....of Birthday Girl Ann Miller, and one of our premier Patron Saints, who's birthday was Sunday. Screw the politicians, I'm a queen, and I'm thinking of declaring this week National Ann Miller Week. Get those huge wigs dusted off....and in the meantime, another of my favorite performances of hers, from Small Town Girl in 1953, and one of the most creative dance scenes I have even seen in a musical.
LIVE! LIVE! Life is a banquet, and some sorry sons of bitches are starving!
Always complex routines. Always. And she was always flawless.
ReplyDeleteI HEART Ann Miller and all those wonderful MGM musicals.
ReplyDeleteAnd Miller said an interview once and this was her favorite performance in a movie.
DeleteI saw her dance in Los Angeles in the mid 80s. She was wonderful even then.
ReplyDeleteI imagine! She never lost it.
DeleteI've heard of the mafia giving someone cement shoes . . . but encasing an entire orchestra in cement? They must have really run afoul of The Godfather!
ReplyDeleteI met Ann Miller at the L.A. Music Center, long ago when I was about 20. She looked spectacular, like a real Hollywood icon - - but she was really down to earth, very sweet and surprisingly humble. Jon
ReplyDeleteI bow to you, you lucky dog! Every interview I saw she seemed so sweet, polite, down to earth and candid and articulate. She would recall such detail. I always thought she was just it!!! And the hair!!!!! They don't make them like her anymore.
DeleteI love those big musical numbers.
ReplyDeleteThat was.... different.
ReplyDeleteHONEY!
ReplyDeleteThat’s what we call a triple threat.
The new girlies should take some notes!
XOXO
It APPAULLS me to no end that not one queen during snatch game yet has done Ann Miller!!!! The over the top things you could do are endless. Ann Miller was a riot and very funny without even knowing it.
DeleteAn utterly spell-bounding set-piece of dance! Busby Berkeley was a genius. It's only let down by the fact that a) it was shoehorned into otherwise mediocre movie, and b) it wasn't in black-and-white (which it should have been, for effect; as earlier Eleanor Powell/Busby Berkeley films proved).
ReplyDeleteAnn Miller was indeed the top of her game, however, and deservedly so!
Jx
I agree. I think she even said herself in an interview she and everyone involved thought the piece should have been used in a more well known, larger film. She also said it was one of the hardest routines she did.
DeleteI remember this movie! Lots of great stuff in it, but this WAS THE zenith. Ann Miller at the top of her form. How she did not get dizzy after so many spins in way beyond me. This scene still gives me chills.
ReplyDeleteI've have never seen anything like that!!!! She was HOOFIN it henny!!!!!!!!!
ReplyDeleteI've seen that before and this day and age of AI and computer-generated imagery, this was amazing, and it is still today!
ReplyDelete'Small Town Girl' is not much of a film, but it is redeemed by two knockout numbers: this one with Ann Miller, which Salvador Dali might have designed, and Bobby Van's crazy but delightful hoppity-hop all around the aforesaid small town. But Ann and the creative mind of Bugsy....well any surprise this number is legendary???
ReplyDeleteOn my list of people I'd like to come back as in another life (though I suppose I'd have to go backwards.)
ReplyDeleteBrilliant staging and flying feet. I’m off to watch Bobby Van bounce around town.
ReplyDeleteCrikey! She's whirling like a dervish! It's the less creepy Ann Miller version of The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
ReplyDeleteBack in 1984 I saw Ann Miller perform with Mickey Rooney in Sugar Babies, they brought the house down at the Pantages Theater in L.A. :-)
ReplyDelete-CA jock