Paige, Janis

Please Don't Eat the Daisies

Domestic comedy about a New York drama critic his wife and children who move out to the country and struggle with dad's daily commute.Running Time: 112 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 012569519725

Silk Stockings

You'd think chilled borscht pulses in her veins. She's Nina Yoshenka a lovely yet severe Soviet envoy sent to Paris to rescue wayward comrades from the perils of champagne and capitalism. But there may be a thaw in Nina's cold war. She meets Steve Canfield a smoothly brash American who won't take nyet for an answer.Running Time: 117 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY UPC: 012569562929

Fred Astaire took one of his final musical turns in this delightful 1957 comedy, a cold war update of the classic Ninotchka. Cyd Charisse, having previously wrapped her endless legs around Fred in The Band Wagon, plays the Greta Garbo role: a humorless Soviet functionary who sternly refuses the allure of Paris… for a while, anyway. Like some of the first widescreen musicals, Silk Stockings feels a little slowed down by the horizontal format, but nothing can dim the sparkle of Astaire and Charisse, nor quench the razzmatazz of Janis Paige. Paige and Astaire assess the current state of movies by singing that films today need "glorious Technicolor, breathtaking CinemaScope, and Stereophonic sound!" In the hands of Cole Porter, that phrase becomes wonderfully musical--and by the way, it's nice to see the composer identified with so many breezy 1930s songs staying au courant in the age of Sputnik and television. --Robert Horton

Broadway - The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There

It's not a comprehensive survey of the American musical theater, but Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There is an invaluable and moving salute to the art form composed of interviews with the people who were there in the 1940s through the 1960s. There are too many to list, but they include John Raitt, Angela Lansbury, Hume Cronyn, Kitty Carlisle Hart, Carol Channing, Jerry Orbach, Robert Goulet, Robert Morse (even he's gotten old!), Jerry Herman, Betty Comden and Adolph Green, Stephen Sondheim, and Harold Prince. There are also some rare performance clips, such as Ethel Merman in Gypsy, Patricia Morison in Kiss Me Kate, and Angela Lansbury in Mame, as well as more familiar television performances, but very few film versions (for either authenticity or rights reasons). Director Rick McKay's focus, however, is on evocative stills, a few too many shots of the city, and most of all the words from the stars themselves. Fact is, because Broadway shows are a live performance medium, there simply isn't a lot of footage available, which is why it's a treat--no, it's an obligation--that we hear the stories from the people themselves. It's the best way the form will survive. After a bit of a slow start, the interviews cover the culture of Broadway, hanging out at Walgreen's and Sardi's, taking a show on the road, and thoughts about the current generation. (Broadway in this case refers to the location in New York rather than the musical-theater genre, so non-musicals are a major part of the discussion.)

Broadway: The Golden Age had a limited theatrical run in 2004, and there will be inevitable comparisons to Broadway: The American Musical, the six-hour series that played on PBS in the fall of that same year. The PBS series is much longer (especially counting the DVDs' bonus interviews) and unlike The Golden Age, it attempts to be a comprehensive survey of 100 years of American musical theater. The ambition is admirable, but often hard to live up to. The Golden Age offers more rare footage, and a more powerful sense of nostalgia throughout the interviews. On the downside, there's no real structure to the film other than grouping the interviews by random subject, and director McKay relies too much on his own personal experiences as a jumping-off point. But it's a worthwhile, often passionate film that captures a priceless glimpse at a way of life as lived by so many memorable figures whose like will never be seen again. --David Horiuchi

Romance on the High Seas

Elvira is supposed to go on a cruise but decides to stay home when she suspects her husband is cheating on her. Her husband suspects the same of his wife and sends an investigator to spy on her on the cruise - but he is really spying on Elvira's husband.Running Time: 99 min.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: COMEDY Rating: NR UPC: 012569796706 Manufacturer No: 79670

For a crystal-clear lesson in how an unknown vaults into immediate stardom, look no further than Romance on the High Seas, the silly 1948 musical that launched the movie career of Doris Day. A band singer, Day was plucked from the ranks when Warner Bros. and director Michael Curtiz needed to find a replacement for a role intended first for Judy Garland and then for Betty Hutton. She's fourth-billed, but there's no question Doris Day owns the picture; in retrospect, the part seems tailor-made to break a new star. The plot is a howler: society wife Janis Paige is suspicious when husband Don DeFore (hubby to TV's Hazel) claims he must stay in New York on business instead of going on a cruise to South America. So Paige gives the cruise ticket to lounge singer Doris, on the condition that she pretend to be Paige, while wifey hangs back in New York. Make sense? Meanwhile, a suspicious DeFore hires a detective (Jack Carson) to spy on his wife during the cruise, except of course it isn't really his wife, it's... well, you get the picture. Day is somewhat sassier than her later well-scrubbed image would allow; she actually seems like an up-from-the-streets, well-traveled barnstormer. The saucy script has a handsome pedigree; it was penned by Casablanca boys Julius and Philip Epstein and polished by future Billy Wilder partner I.A.L. Diamond. However, it must be stated that Curtiz is nobody's idea of a buoyant comedy director, even if the lounge-singing sequences are sharply made. The cast is stocked with screwball stalwarts such as S.Z. Sakall, Eric Blore, and Franklin Pangborn. As Day's accompanist and suitor, the celebrated musican-wit Oscar Levant has one of his better screen roles--and his experience here was likely the source of his later quip, "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin." If you see her cheeky performance here, you might agree with him. --Robert Horton