berlin's earlier musicals, Alexander's Ragtime Band.

But what Easter Parade has going for it is a couple of things. One is those dance numbers. Fred Astaire was much better in terms of dancing that any of the cast of Alexander's Ragtime Band. It also has Technicolor, which makes a movie like this that much better. Indeed, I don't think the movie would be memorable at all if it had been made in black and white. That's how much weaker the story is than even the old Fred-and-Ginger films.

So, although I had some problems with Easter Parade, it's definitely a movie that's worth watching. And I think that if you're the sort of person who likes the dance numbers, you'll really love Easter Parade.