Dave, you are correct that film can sometimes use cross-cutting effectively in a song. I'm reminded of Chava dancing with Tzeitl and Hodel in the middle of Topol's "Chavale." Jewison effectively used cross cutting elsewhere in Fiddler. But, in the case of "Chavale"'s emotional power, Robbins and Prince also cut away from Mostel on stage by the use of scrim, dance and flashback of familial unity.
But there are countless examples from film when effectively a song was sung without crosscutting. As I've said, in one of the greatest musical films of all time (and for me the best directed adaptation of a stage musical to film), Carol Reed resisted the technique in OLIVER for Wallace, Moody and Lester; the same can be said for Andrews' "I Have Confidence," Imagine how cheap flashbacks would have been while Streisand sang "My Man," or Garland sang "The Man Who Got Away?" And you don't need a legendarily great singer to know that flashbacks can be awful. To me, Hooper would cheaply compromise Hathaway's "I Dreamed A Dream" by interpolating flashback as much as Cukor would have cheaply compromised Harrison's "Why Can't A Woman?" with scenes of a date at a play or ballet reaching for her glove, or an image of a large Wagnerian mother.
As for the hair cutting, it belongs in "Lovely Ladies," a number much better suited to cross cutting, as it was suited to shifting between song and dramatic action on stage. The image of Hathaway, a very good actress and fine singer, sitting in what looks like a sewer pipe, expressing everything we need to know about her plight and memory of optimism can be - and,in this trailer, gives every promise of being - cinematically powerful, and I agree that flashback would liken it to a music video. I hope Hooper has not employed it. Although I am open to judging what he has done with the complete song, for better or for worse, when I see itl and I can even accept that flashback, if used, might be surprisingly effective, in spite of my doubts about it.
What I disagree with you about is that musical film requires cross cutting or flashback. To me the most memorable scenes from musical films have not employed it. "Over the Rainbow" did not include inserts of Dorothy being misunderstood and benignly neglected, "As Long As He Needs Me" did not cut away to Bill not treating Nancy in the way that he should, and "When You're Good to Mama" did not include mixed-in scenes of Morton's graft and being the biggest mother hen to the merry murderesses (nor did "Cell Block Tango" cut to the crime, except expressionistically through dance in the number). As a rule, when a director knows what he's doing with a character's big moment (as "I Dreamed A Dream" is) he should trust the audience's intelligence and imagination to be an integral part of the movie experience, and not manipulate or over direct.
Updated On: 6/1/12 at 09:59 AM
