(already subscribe? log in).

Film series that steps out

THIS STORY APPEARED IN

January 15, 2012|By Ty Burr

KINO VIDEO (Jeannette MacDonald and…)

When we think of the American movie musical, we think of its perfect moments. Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dancing cheek to cheek. Busby Berkeley’s insane terpsichorean fractals.

ArtsEmerson’s five-month film series “Gotta Dance: A Survey of the American Film Musical’’ has those moments and more, and if you’ve never seen “Singin’ in the Rain’’ on a big screen, you owe it to yourself to get down to the Paramount Center’s Bright Family Screening Room when the MGM classic opens the series this Friday night and Saturday afternoon. But “Gotta Dance,’’ like most of ArtsEmerson’s adventurous programming, is more welcome for rescuing a number of rarely seen and hardly ever seen early film musicals and bringing them to the Bright in restored prints. They’re not all great films - in some cases they’re instructively bad - but they fill in the blanks of Hollywood musical history in a way the perfect ones don’t. They’re not the apex of the form but the building blocks that got it there.

The series makes its mission clear with its opening salvo, a double bill of 1929’s “The Broadway Melody’’ and 1952’s “Singin’ in the Rain’’ - the first movie musical and the greatest. Billed as the first all-singing, all-talking entry in the genre, “Broadway Melody’’ won the best picture Oscar at the second Academy Awards; it was a technical and musical marvel of its time. Today it’s a marvelous time capsule, a rough-and-ready backstage melodrama that shows how many kinks the genre had to work out of its system.

It also may capture the sweat of vaudeville and the New York stage better than any movie that came after it. Star Charles King was an established song-and-dance man with little movie-star elegance to him, and Anita Page and Bessie Love, playing a sister act that gets split up by romantic complications, have the desperate energy of hoofers seeking their big break. Too much of “Broadway Melody’’ is given over to fuzzily-recorded dramatic scenes and not enough to production numbers like “The Wedding of the Painted Doll.’’ But you can easily see where the genre will go from here.