Easter Parade - Special Edition

Here's yet another classic Hollywood musical from the solid-gold Warner Brothers vaults. Put on your best Easter bonnet and join the parade.

Lovers of the great American musical are getting thoroughly spoilt right now, as Warners continue to create definitive editions of the masterworks of this great artform. For 'artform' is just what these musicals constitute -- the American musical is as important a creative outpouring as any of the artistic explorations of the 20th Century. And they're downright fun to boot!

So here, from 1948, comes the Technicolor extravaganza, Easter Parade, the film which became a classic totally by accident.

That accident was painful. Easter Parade was meant to team together Judy Garland and Gene Kelly as a successor to that team's For Me and My Gal -- which is, by the way, my own all-time favourite Judy Garland movie.

But Gene Kelly injured his ankle and had to step out of the production. Sitting on the sidelines was the recently-retired Fred Astaire. He was coaxed back from retirement to make this movie -- and fortunately for us, enjoyed it so much that he stayed active for a few more key movies of his career, including the wondrous The Band Waggon.

Strangely, Fred and Judy had never worked together before. In fact, they had never even met. Together they work wonderful magic, to make this one of the most joyous of musicals.

The plot is simple. Fred plays Variety star Don Hewes, whose career is thrown out of whack when his stage-partner Nadine (the wonderfully vulgar hoofer Ann Miller) dumps him. Fred is so miffed that he loudly proclaims that anyone could follow Nadine -- in a defiantly Henry Higgins moment, he claims he could make anyone into a star.

It's his great lasting fortune that he chooses as his Eliza or Galatea a low-rent singer-dancer Hannah Brown. She's not low-rent; the dives she's performing in are. Things get off to an awkward start when he tries to have her emulate Ann Miller's zestful dancing. But a bright new day dawns the moment he lets her just exercise those amazing vocal-chords and sing.

The movie abounds with classic musical moments, including It Only Happens When I Dance with You, We're a Couple of Swells and Steppin' Out With my Baby. With numbers like that, it's no wonder the movie was originally titled Irving Berlin's The Easter Parade, in honour of the great songwriter.

The closing scene, of the famous Easter Parade used to bring cinema audiences to their feet, applauding and cheering at the sheer cinematic audacity of the set and staging. Even on DVD, it's still astounding.

This is another totally superlative Technicolor transfer from the boys at Warners. There's some film grain evident, just enough to remind us this is true cinema.

Colours are rich and luscious, with no sign of bleeding, and there seems virtually no artefacts or damage of any kind to remind us that this movie is more than half-a-century old.

The mono sound is strong and clear, and shows just why there's no real need for artificial processing of music-tracks as good as this. As long as your amplifier/processor lets you split the signal between both side-channels instead of just coming out of the single centre-speaker, you'll be doing just fine.

Although this is a PAL version of the movie, I found it difficult to hear a marked difference in pitch between this and its NTSC equivalent. Usually I find this difference very marked.

The extra features include a Making Of documentary Easter Parade: Beyond the Avenue which is great entertainment in its own right, especially when it details the sequence of accidents which brought us the movie in its present form. Gene Kelly's ankle-injury was just the last of an astonishing production-shaping sequence.

There's a lively Audio Commentary by a team of Fred's daughter Ava Astaire McKenzie, and Judy Garland's biographer John Fricke. It's a lot better than most of these, and particularly touching is the way Ava still very lovingly refers to Fred as 'dad'.

We have an outtake of a Judy Garland number, Mr Monotony, presented in fine quality enhanced-quality anamorphic Academy Ratio, with black bars framing all round the image on an anamorphically-capable standard-ratio set. This unusual ratio is, I suspect, because the clip is drawn from the American anamorphic issues of the That's Entertainment series.

Finally, there's a Judy Garland Trailers feature of nine theatrical trailers, for The Wizard of Oz, Ziegfeld Girls, For Me and My Gal, Meet Me in St Louis, The Harvey Girls, Ziegfeld Follies, Easter Parade, In the Good Old Summertime and A Star is Born. All these movies are available on DVD, either here or in Region One.

But wait ... there's more. Right at the start, before the feature or the menu, there's an Unwelcome Extra Feature in the form of a sensationalistic anti-piracy commercial. But there are two easy ways to skip it. First, if you're in time, is to press the 'menu' button immediately the Warners opening music comes on.

If you miss that chance, fear not. After that snatch of music, you're offered the choice of about half-a-dozen languages, as if it's an audio option. Choose either of the bottom two (Russian or some Arabic script) and the anti-piracy message is dropped, and you go straight to the menu.

This classic musical must be seen -- rent it or buy it. It's not as indispensable a part of a collection as, say, The Band Wagon or For Me and My Gal, but its appeal is imperishable.

Chief regret is that this is a single-disc edition which is not so special as the version just released in the USA. Over there, buyers also gained a major American Masters documentary profile: Judy Garland: By Myself, which might have been omitted here as a result of Warners not having issue rights. The documentary had to be omitted for that reason from the Canadian edition.

Our edition also omits an radio production of Easter Parade featuring the movie cast.