The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, November 16-22
Brigadoon (1954)
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
The greatest premise in the history of musical theater: a Scottish village that materializes for a day once every hundred years, emerging out of the mist as a tartan oasis of escapism and contrivance. Gene Kelly is the hunter who wanders into this waking dream while on vacation from the symphonic buzz of modern Manhattan, and Cyd Charisse the lassie who tempts him to step aside from the course of history. Someone let real livestock graze on a thatch-and-purple backlot made of potted shrubs and loose-wristed, fine-bristle watercolor matte paintings, which heightens rather than diminishes the fantasy when Gene sings “It’s Almost Like Being in Love” to some dour but, we sense, basically sympathetic cud-chewing Highland cattle. The past was never misremembered in such prancing, delicate Technicolor. The next Brigadoon Day is May 25, 2054. Mark Asch (November 20, 2pm, 6:45pm at BAM’s “That’s Entertainment!: MGM Musicals Part II”)