Many people seem to genuinely love "The Band Wagon", and it regularly receives top recommendations from reviewers and raters, but I just don't like this movie. Some of Fred Astaire's numbers are top notch, such as "Shine on My Shoes" and Fred and Cyd's number "Dancing in the Dark", and by themselves deserve a top rating. However, the plot is irritating, particularly the characters laboriously plodding through trying to bring to fruition producer Jeffrey Cordova's (Jack Buchanan) view of what the next great stage musical show should be like. Also, Fred and Cyd seem much too far apart in age to be a plausible romantic couple. Most irritating is that the musical numbers seem to be a hodge-podge which have nothing to do with each other. It's all too disjointed to be enjoyable.
I will say this is not entirely the fault of Betty Comden and Adolph Green's writing--they were, at times, given a group of unrelated songs by MGM and requested to write a movie script that would encompass them. This film was also loosely based on their own professional relationship as a script-writing team, although they were not married, as the writers, the Martons, are in the film.
If you haven't seen this movie, it IS worth watching for some of the musical numbers, and when I've seen it, I try to concentrate on those. But try as I might, I never seem to be able to warm up to this film.
I will say this is not entirely the fault of Betty Comden and Adolph Green's writing--they were, at times, given a group of unrelated songs by MGM and requested to write a movie script that would encompass them. This film was also loosely based on their own professional relationship as a script-writing team, although they were not married, as the writers, the Martons, are in the film.
If you haven't seen this movie, it IS worth watching for some of the musical numbers, and when I've seen it, I try to concentrate on those. But try as I might, I never seem to be able to warm up to this film.