Easter Parade (1948)

What a ripoff: We never see the parade itself! ...OK, I didn't really come for that, and probably neither did others. In truth, the story doesn't have much to do with Easter festivities; it just happens to start on one Easter and end on the next, possibly because Irving Berlin didn't feel like stopping the theme with Holiday Inn.

Apart from Berlin, whose lyrics account for a large percentage of the dialog, the main draws are Fred Astaire and Judy Garland in her most attractive years. Fourth place might go to the employment of Technicolor to highlight the fashions, which were sadly anachronistic for the early 1910s. (Why did Garland keep playing characters from earlier generations, anyway?)

The story doesn't exactly feel fresh, but at least it's less absurd than in many an Astaire movie. He plays a professional dancer, as always, because it never occurred to his writers that singers in musicals don't have to play professional singers. When his shrewish dance partner, Nadine (Ann Miller), signs onto a separate show, Astaire's Don seeks something between revenge and reconciliation by training random chorus girl Hannah as her replacement. Things do not go where he expects, because he's not as genre-savvy as we are.

That said, characters' feelings for one another get more complicated than I expected. Don and Nadine don't know how to act toward each other, Don and Hannah have a lot of trouble sorting things out...and then we have Don's charming friend Jonathan, who has relationships similarly in flux with both women, yet neither man shows any jealousy toward the other. It's not utter emotional nonsense; it just defies a few conventions.

Apart from that, it's pretty much nothing I hadn't seen before. Only the color would've looked out of place in the mid-'30s. The dialog has about an equal chance of striking me as clever or flatly dated. I perceive mild racism in the form of Nadine's maid, who mistakes a comedic stage act for a serious one that garners accidental laughs.

But let's face it: Those hardly matter. We came for the songs and dances, right? Well, the oeuvre of Berlin never did much for me, and I don't believe I've heard any of these songs anywhere else, but Garland could make almost any song beautiful. Astaire is still great on the floor, tho he doesn't get the best opportunities to show off this time. Garland obviously doesn't have quite the dancing chops of Ginger Rogers, so it's a good thing she starts out as a novice -- one who claims that converting from a lefty has rendered her incapable of remembering left versus right. I prefer the dance numbers where they incorporate objects from the environment, such as by kicking drums in a toy store. Those seem like they would've been fun to make, for a while anyway.

EP does its job of buoyantly light-hearted entertainment, easy on the eyes and ears. There's a good chance you get in the mood for that sometimes if you watch movies. Just don't go in for any other reason.