LADY IN THE DARK
Tit. it.:; Sog.: dal musical omonimo di Moss Hart, Kurt Weill e Ira Gershwin; Scen.: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, Mitchell Leisen; F.: Ray Rennahan; M.: Alma Macrorie; Scgf.: Raoul Pene Du Bois; Cost.: Raoul Pene Du Bois, Edith Head, Mitchell Leisen, Babs Wilomez; Trucco: Wally Westmore; Su.: Earl Hayman, Walter Oberst; Effetti speciali: Gordon Jennings, Paul Lerpae, Farciot Edouart; Mu.: Robert Emmett Dolan; Canzoni: Johnny Burke, Jimmy Van Heusen, Kurt Weill e Ira Gershwin; Coreografie: Billy Daniels, Don Loper; Ass. R.: Chico Alonso; Int.: Ginger Rogers (Liza Elliott), Ray Milland (Charley Johnson), Warner Baxter (Kendall Nesbitt), Jon Hall (Randy Curtis), Barry Sullivan (Dr. Brooks), Mischa Auer (Russell Paxton), Don Loper (Adams); Prod.: Richard Blumenthal, Buddy G. DeSylva per Paramount Pictures 35mm. L.: 2740 m. D.: 100’.
Film Notes
Based on a brilliant Broadway musical by Moss Hart and Kurt Weill (based, in turn, on Hart’s own experience of psychoanalysis) and benefiting from a generous budget, Lady in the Dark remains a prime specimen of that most endearingly camp of sub-genres, the fashion magazine movie (cf. Cover Girl, Funny Face, Woman’s World, The Best of Everything). It looks, in its three-strip Technicolor, like a mannequin parade in heaven and contains an outrageous cameo by Mischa Auer as a flagrantly homosexual photographer. But the decision of producer Buddy DeSylva (who reportedly loathed Weill) to cut most of the numbers, including Ginger Rogers’ final, unrepressed rendering of the pivotal song “My Ship”, is a serious flaw; and the film is noteworthy mostly for tackling head-on the equation, more obliquely posed in the world of Minnelli or Busby Berkeley, between dream (and, by a Freudian extension that the script quite consciously assumes, sex) and musical comedy spectacle.
Gilbert Adair, Sight &Sound, Summer 1980