Ditto here. Every word of it.Richard--W said:
As you posted earlier, you are not a fan of Frank Sinatra.Virgoan said:
The musical Carousel was based on a 1909 play, Liliom.Virgoan said:
Joseph SchildkrautLiliom is a 1909 play by the Hungarian playwright Ferenc Molnár. It was very famous in its own right during the early to mid-20th century, but is best known today as the basis for the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Carousel.
…
Joseph Schildkraut in the 1921 Broadway production of Liliom.
… Liliom was a failure in Hungary when it was staged there in 1909, but not when it was staged on Broadway in an English translation by Benjamin Glazer in 1921. The production starred Joseph Schildkraut (his role originally offered to John Barrymore), and Eva Le Gallienne, with supporting roles played by such actors as Dudley Digges and Helen Westley.[1]Ivor Novello starred as Liliom in 1926 in London, with Charles Laughton, in one of his first stage roles, as Ficsúr. Schildkraut and Ms. Le Gallienne also starred in the first American revival of the play, in 1932.[2]
In 1939, Orson Welles directed and played the title role in a one-hour radio adaptation for his CBS Campbell Playhouse program ; the production co-starred Helen Hayes as Julie and Agnes Moorehead as Mrs. Muskat, the carousel owner who is infatuated with Billy.[3] It was broadcast live on October 10, 1939. The recording made from the broadcast still exists and can even be heard online.
In 1940, a second American stage revival, starring Burgess Meredith and Ingrid Bergman, with Elia Kazan as Ficsúr and Joan Tetzel as Liliom and Julie's daughter Louise, played New York.
Here is Joseph Schildkraut’s imdb page pic:Joseph Schildkraut (March 22, 1896 – January 21, 1964) was an Austrian stage and film actor.
…Schildkraut is perhaps best remembered today for playing the role of Otto Frank in both the original stage and film versions of The Diary of Anne Frank. He was also an active character actor, and appeared in guest roles on several early television shows, notably the Hallmark Hall of Fame, in which he played Claudius in the 1953 television production of Hamlet, with Maurice Evans in the title role. Schildkraut also hosted and starred inJoseph Schildkraut Presents, a short-lived series on the DuMont Television Network from October 1953 to January 1954.
As you can see above in the Wikipedia link, there is also a mention of another actor who played the role successfully on stage, Burgess Meredith. Don't know if you've ever heard of Burgess Meredith, but he would never be taken for a "big tough guy" either. Apparently, being a "big tough guy" wasn't the prerequisite in anyone's mind for the role Sinatra would have played in Carousel.
There is an 8:25 minute outtake of Sinatra's recording of Soliloquy for the movie in the box set, Sinatra in Hollywood 1940-1964. The only other song sung by Billy Bigelow in Carousel is the duet with Julie, If I Loved You, and there is a recording of him and Shirley Jones repeating that duet on the DVD, Sinatra, the Classic Duets. No, it isn't the original recording for the movie, but it gives you a taste of what it would have sounded like if he'd done the movie. Actually, Sinatra recorded both of those songs at various times throughout his career. If you catch his version of Soliloquy on the CD, The Concert Sinatra, it is my opinion that no one would have wished for a Gordon MacRea version of it had Sinatra gone forward with the movie and had MacRea never gotten that call after the Sinatra cancellation.GMpasqua said:
I have always had a problem with the movie of CAROUSEL because it seems like they were trying to make OKLAHOMA! in Maine. The story is much different, much darker, but the movie doesn't reflect that. Maybe Hollywood in 1956 just wasn't ready to make a dark musical for the mainstream. For example - in the stage play Billy does not fall on his knife, he makes a choice to end his life. That alone skews the whole last one-third of the story, and I have never liked the flashback framework. I love Shirley Jones and I admire Gordon MacRae, but I think both of their characters need to be a bit more "wrong side of tracks" to make the story really resonate. It would have taken a different director with a different intention. Shirley proved she could play against type in ELMER GANTRY. I am also bothered by the large amount of music that was cut from the film. But, CAROUSEL does basically follow the stage version despite the cuts, which is not true with PAL JOEY.Cineman said:
Your personal observations about the film and the performances are your opinions. Whether they are valid is something people will decide for themselves.Virgoan said:
Towards the end of the movie he does turn over a new leaf and make a stand for his principles (dubious they may be), so the happy ending isn't entirely out of place. The Joey at the very start of the movie thoroughly deserves to have an unhappy ending, but at the same time, I found it hard to really hate the character at any point as portrayed by Sinatra. He played Joey more as a loveable rogue with rough edges than an outright sleaze.KPmusmag said:
I didn't see the show on Broadway. I saw the national tour of it in Los Angeles. I'm afraid I don't remember the name of the actor I saw playing Bigelow, but I seem to recall there were a couple of actors cast in the role who took turns performing it. I do remember thinking he looked more like what one might envision as the Jigger character than the Bigelow character relative to Cameron Mitchell and Gordon MacRae in the movie.MattH. said:
That's what I loved about the Hytner revival of the stage musical. He captured the grinding poverty and mind-numbing, near slave conditions of the mill workers (Julie), the grubbiness of carny life, that although it was sad for sweet Julie to take up with such an obvious unsavory scoundrel it still was better than the trap she'd been living in at the mill. The approach made Hammerstein's lyrics soar in ways I'd never felt before, as many times as I'd seen the movie and other stage productions. It was heartbreaking to hear these characters sing words they had only seen written on kitchen samplers and never knew they could feel in real life, never knew they'd deserve to feel in real life and were not prepared by education, experience or a sense of self-worth to express ("IF I loved you..."). It made sense in ways the beautiful-looking stars in the beautiful-looking movie didn't. For the first time and in the most powerful way, I got the message Hammerstein must have been sending from the beginning but hadn't been fully expressed in the post-WWII to mid-1950's versions of Carousel; that even people who we might dismiss as the dregs of society will and deserve to fall deeply in love, usually not in a smart way, probably not in a way that makes sense to the rest of us, but they will and they deserve to just like the rest of us. This was not a R&H love story between kings and school teachers, decorated sea captains and governesses, war heroes and military nurses. It was a lot more challenging than that for your typical Broadway theater audience member. By the time that awkward, decidedly politically-incorrect, downright wrong, exchange comes where Julie explains to her daughter that someone can hit you, hit you hard and it not hurt, in this particular treatment of the story that moment was put in at least a more understandable perspective because of who these people were and where they'd come from. And that is something I didn't feel at all in the movie even though I'm a big fan of the movie and the actors in it.KPmusmag said:
Irresistible is the word, all right. Sinatra exudes charm, but more than that, there's always a certain underlying vulnerability in his acting. He seems like the kind of guy a woman imagines she can reform.Virgoan said:
That is beautifully articulated and exactly the way I feel, including the fact that I am also a fan of the movie and all of the actors in it, despite acknowledging that I have a certain "I wish it were otherwise" feeling when I watch it.Cineman said:
