Director: Walter Lang
Writers: Arthur Sheekman, Howard Lindsay, Russel Crouse
Photography: Leon Shamroy
Music: Irving Berlin, Alfred Newman
Editor: Robert L. Simpson
Cast: Ethel Merman, Donald O’Connor, George Sanders, Vera-Ellen, Billy De Wolfe, Helmut Dantine, Walter Slezak, Steven Geray, Ludwig Stossel, Julie Newmar
I keep wanting to designate Call Me Madam as a guilty pleasure, perhaps because I have a personal reason for being predisposed toward it—I happen to know it was the movie my parents saw on their first date. We even had the 1950 Decca 10-inch soundtrack album from the Broadway show in our house. It’s possible my mother purchased it before the movie came out. She liked to sing “It’s a Lovely Day Today” and “You’re Just in Love” around the house. As a kid I could often be found cringing at this activity, which obviously I would love to be around again now. So I have a sentimental attachment to those songs specifically and thus, what’s more, something of a defensive attitude toward Ethel Merman, who largely seems to be taken as a joke these days, and not the right kind of joke.
As far as I can tell, this take on her rests chiefly on her unschooled singing style and her generally brassy demeanor. Her persona could run to the coarse—she had a reputation for telling dirty jokes—and always had the cynical midcentury American Bugs Bunny sheen of someone who actually does know better than you. A lot of her humor is influenced by Groucho Marx’s pattering tangents. She makes a baseball joke to sum up a situation, for example, and, at another point, when two characters attempt to flatter her as beautiful, she mutters, half to the camera, “A good optometrist could really clean up around here.” Another time someone refers to a palace estate and she assumes they are talking about Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. “The Palace? Who’s playing there?” she asks.
I keep wanting to designate Call Me Madam as a guilty pleasure, perhaps because I have a personal reason for being predisposed toward it—I happen to know it was the movie my parents saw on their first date. We even had the 1950 Decca 10-inch soundtrack album from the Broadway show in our house. It’s possible my mother purchased it before the movie came out. She liked to sing “It’s a Lovely Day Today” and “You’re Just in Love” around the house. As a kid I could often be found cringing at this activity, which obviously I would love to be around again now. So I have a sentimental attachment to those songs specifically and thus, what’s more, something of a defensive attitude toward Ethel Merman, who largely seems to be taken as a joke these days, and not the right kind of joke.
As far as I can tell, this take on her rests chiefly on her unschooled singing style and her generally brassy demeanor. Her persona could run to the coarse—she had a reputation for telling dirty jokes—and always had the cynical midcentury American Bugs Bunny sheen of someone who actually does know better than you. A lot of her humor is influenced by Groucho Marx’s pattering tangents. She makes a baseball joke to sum up a situation, for example, and, at another point, when two characters attempt to flatter her as beautiful, she mutters, half to the camera, “A good optometrist could really clean up around here.” Another time someone refers to a palace estate and she assumes they are talking about Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. “The Palace? Who’s playing there?” she asks.
Merman plays Sally Adams, a personal friend of Harry Truman’s who is embarking on a diplomatic career as the ambassador to a fictional country in central Europe, Lichtenburg. There are some good jokes here about Margaret Truman and critics at large. Adams has no useful experience to be an ambassador, of course. She’s just a fixture in D.C. society who throws a lot of parties. At the last minute, Kenneth Gibson (Donald O’Connor) inveigles his way into her crew as a PR man. The plot as such, from the Broadway show, revolves around two romantic comedy storylines. Almost the minute Adams is there she falls for a powerful figure in Lichtenburg politics, General Cosmo Constantine (George Sanders, who is always good but perhaps even better here, almost unrecognizable and obviously having a ball). One thing I like about Sally Adams, which is pretty much all Merman, is how aggressive she is sexually—and she’s not really as naïve as everyone assumes either.
That’s the first love story. The second is between Gibson and Princess Maria (Vera-Ellen). In both cases, Americans are intruding into and may be trampling on old European values. Princess Maria has already been promised to another, for example—for Princess Maria and her family, it’s all about “saving the throne.” In fact, it’s quite dangerous for Gibson to be wooing her. There’s a jealous prince who will challenge him to a duel, or something. However, Vera-Ellen, like Donald O’Connor, is in this movie for one reason only, and that is to dance, dance, dance. In the first hour of the picture, I was complaining in my notes that there weren’t enough dance scenes. It didn’t seem to be that kind of musical, though many of the songs sounded good. I could imagine my parents, especially my mother, melting into a lot of these interludes—notably “It’s a Lovely Day Today,” a duet between Gibson and Princess Maria on first meeting.
Then the second half of the picture came along with three amazing dance scenes. Donald O’Connor and Vera-Ellen both once again prove how good they are, in one involving a pool of water and stepping-stones in moonlight and another in a secret staircase passage in the castle (if it’s Europe there’s always a castle). O’Connor goes solo on the third, drunkenly lurching around in an after-hours bar, encountering xylophones (which he plays by dancing on the big one) and balloons which he pops by kicking at them, taking hard pratfalls right on his face, with grace. “If an apple could finish Adam / They could knock me off with a grape,” he sings. I don’t know why I couldn’t see this ridiculous physical exuberance before. And I guess it’s that exuberance, in the face of everything dismal in life, that is what does it for me. These dancing scenes can be very moving to me now even when they are intended as comic relief.
If I have no perspective on Call Me Madam, I can tell you Halliwell’s gives it three stars (which is better than three stars in other systems) and other sources indicate it’s a solid if perhaps second-tier musical from a golden era of them in the postwar period. It’s true Call Me Madam is not really within the vicinity of Singin’ in the Rain, or indeed anything associated with Gene Kelly in this period. But it has Donald O’Connor and that’s not nothing. It has George Sanders cutting it up with a thick, hilariously inconsistent accent. It has a bunch of great Irving Berlin songs. And, yes, it has Ethel Merman—a beast full of vitality and comic, self-deprecating asides. It’s a must if you are surveying postwar musicals.
That’s the first love story. The second is between Gibson and Princess Maria (Vera-Ellen). In both cases, Americans are intruding into and may be trampling on old European values. Princess Maria has already been promised to another, for example—for Princess Maria and her family, it’s all about “saving the throne.” In fact, it’s quite dangerous for Gibson to be wooing her. There’s a jealous prince who will challenge him to a duel, or something. However, Vera-Ellen, like Donald O’Connor, is in this movie for one reason only, and that is to dance, dance, dance. In the first hour of the picture, I was complaining in my notes that there weren’t enough dance scenes. It didn’t seem to be that kind of musical, though many of the songs sounded good. I could imagine my parents, especially my mother, melting into a lot of these interludes—notably “It’s a Lovely Day Today,” a duet between Gibson and Princess Maria on first meeting.
Then the second half of the picture came along with three amazing dance scenes. Donald O’Connor and Vera-Ellen both once again prove how good they are, in one involving a pool of water and stepping-stones in moonlight and another in a secret staircase passage in the castle (if it’s Europe there’s always a castle). O’Connor goes solo on the third, drunkenly lurching around in an after-hours bar, encountering xylophones (which he plays by dancing on the big one) and balloons which he pops by kicking at them, taking hard pratfalls right on his face, with grace. “If an apple could finish Adam / They could knock me off with a grape,” he sings. I don’t know why I couldn’t see this ridiculous physical exuberance before. And I guess it’s that exuberance, in the face of everything dismal in life, that is what does it for me. These dancing scenes can be very moving to me now even when they are intended as comic relief.
If I have no perspective on Call Me Madam, I can tell you Halliwell’s gives it three stars (which is better than three stars in other systems) and other sources indicate it’s a solid if perhaps second-tier musical from a golden era of them in the postwar period. It’s true Call Me Madam is not really within the vicinity of Singin’ in the Rain, or indeed anything associated with Gene Kelly in this period. But it has Donald O’Connor and that’s not nothing. It has George Sanders cutting it up with a thick, hilariously inconsistent accent. It has a bunch of great Irving Berlin songs. And, yes, it has Ethel Merman—a beast full of vitality and comic, self-deprecating asides. It’s a must if you are surveying postwar musicals.
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