An expatriate Russian dancer is on a plane forced to land on Soviet territory. He is taken to an apartment in which a black American who has married a Russian woman ...
Director: Taylor Hackford
Stars: Mikhail Baryshnikov, Gregory Hines, Helen Mirren, Geraldine Page, Isabella Rossellini.
Mikhail Baryshnikov ... additional choreographer
Gregory Hines ... tap improvography
Roland Petit ... choreographer: "La jeune homme et la mort"
Twyla Tharp ... choreographer
15 songs in the Soundtracks.
I rated this 7 on 2015-05-06. But today it's a 9. Why not a 10? Maybe it could have used a little (more) humor.
We get some superb dancing and singing (There's a Boat Leaving for NY sung by GH), an excellent story, and historical insight about defecting from/to USSR and Cold War relations with the US. Plus we get excellent footage of Leningrad (by a travel company commissioned for the job), and Helsinki substituting for Leningrad when they needed MB on the ground. Oh yeah, and the acting and pacing are excellent.
Not only is the dancing superb, but it is filmed as well or better than I've ever seen. The camera truly moves with the dancers, and I mean that in a physical sense, not in an editing room sense. It's on a dolly, or it zooms or jumps. When a closeup of feet is desired, the dancers come closer to the camera (or vice versa); the film is not cut for that. I'm not saying the dances are cut-free; not so. But the cuts are for a purpose (ex: change camera position when the dancer does a radical direction change), not just to paste together a performance that could not be sustained by the dancers.
The c.track is a firehose of information. Director Hackford apologized at one point for not being smoother, but there was barely a moment when he wasn't saying something relevant. He did repeat himself a little bit, but I got the sense that you could sit with him twice through the film and still get more good stuff. Fun tidbit: the plane crash early in the film was not a model. They disguised a 707 as a 747 and really crashed it. It was cheaper than other plans. During 1 sequence he tried keeping up with the changes in location: Helsinki, Portugal, England (studio) all for a scene at seemingly 1 location for the viewer. I would hate to be a film editor.
Really fell for this one.
OMG, just noticed this is NOT classified as Music or Musical. Hokey Smokes. Let's see if that can get changed. I'm certainly going to count it as a music/al. Update: they added it to IMDb and I added it to the genres above.
OMG, just noticed this is NOT classified as Music or Musical. Hokey Smokes. Let's see if that can get changed. I'm certainly going to count it as a music/al. Update: they added it to IMDb and I added it to the genres above.
Columbia & more, dir. Hackford; 9+
