The Band Wagon: Special Edition

This sparkling 1953 MGM musical was a follow-up to the studio's 1952 masterpiece Singin' in the Rain, and also boasted a script by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, structured around a stack of wonderful old songs (this time by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, who penned one new ditty for the movie, too--a little thing called “That's Entertainment”), though it featured a different leading man (Fred Astaire) and director (Vincente Minnelli). The backstage story, about transforming a Broadway flop into a smash simply by turning the show into a crowd-pleasing revue, doesn't have the satiric snap of its predecessor, but it provides a perfect skeleton on which to hang a succession of incredible numbers, done magnificently by Astaire, Cyd Charisse, Oscar Levant, Nanette Fabray, and especially Jack Buchanan, the great British song-and-dance man who never received his due in the U.S. Easily one of the most enjoyable Hollywood musicals ever made, The Band Wagon looks and sounds newly-minted in this digitally remastered transfer backed by a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack. DVD extras on this double-disc set include a fine new “making-of” documentary, a film on Minnelli's career, an outtake of the unused musical number “Two Faced Woman,” and a Vitaphone short featuring Buchanan with the Glee Quartet in an old music hall routine. In fact, the only weak point is a rather embarrassing audio commentary by Liza Minnelli and Michael Feinstein (but you needn't turn it on). Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. (F. Swietek)