A Little Night Music (1977)

I frequently complain about today's Hollywood musicals and frequently say how much better they were a long time ago. But... I am not sure the 1970s was the time when they were better. Harold Prince's 1977 version of Sondheim's A Little Night Music is rather flat. In the first place, it stars Elizabeth Taylor and Diana Rigg, neither of whom can sing, and in the second place the whole thing is filmed without miuch energy. I suppose this makes sense for the deflated egos of a majority of the characters but even the upbeat songs feel slow as captured by Prince's languid camera and the milky lighting that is such a hallmark of the 1970s. The costumes are gorgeous, but the film really could have been livened up by more interesting production design. Len Cariou feels as though he is on his game, and he and Laurence Guittard and Lesley-Anne Down – all three of whom are in good voice – seem to know that they're in a comedy, but... well maybe it's Prince that is trying to make something other than a comedy. The comic scenes just don't really work here. 

Or perhaps it's Taylor's fault. She plays the whole film in much the same way – it's a rather sad and desperate performance. It's even very moving when she gets to "Send in the Clowns", despite her inability to sing the song. But she doesn't lean in to the character's schemes or her silliness, and if she calls for clowns she never lets us laugh at her. She asks only for pity.

I want to say something about the theatrical frame that Prince gives to the whole thing. We begin in a nineteenth-century Austrian theatre, and the story is introduced to us onstage before we move in and find ourselves in the real world. We end onstage as well, and the actors take bows as the credits roll. This is a fine device, and Ingmar Bergman himself (A Little Night Music is based on a film of his) had used it just two years earlier for his film of The Magic Flute. But Prince does nothing at all with this theatrical frame. We never return to it in the course of the movie. The characters never talk directly to us; the falseness of it all never breaks through. In Bergman's Flute, for example, we spend a short intermission with the actors, who smoke silently or play checkers or flirt. It's a stunning little section in that film. In A Little Night Music we get nothing like this, and there is no point at all to the frame except perhaps to remind us that the entire thing might have been better onstage.

I read on Wikipedia that reviews of this film were mostly negative and that critics made a lot of hay about Elizabeth Taylor's apparently wildly fluctuating weight from scene to scene. I saw none of this. She looked great throughout the film. These critics perhaps proved one of the central theses of A Little Night Music: that men are pigs, and that an older man easily thinks himself entitled to a younger woman while simultaneously imagining that an older woman is entitled to nothing. How dare they.