Monday, July 10, 2017

Yul Have To Thank Me Later

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I doubt this will surprise any of you who've read MNPP for any length of time longer than "starting with this sentence" but I have never seen the 1956 musical The King and I, starring Yul Brynner and Deborah Kerr. It's the sort of thing I have... avoided. Anyway tomorrow is Yul's birthday and so I made a pact with the folks at The Film Experience -- that I was going to watch The King and I, as long as they (i.e. you, since "you" can be a part of "they") told me some stuff about it in the comments of this week's The King and I themed "Beauty vs Beast" which you can check out right here. We'll see if anybody has anything to say, but I'm keeping my part of the bargain! Probably!
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3 comments:

Unknown said...

Check out the other movie he made with Kerr. It's called The Journey.

Anonymous said...

What do you want to know? It's a highly fictionalized, romanticized (read: white washed) redoing of the real Anna Leonowens book, which is of questionable accuracy in and of itself. It's banned in Thailand to this day for this reason.

But, as a musical, it's brilliant. Brynner and Kerr are superb (though Kerr's singing was dubbed by Marni Noxon, who made a whole career out of dubbing actors who couldn't sing). The score is one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's best (well, with the exception of Whistle a Happy Tune, ugh). And it's hell of entertaining.

Anonymous said...

Yul Brynner is just the start, Debra Kerr and Rita Moreno, in those costumes, are luminous. Jerome Robbins choreography, particularly "The House Of Uncle Thomas"(a ballet based on "Uncle Tom's Cabin") and "Shall We Dance", was innovative. Please notice during Yul Brynner's solo "A Puzzlement" in the long shots he has an earring in some of the close-ups he does not. Truly one of the best uses of Cinema-Scope, You can understand the excitement of the '50's audiences when you see the panoramic shots. On the down side 20th blinked and cut the movie before release. I could never understand why musical numbers were cut to shorten the running time. And it was common. We don't really see a musical for the plot. But missing are Rita Moreno's "Lord And Master", the amazing "I have Dreamed" and Anna's "Shall I tell You What I think". The soundtrack album has the audio of these songs. The footage has never been found and reinserted.