Phrases like “end of an era” are routinely thrown about when a luminary in their field dies at a ripe old age, but for film lovers, the sentiment hit harder than usual with the passing of Stanley Donen last month. At 94, 20 years on from his final, made-for-TV film (Love Letters), the director of Singin’ in the Rain truly seemed about the last of the golden age masters. As artful a craftsman as ever existed of pure, candy-bright Hollywood entertainment, he outlived almost all the stars whose images he fixed most gorgeously on celluloid.
Did the flurry of Donen obituaries prompt a spike in searches for Singin’ in the Rain across digital viewing platforms, among people nostalgic to revisit the preeminent showbiz musical’s watertight joys? I should hope so: streaming on Now TV and downloadable via iTunes and elsewhere, it’s unsurprisingly the most readily available of Donen’s films online.
For fans looking to dig a little deeper, his oeuvre has survived into the streaming age better than many of his contemporaries – though a number of key gaps point to the still sorry state of classic film inclusion on the major sites. On Netflix, for example, you’ll find not one of Donen’s 28 films. Eleven of them, meanwhile, aren’t to be found on any UK outlet, including such valuable works as his and George Abbott’s fizzy Faust-meets-baseball confection Damn Yankees (1958) or his inspired 1978 double-feature pastiche Movie Movie.
Still, that leaves plenty of the good stuff ready to be discovered or rediscovered, ranging from firmly entrenched crowdpleasers such as 1954’s Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (socially dated but still bouncy, on iTunes) to swish throwaways like the Cary Grant-Deborah Kerr infidelity comedy from 1960, The Grass Is Greener (Amazon Video). Newcomers to Donen’s work should make a beeline for 1957’s Funny Face (rent it via YouTube), his eternally radiant, spun-sugar blend of Gershwin-soaked romanticism and Hollywoodised Paris chic. It never ranks as highly as Singin’ in the Rain in the canon, but it’s just as winsome.
It stars Audrey Hepburn, of course, whose blossomy star quality was just as vital to Donen’s two best films of the 1960s: the limber, skittering 1963 caper Charade (free to stream with Amazon Prime), which paired her so perfectly with Cary Grant, and the more adult bittersweet 1967 marital comedy Two for the Road (Amazon Video), which showed how lithely Donen could adapt to shifting industry trends. Bearing the influence of the French New Wave and swinging British modernism in its flashback-heavy patchwork of an imperfect 12-year relationship, it’s both Donen’s most fashion-forward film and his most deep-feeling, buoyed by Hepburn and Albert Finney’s opposites-attraction. To watch it in the wake of both Finney’s and Donen’s recent deaths leaves a bigger lump in the throat than was ever intended.
Fans of more streamlined vintage Donen elegance, meanwhile, can hardly do better than 1958’s Indiscreet (Now TV again), which dreamily reteamed Grant and Ingrid Bergman from Hitchcock’s Notorious. Their sizzling chemistry from that film turned out to crackle just as happily in a romantic comedy. There isn’t a lot of meat to its airily witty, deception-laden script, but Donen knew as well as anyone that sometimes in cinema, it’s all about the faces.
Advanced Donenites will be glad to know that the internet hasn’t entirely failed them when it comes to the director’s deep cuts and curios. Narratively creaky but lavishly orchestrated, his Sigmund Romberg portrait Deep in My Heart (1954), available from Chili, is a quintessential example of the revue-style classic musical biopics that I discussed in this column last week. Anyone curious to see Donen completely out of his element should make for the BFI Player to stream Saturn 3 (1980), his misbegotten but fascinating (and Martin Amis-scripted) attempt at post-Star Wars sci-fi.
And I was amazed to find Donen’s near-forgotten Rex Harrison-Richard Burton gay drama Staircase (1969) in the Chili library. Improbably matching the two as a London couple examining their relationship as one faces trial for propositioning a cop, it’s at once a curate’s egg and a queer cinema landmark of sorts: occasionally tender, occasionally wildly crass, and clear evidence that Donen wasn’t a film-maker to be left behind in the golden age.
New to streaming and DVD this week
Free Solo
(Dogwoof, 12)
This Oscar-winning study of madly ambitious rock climber Alex Honnold (right) inevitably loses some vertiginous impact on the small screen, but its human details hold up.
Peterloo
(Fox, 15)
Mike Leigh’s grandiose, chest-beating passion project tracks the makings of the 1819 Peterloo massacre from multiple angles, but its rhetoric is more compelling than its windy drama.
The Nutcracker and the Four Realms
(Disney, PG)
A rare Disney flop, this attempt to refashion the classic ballet as a fantasy origin story is severely overworked, but there’s kitsch fun here for the eyes and ears.
The Wild Pear Tree
(Drakes Avenue, 15)
Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan follows up Winter Sleep with another sporadically bewitching three-hour talkfest on men, women, literature and everything in between.
Wildlife
(Icon, 12)
Midcentury suburban sorrow fuels Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan’s tasteful Richard Ford adaptation. It’s plainly heartfelt, a little cautious, and lent a wallop by a superb Carey Mulligan.
Juanita
(Netflix)
At 66, Alfre Woodard is staging a comeback: this Netflix film, which she headlines as a fed-up mother belatedly reclaiming her life, is a loving showcase for her no-nonsense gifts.
