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Gypsy (1962 film)
Encyclopedia
Gypsy is a 1962
American
musical film
produced and directed by Mervyn LeRoy
. The screenplay
by Leonard Spigelgass
is based on the book
of the 1959 stage musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable
by Arthur Laurents
, which was adapted from Gypsy: A Memoir
by Gypsy Rose Lee
.
Stephen Sondheim
wrote the lyrics for songs composed by Jule Styne
.
The film was remade for television
in 1993.
headliner, willful, resourceful, domineering stage mother
Rose Hovick
will stop at nothing to achieve her goal. She drags the girl and her shy, awkward, and decidedly less-talented older sister Louise around the country in an effort to get them noticed, and with the assistance of agent Herbie Sommers, she manages to secure them bookings on the prestigious Orpheum Circuit
.
Years pass, and the girls no longer are young enough to pull off the childlike persona
e their mother insists they continue to project. June rebels and elopes with Jerry, one of the dancers who backs the act. Devastated by what she considers an act of betrayal, Rose pours all her energies into making a success of Louise, despite the young woman's obvious lack of singing and dancing skills. Not helping matters is the increasing popularity of sound film
s, which leads to a decline in the demand for stage entertainment. With bookings scarce, mother and daughter find themselves in Wichita, Kansas
, where the owner of a third-rate burlesque
house offers Louise a job.
When one of the strippers is arrested for shoplifting, Louise unwillingly becomes her replacement. At first her voice is shaky and her moves tentative at best, but as audiences respond to her she begins to gain confidence in herself. She blossoms as an entertainer billed as Gypsy Rose Lee, and eventually reaches a point where she tires of her mother's constant interference in both her life and wildly successful career. Louise confronts Rose and demands she leave her alone. Finally aware she has spent her life enslaved by a desperate need to be noticed, an angry, bitter, and bewildered Rose stumbles onto the empty stage of the deserted theater and experiences a moment of truth that leads to an emotional breakdown followed by a reconciliation with Louise.
and her husband, theatre producer Frederick Brisson, were hoping to do a straight dramatic version of the story based directly on the memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee
, but the book was irrevocably tied up in the rights to the play. Coincidentally, Russell had just starred in the film version of the Leonard Spigelgass
play A Majority of One
at Warner Bros, which Brisson had produced, and all parties came together to make Gypsy, with Russell starring, LeRoy directing, and Spigelgass writing the highly faithful adaptation of the Arthur Laurents
stage book.
Although Russell had starred and sung in the 1953 stage musical Wonderful Town
and the 1955 film The Girl Rush, the Gypsy score was beyond her. Her own gravelly singing voice was artfully blended with that of contralto
Lisa Kirk
. Kirk's ability to mimic Russell's voice is showcased in the final number "Rose's Turn", which is a clever blend of both of their voices. Kirk's full vocal version was released on the original soundtrack, although it is not the version used in the finished film. In later years, Russell's original tryout vocals were rediscovered on scratchy acetate discs and included as bonus tracks on the CD reissue of the film's soundtrack.
Marni Nixon
had dubbed Natalie Wood
's singing voice in West Side Story
the previous year, but Wood did her own singing in Gypsy. While Wood recorded a separate version of "Little Lamb" for the soundtrack album, in the film she sang the song "live" on the set. Other songs performed live were "Mr. Goldstone, I Love You" and the reprise of "Small World," both sung by Russell (not Kirk).
"Together Wherever We Go" was deleted prior to the film's release, although it was included on the soundtrack album
, and "You'll Never Get Away From Me" was abbreviated to a solo for Rose following the initial run. In the DVD release of the film, both numbers - taken from a 16-millimeter print of inferior quality - are included as bonus features.
"And although Jerome Robbins has more consistent choreographic opportunity in 'WSS,' at any rate one of his numbers in 'Gypsy' is on par with anything in the other show and movie. Last but no less important than these considerations, 'Gypsy' on celluloid boasts two performances – by Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood” – immeasurably superior to any of the acting in the 'West Side Story' film."
"In the main, LeRoy’s mise-en-scène is a perfect compromise between the evocatively theatrical atmosphere of the original, and shrewdly filmic innovation. All the best numbers reflect this. One thinks of 'Some People', where the marvelously urgent words and rhythms of the song (delivered by the possessive Rose, mother of the little girl Louise whom she is to transform into strip-queen Gypsy) are put across by Russell with knife-edge timing of gesture and facial expression, most notably in her contemptuously comic grimace as she plunges a hatpin into her hat on the climactic line, 'Well, they can stay and rot – but not Rose!' Or again, of the way in which the vivacious chorus (for) 'Mr. Goldstone, I Love You' is followed (with a change of mood as daringly impressive as anything in Capra or Ford) by a cut and a slow track-in to the crouchingly isolated form of Louise (Natalie Wood), cradling and singing softly to a nuzzling 'Little Lamb' as she sits lonely on her noisily spoiled birthday. LeRoy’s shooting of the numbers is never static – except when it helps so to be, as in most of this ballad."
"Miss Wood and Ann Jilliann (as Louise’s younger sister, June) do a staircase duet, 'If Mama Was Married', which ends on an exhilarating, long-held reprise of a low-angle close-shot, taken from lower down the stairs, of them peering at us over the banister, right of the frame (the grouping decoratively balanced by a candelabra on the left), and then hanging on to the final ringing note."
"And in the film’s greatest sequence, the 'All I Need Is the Girl' routine (in which Jerome Robbins exceeds even his 'WSS' dance-design), LeRoy’s command is masterful. A youthful hoofer (played by Paul Wallace) demonstrates to the enthralled Louise the fabulous number with which he hopes one day to conquer New York: and it becomes a celebration of his show-business ambition and an orgasmic symbol of her hopeless, amorous yearning for him."
"LeRoy preserves the potently blue-shadowed alley and yard setting (plaudits to art director John Beckman and Technirama-Technicolor camerawork by Harry Stradling), by largely holding the action in medium-shot: but his camera not only tracks in a little on Louise as she longingly stands, stretching out her hand or pressing voluptuously to her body, it also moves with Wallace during his terpsichorean solo laterally - unobtrusively yet tellingly. And finally, it pulls back to view them both when Louise at last does join in, and they caper and twirl together, Wallace yelling exultantly to her as they leap, 'Again! Again! Again!...' This number, a choreographed sex-act, rates for me (with 'Niña' in 'The Pirate' and 'The Man that Got Away' in 'A Star Is Born') as one of the three most inspired I have seen in the film-musical genre."
"Strandling and Beckman deserve our thanks, too, for the atmospherically misty-blue railway station décor which is the background to 'Everything’s Coming Up Roses', Rose's bitterly intransigent song of resolve – when June, her original protégée, unexpectedly quits to get married – that Louise shall take her place. It is handled by Rosalind Russell with neurotically pile-driving brilliance: nowhere more so than in her mortified gaze and vocal emphasis on the lines 'You’ll be swell!' and 'Mama is gonna see to it!' And at the finish of her solo, her arms come up and freeze above her head, while the camera pans slowly above and to the left of her (we see her arms and face at the bottom of frame) to take in the railroad vista – and we hear the faint, melancholy, poetic hoot of a train ... the train carrying June away from her?"
"As Louise – now Gypsy – prepares to go on-stage to peel for the first time, LeRoy tracks with her, first out of her dressing-room, then away in front of her as she walks towards the stage, then laterally – until we join her behind the curtain. This lengthy track conveys all Gypsy’s nervous excitement. The director’s share in the marvelous portrayals by Russell and Wood is surely indisputable: and these portrayals culminate in the riveting quarrel scene – in the way that Miss Wood looks almost shyly down at her ritzy gown and says in a quiet, breaking voice, apropro of her new fame, 'Mama – I love it' (later repeating this several times in a furious tirade which the actress gradates faultlessly, never quite losing our sympathy); and in the flickering combination of rage, guilt and misery in Miss Russell’s face, after her exasperated rhetorical query, 'What did I do it all for?,' has been answered (unanswerably) by Gypsy’s softly accusing 'I thought you did it for me, Mama...'"
"Now that Louise-Gypsy no longer seems to need her, Rose, defiantly alone on an empty, crimson-glowing stage, does a bravura song and mimed striptease, 'Rose’s Turn'. Once more, Russell is magnetic (who cares if Lisa Kirk dubbed a few of her high notes?): especially in her final, orgiastic repetition, 'For me! For me! For me!'. But the silence after this number is broken by the applause of the smiling, watching Gypsy: mother and daughter are reconciled; and the film’s last line, appropriately, is 'Madame Rose – and her daughter … Gypsy!', delivered with beamingly affectionate élan and a raised, annunciatory sweep of the arm by Russell to Wood (LeRoy lifting his camera slightly to echo Rose’s raised arm). The two of them turn and walk away from us, arm in arm (the camera tracking slightly away from them, to increase the formalized finality of the image), to a triumphant, measured orchestral surge on the soundtrack of the “curtain up” passage in 'Everything’s Coming Up Roses'. "This grand finale is only paralleled in impact by that of Cukor’s 'A Star Is Born.' One regrets all the more that Warner Bros. (as in the case of 'A Star Is Born') saw fit to make certain cuts in the versions of 'Gypsy' released in Britain and widely in America."
Variety
noted, "There is a wonderfully funny sequence involving three nails-hard strippers which comes when Gypsy has been unreeling about an hour. The sequence is thoroughly welcome and almost desperately needed to counteract a certain Jane One-Note implicit in the tale of a stage mother whose egotisms become something of a bore despite the canny skills of director-producer Mervyn LeRoy to contrive it otherwise. Rosalind Russell's performance as the smalltime brood-hen deserves commendation . . . It is interesting to watch [Natalie Wood] . . . go through the motions in a burlesque world that is prettied up in soft-focus and a kind of phony innocence. Any resemblance of the art of strip, and its setting, to reality is, in this film, purely fleeting."
(Harry Stradling
), Best Costume Design (Orry-Kelly
), and Best Music Adaptation or Treatment (Frank Perkins
).
Rosalind Russell won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
, her second consecutive win in this category; she won the previous year for A Majority of One. Additional nominations included Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Director, Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Natalie Wood), Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Karl Malden), and New Star of the Year – Actor (Paul Wallace).
Leonard Spigelgass was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award
for Best Written American Musical.
released the Region 1 DVD on May 2, 2000. The film is in anamorphic widescreen
format with an audio track in English and subtitles in English and French.
The Region 2 DVD was released on December 6, 2006. The film is in fullscreen
format with audio tracks in French and English and subtitles in French.
Gypsy is one of six films included in the box set The Natalie Wood Collection released on February 3, 2009.
1962 in film
The year 1962 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*May - The Golden Horse Film Festival and Awards are officially founded by the Taiwanese government....
American
Cinema of the United States
The cinema of the United States, also known as Hollywood, has had a profound effect on cinema across the world since the early 20th century. Its history is sometimes separated into four main periods: the silent film era, classical Hollywood cinema, New Hollywood, and the contemporary period...
musical film
Musical film
The musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs usually advance the plot or develop the film's characters, though in some cases they serve merely as breaks in the storyline, often as elaborate...
produced and directed by Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy
Mervyn LeRoy was an American film director, producer and sometime actor.-Early life:Born to Jewish parents in San Francisco, California, his family was financially ruined by the 1906 earthquake...
. The screenplay
Screenplay
A screenplay or script is a written work that is made especially for a film or television program. Screenplays can be original works or adaptations from existing pieces of writing. In them, the movement, actions, expression, and dialogues of the characters are also narrated...
by Leonard Spigelgass
Leonard Spigelgass
Leonard Spigelgass was an American film producer and screenwriter.Born in Brooklyn, New York, Spigelgass got his start collaborating on the script for Erich Von Stroheim's Hello, Sister!...
is based on the book
Libretto
A libretto is the text used in an extended musical work such as an opera, operetta, masque, oratorio, cantata, or musical. The term "libretto" is also sometimes used to refer to the text of major liturgical works, such as mass, requiem, and sacred cantata, or even the story line of a...
of the 1959 stage musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable
Gypsy: A Musical Fable
Gypsy is a musical with music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, and a book by Arthur Laurents. Gypsy is loosely based on the 1957 memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous striptease artist, and focuses on her mother, Rose, whose name has become synonymous with "the ultimate show business...
by Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S...
, which was adapted from Gypsy: A Memoir
Gypsy: A Memoir
Gypsy: A Memoir is a 1957 book written by striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee, which inspired the Broadway musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable.The first edition was published by Harper in 1957. It is now available in a 1999 paperback reprint....
by Gypsy Rose Lee
Gypsy Rose Lee
Gypsy Rose Lee was an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She was also an actress, author, and playwright whose 1957 memoir was made into the stage musical and film Gypsy.-Early life:...
.
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award...
wrote the lyrics for songs composed by Jule Styne
Jule Styne
Jule Styne was a British-born American songwriter especially famous for a series of Broadway musicals, which included several very well known and frequently revived shows.-Early life:...
.
The film was remade for television
Gypsy (1993 film)
Gypsy is a 1993 musical television film directed by Emile Ardolino. The teleplay by Arthur Laurents is an adaptation of his book of the 1959 stage musical Gypsy: A Musical Fable, which was based on Gypsy: A Memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee....
in 1993.
Plot
Determined to make her young, blonde, and beautiful daughter June a vaudevilleVaudeville
Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...
headliner, willful, resourceful, domineering stage mother
Stage mother
In the performing arts, a stage mother is a term for the mother of a child actor. The mother will often drive her child to auditions, make sure he or she is on the set on time, etc...
Rose Hovick
Rose Thompson Hovick
Rose Elizabeth Thompson Hovick was the mother of two famous performing daughters: burlesque artist Gypsy Rose Lee and actress June Havoc.-Life and career:...
will stop at nothing to achieve her goal. She drags the girl and her shy, awkward, and decidedly less-talented older sister Louise around the country in an effort to get them noticed, and with the assistance of agent Herbie Sommers, she manages to secure them bookings on the prestigious Orpheum Circuit
Orpheum Circuit, Inc.
Orpheum Circuit, Inc., was a company started by Martin Beck who owned a series of vaudeville theaters and motion picture theaters.- The company :...
.
Persona
A persona, in the word's everyday usage, is a social role or a character played by an actor. The word is derived from Latin, where it originally referred to a theatrical mask. The Latin word probably derived from the Etruscan word "phersu", with the same meaning, and that from the Greek πρόσωπον...
e their mother insists they continue to project. June rebels and elopes with Jerry, one of the dancers who backs the act. Devastated by what she considers an act of betrayal, Rose pours all her energies into making a success of Louise, despite the young woman's obvious lack of singing and dancing skills. Not helping matters is the increasing popularity of sound film
Sound film
A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before sound motion pictures were made commercially...
s, which leads to a decline in the demand for stage entertainment. With bookings scarce, mother and daughter find themselves in Wichita, Kansas
Wichita, Kansas
Wichita is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kansas.As of the 2010 census, the city population was 382,368. Located in south-central Kansas on the Arkansas River, Wichita is the county seat of Sedgwick County and the principal city of the Wichita metropolitan area...
, where the owner of a third-rate burlesque
Burlesque
Burlesque is a literary, dramatic or musical work intended to cause laughter by caricaturing the manner or spirit of serious works, or by ludicrous treatment of their subjects...
house offers Louise a job.
When one of the strippers is arrested for shoplifting, Louise unwillingly becomes her replacement. At first her voice is shaky and her moves tentative at best, but as audiences respond to her she begins to gain confidence in herself. She blossoms as an entertainer billed as Gypsy Rose Lee, and eventually reaches a point where she tires of her mother's constant interference in both her life and wildly successful career. Louise confronts Rose and demands she leave her alone. Finally aware she has spent her life enslaved by a desperate need to be noticed, an angry, bitter, and bewildered Rose stumbles onto the empty stage of the deserted theater and experiences a moment of truth that leads to an emotional breakdown followed by a reconciliation with Louise.
Production
Rosalind RussellRosalind Russell
Rosalind Russell was an American actress of stage and screen, perhaps best known for her role as a fast-talking newspaper reporter in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy His Girl Friday, as well as the role of Mame Dennis in the film Auntie Mame...
and her husband, theatre producer Frederick Brisson, were hoping to do a straight dramatic version of the story based directly on the memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee
Gypsy Rose Lee
Gypsy Rose Lee was an American burlesque entertainer famous for her striptease act. She was also an actress, author, and playwright whose 1957 memoir was made into the stage musical and film Gypsy.-Early life:...
, but the book was irrevocably tied up in the rights to the play. Coincidentally, Russell had just starred in the film version of the Leonard Spigelgass
Leonard Spigelgass
Leonard Spigelgass was an American film producer and screenwriter.Born in Brooklyn, New York, Spigelgass got his start collaborating on the script for Erich Von Stroheim's Hello, Sister!...
play A Majority of One
A Majority of One
-Plot:The comedy involves Mrs. Jacoby, a Jewish widow from Brooklyn, New York, and Koichi Asano, a millionaire widower from Tokyo. Mrs. Jacoby is sailing to Japan with her daughter and foreign service officer son-in-law who is being posted to the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo...
at Warner Bros, which Brisson had produced, and all parties came together to make Gypsy, with Russell starring, LeRoy directing, and Spigelgass writing the highly faithful adaptation of the Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents
Arthur Laurents was an American playwright, stage director and screenwriter.After writing scripts for radio shows after college and then training films for the U.S...
stage book.
Although Russell had starred and sung in the 1953 stage musical Wonderful Town
Wonderful Town
Wonderful Town is a musical with a book written by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein...
and the 1955 film The Girl Rush, the Gypsy score was beyond her. Her own gravelly singing voice was artfully blended with that of contralto
Contralto
Contralto is the deepest female classical singing voice, with the lowest tessitura, falling between tenor and mezzo-soprano. It typically ranges between the F below middle C to the second G above middle C , although at the extremes some voices can reach the E below middle C or the second B above...
Lisa Kirk
Lisa Kirk
Lisa Kirk was an American actress and singer noted for her comic talents and rich contralto .-Career:...
. Kirk's ability to mimic Russell's voice is showcased in the final number "Rose's Turn", which is a clever blend of both of their voices. Kirk's full vocal version was released on the original soundtrack, although it is not the version used in the finished film. In later years, Russell's original tryout vocals were rediscovered on scratchy acetate discs and included as bonus tracks on the CD reissue of the film's soundtrack.
Marni Nixon
Marni Nixon
Marni Nixon is an American soprano and playback singer for featured actresses in movie musicals. She has also spent much of her career performing in concerts with major symphony orchestras around the world and in operas and musicals throughout the United States.-Biography:Born Margaret Nixon...
had dubbed Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood
Natalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko was an American film and television actress. After first working in films as a child, Wood became a successful Hollywood star as a young adult, receiving three Academy Award nominations before she was 25 years old.Wood began acting in movies at the...
's singing voice in West Side Story
West Side Story (film)
West Side Story is a 1961 musical film directed by Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. The film is an adaptation of the 1957 Broadway musical of the same name, which in turn was adapted from William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. It stars Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno,...
the previous year, but Wood did her own singing in Gypsy. While Wood recorded a separate version of "Little Lamb" for the soundtrack album, in the film she sang the song "live" on the set. Other songs performed live were "Mr. Goldstone, I Love You" and the reprise of "Small World," both sung by Russell (not Kirk).
Cast
- Rosalind RussellRosalind RussellRosalind Russell was an American actress of stage and screen, perhaps best known for her role as a fast-talking newspaper reporter in the Howard Hawks screwball comedy His Girl Friday, as well as the role of Mame Dennis in the film Auntie Mame...
..... Rose Hovick - Natalie WoodNatalie WoodNatalie Wood, born Natalia Nikolaevna Zacharenko was an American film and television actress. After first working in films as a child, Wood became a successful Hollywood star as a young adult, receiving three Academy Award nominations before she was 25 years old.Wood began acting in movies at the...
..... Louise Hovick - Karl MaldenKarl MaldenKarl Malden was an American actor. In a career that spanned more than seven decades, he performed in such classic films as A Streetcar Named Desire, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, On the Waterfront and One-Eyed Jacks...
..... Herbie Sommers - Paul Wallace ..... Tulsa
- Suzanne CupitoMorgan BrittanyMorgan Brittany is an American film and television actress. She is possibly best known for her role in the 1980s primetime soap opera Dallas, where she portrayed Katherine Wentworth, the scheming younger half-sister of Pamela Ewing and Cliff Barnes.-Early career:Under her birth name, Brittany...
..... Baby June - Ann JillianAnn JillianAnn Jillian is an American actress, who started acting at age 10. Her career reached its zenith in the 1980s, with her best-known role being that of waitress Cassie Cranston on the sitcom It's a Living.-Early life and career:...
..... Dainty June - Diane Pace ..... Baby Louise
- Betty Bruce ..... Tessie Tura
- Faith DaneFaith DaneFaith Dane, frequently known simply as Faith, is an actress, musician, and artist. She is also a perennial candidate for elected office in Washington, D.C....
..... Mazeppa - Roxanne Arlen ..... Electra
Song list
- The "Gypsy" Overture ... conducted by Jule Styne
- Small World ... Rose
- Some People ... Rose
- Baby June and Her Newsboys ... Baby June and Chorus
- Mr. Goldstone, I Love You ... Rose
- Little Lamb ... Louise
- You'll Never Get Away From Me ... Rose and Herbie
- Dainty June and Her Farmboys ... Dainty June and Chorus
- If Mama Was Married ... June and Louise
- All I Need Is the Girl ... Tulsa
- Everything's Coming Up Roses ... Rose
- Together Wherever We Go ... Rose, Herbie, and Louise
- You Gotta Have A Gimmick ... Tessie Tura, Mazeppa, and Electra
- Small World (reprise) ... Rose
- Let Me Entertain You ... Louise
- Rose's Turn ... Rose
"Together Wherever We Go" was deleted prior to the film's release, although it was included on the soundtrack album
Soundtrack album
A soundtrack album is any album that incorporates music directly recorded from the soundtrack of a particular feature film or television program. In some cases, not all the tracks from the movie are included in the album; however there are rare cases of songs in the trailers that do not appear in...
, and "You'll Never Get Away From Me" was abbreviated to a solo for Rose following the initial run. In the DVD release of the film, both numbers - taken from a 16-millimeter print of inferior quality - are included as bonus features.
Critical reception
Film historian Douglas McVay in his tome, "The Musical Film," observed, "Fine as 'West Side Story' is, though, it is equaled and, arguably, surpassed – in a rather different idiom – by another filmed Broadway hit: Mervyn LeRoy’s “Gypsy.” Arthur Laurents’s book (for) 'West Side Story' (adapted for the screen by Ernest Lehman), though largely craftsmanlike, falls short of his libretto for 'Gypsy' (scripted on celluloid by Leonard Spigelgass), based on the memoirs of the transatlantic stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. The dialogue and situations in 'Gypsy' have more wit, bite and emotional range, and the characterizations are more complex.""And although Jerome Robbins has more consistent choreographic opportunity in 'WSS,' at any rate one of his numbers in 'Gypsy' is on par with anything in the other show and movie. Last but no less important than these considerations, 'Gypsy' on celluloid boasts two performances – by Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood” – immeasurably superior to any of the acting in the 'West Side Story' film."
"In the main, LeRoy’s mise-en-scène is a perfect compromise between the evocatively theatrical atmosphere of the original, and shrewdly filmic innovation. All the best numbers reflect this. One thinks of 'Some People', where the marvelously urgent words and rhythms of the song (delivered by the possessive Rose, mother of the little girl Louise whom she is to transform into strip-queen Gypsy) are put across by Russell with knife-edge timing of gesture and facial expression, most notably in her contemptuously comic grimace as she plunges a hatpin into her hat on the climactic line, 'Well, they can stay and rot – but not Rose!' Or again, of the way in which the vivacious chorus (for) 'Mr. Goldstone, I Love You' is followed (with a change of mood as daringly impressive as anything in Capra or Ford) by a cut and a slow track-in to the crouchingly isolated form of Louise (Natalie Wood), cradling and singing softly to a nuzzling 'Little Lamb' as she sits lonely on her noisily spoiled birthday. LeRoy’s shooting of the numbers is never static – except when it helps so to be, as in most of this ballad."
"Miss Wood and Ann Jilliann (as Louise’s younger sister, June) do a staircase duet, 'If Mama Was Married', which ends on an exhilarating, long-held reprise of a low-angle close-shot, taken from lower down the stairs, of them peering at us over the banister, right of the frame (the grouping decoratively balanced by a candelabra on the left), and then hanging on to the final ringing note."
"And in the film’s greatest sequence, the 'All I Need Is the Girl' routine (in which Jerome Robbins exceeds even his 'WSS' dance-design), LeRoy’s command is masterful. A youthful hoofer (played by Paul Wallace) demonstrates to the enthralled Louise the fabulous number with which he hopes one day to conquer New York: and it becomes a celebration of his show-business ambition and an orgasmic symbol of her hopeless, amorous yearning for him."
"LeRoy preserves the potently blue-shadowed alley and yard setting (plaudits to art director John Beckman and Technirama-Technicolor camerawork by Harry Stradling), by largely holding the action in medium-shot: but his camera not only tracks in a little on Louise as she longingly stands, stretching out her hand or pressing voluptuously to her body, it also moves with Wallace during his terpsichorean solo laterally - unobtrusively yet tellingly. And finally, it pulls back to view them both when Louise at last does join in, and they caper and twirl together, Wallace yelling exultantly to her as they leap, 'Again! Again! Again!...' This number, a choreographed sex-act, rates for me (with 'Niña' in 'The Pirate' and 'The Man that Got Away' in 'A Star Is Born') as one of the three most inspired I have seen in the film-musical genre."
"Strandling and Beckman deserve our thanks, too, for the atmospherically misty-blue railway station décor which is the background to 'Everything’s Coming Up Roses', Rose's bitterly intransigent song of resolve – when June, her original protégée, unexpectedly quits to get married – that Louise shall take her place. It is handled by Rosalind Russell with neurotically pile-driving brilliance: nowhere more so than in her mortified gaze and vocal emphasis on the lines 'You’ll be swell!' and 'Mama is gonna see to it!' And at the finish of her solo, her arms come up and freeze above her head, while the camera pans slowly above and to the left of her (we see her arms and face at the bottom of frame) to take in the railroad vista – and we hear the faint, melancholy, poetic hoot of a train ... the train carrying June away from her?"
"As Louise – now Gypsy – prepares to go on-stage to peel for the first time, LeRoy tracks with her, first out of her dressing-room, then away in front of her as she walks towards the stage, then laterally – until we join her behind the curtain. This lengthy track conveys all Gypsy’s nervous excitement. The director’s share in the marvelous portrayals by Russell and Wood is surely indisputable: and these portrayals culminate in the riveting quarrel scene – in the way that Miss Wood looks almost shyly down at her ritzy gown and says in a quiet, breaking voice, apropro of her new fame, 'Mama – I love it' (later repeating this several times in a furious tirade which the actress gradates faultlessly, never quite losing our sympathy); and in the flickering combination of rage, guilt and misery in Miss Russell’s face, after her exasperated rhetorical query, 'What did I do it all for?,' has been answered (unanswerably) by Gypsy’s softly accusing 'I thought you did it for me, Mama...'"
"Now that Louise-Gypsy no longer seems to need her, Rose, defiantly alone on an empty, crimson-glowing stage, does a bravura song and mimed striptease, 'Rose’s Turn'. Once more, Russell is magnetic (who cares if Lisa Kirk dubbed a few of her high notes?): especially in her final, orgiastic repetition, 'For me! For me! For me!'. But the silence after this number is broken by the applause of the smiling, watching Gypsy: mother and daughter are reconciled; and the film’s last line, appropriately, is 'Madame Rose – and her daughter … Gypsy!', delivered with beamingly affectionate élan and a raised, annunciatory sweep of the arm by Russell to Wood (LeRoy lifting his camera slightly to echo Rose’s raised arm). The two of them turn and walk away from us, arm in arm (the camera tracking slightly away from them, to increase the formalized finality of the image), to a triumphant, measured orchestral surge on the soundtrack of the “curtain up” passage in 'Everything’s Coming Up Roses'. "This grand finale is only paralleled in impact by that of Cukor’s 'A Star Is Born.' One regrets all the more that Warner Bros. (as in the case of 'A Star Is Born') saw fit to make certain cuts in the versions of 'Gypsy' released in Britain and widely in America."
Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...
noted, "There is a wonderfully funny sequence involving three nails-hard strippers which comes when Gypsy has been unreeling about an hour. The sequence is thoroughly welcome and almost desperately needed to counteract a certain Jane One-Note implicit in the tale of a stage mother whose egotisms become something of a bore despite the canny skills of director-producer Mervyn LeRoy to contrive it otherwise. Rosalind Russell's performance as the smalltime brood-hen deserves commendation . . . It is interesting to watch [Natalie Wood] . . . go through the motions in a burlesque world that is prettied up in soft-focus and a kind of phony innocence. Any resemblance of the art of strip, and its setting, to reality is, in this film, purely fleeting."
Awards and nominations
The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Best CinematographyAcademy Award for Best Cinematography
The Academy Award for Best Cinematography is an Academy Award awarded each year to a cinematographer for work in one particular motion picture.-History:...
(Harry Stradling
Harry Stradling
Harry Stradling Sr., A.S.C. was an American cinematographer with over 130 films to his credit.His uncle Walter Stradling and son Harry Stradling Jr. were also cinematographers.-Early career:...
), Best Costume Design (Orry-Kelly
Orry-Kelly
Orry-Kelly was the professional name of Orry George Kelly , a prolific Hollywood costume designer....
), and Best Music Adaptation or Treatment (Frank Perkins
Frank Perkins (composer)
Frank S. Perkins was an American song composer best known for the song Stars Fell on Alabama ....
).
Rosalind Russell won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy
The Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy was first awarded by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as a separate category in 1950...
, her second consecutive win in this category; she won the previous year for A Majority of One. Additional nominations included Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, Best Director, Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Natalie Wood), Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy (Karl Malden), and New Star of the Year – Actor (Paul Wallace).
Leonard Spigelgass was nominated for the Writers Guild of America Award
Writers Guild of America Awards 1962
The 15th Writers Guild of America Awards, given at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles, California, U.S. on 7 May 1963, honored the best writers of 1962.-Film:*Best Written American Comedy:**That Touch of Mink - Nate Monaster and Stanley Shapiro...
for Best Written American Musical.
DVD release
Warner Home VideoWarner Home Video
Warner Home Video is the home video unit of Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc., itself part of Time Warner. It was founded in 1978 as WCI Home Video . The company launched in the United States with twenty films on VHS and Betamax videocassettes in late 1979...
released the Region 1 DVD on May 2, 2000. The film is in anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen
Anamorphic widescreen, when applied to DVD manufacture, is a video process that horizontally squeezes a widescreen image so that it can be stored in a standard 4:3 aspect ratio DVD image frame. Compatible playback equipment can then re-expand the horizontal dimension to show the original widescreen...
format with an audio track in English and subtitles in English and French.
The Region 2 DVD was released on December 6, 2006. The film is in fullscreen
Pan and scan
Pan and scan is a method of adjusting widescreen film images so that they can be shown within the proportions of a standard definition 4:3 aspect ratio television screen, often cropping off the sides of the original widescreen image to focus on the composition's most important aspects...
format with audio tracks in French and English and subtitles in French.
Gypsy is one of six films included in the box set The Natalie Wood Collection released on February 3, 2009.