Gypsy (1962 film)

Gypsy
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Mervyn LeRoy
Produced by	Mervyn LeRoy
Written by	Leonard Spigelgass Based on the stage musical by Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne, and Stephen Sondheim, and a memoir by Gypsy Rose Lee
Starring	Rosalind Russell Natalie Wood Karl Malden
Music by	Jule Styne
Cinematography	Harry Stradling
Editing by	Philip W. Anderson
Distributed by	Warner Bros.
Release date(s)	November 1, 1962
Running time	143 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English

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.

Plot

Determined to make her young, blonde, and beautiful daughter June a vaudeville 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.

Rosalind Russell in a scene from the film

Years pass, and the girls no longer are young enough to pull off the childlike personae 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 films, 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.

Production

Rosalind Russell 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).

Cast

• Rosalind Russell ..... Rose Hovick
• Natalie Wood ..... Louise Hovick
• Karl Malden ..... Herbie Sommers
• Paul Wallace ..... Tulsa
• Suzanne Cupito ..... Baby June
• Ann Jillian ..... Dainty June
• Diane Pace ..... Baby Louise
• Betty Bruce ..... Tessie Tura
• Faith Dane ..... 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, 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 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 Cinematography (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.

DVD release

Warner Home Video 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.

External links

• Gypsy (1962 film) at the Internet Movie Database
• Gypsy (1962 film) at AllRovi