What I liked: This is a classic musical, or at least it comes in the box set labeled classic musicals. I remembered seeing it in middle school as the movie version of taming of the shrew It wasn’t particularly inspiring at the time and we ended up watching it as part of a girls night after everyone else voted down Indiana Jones and Star Wars, so Kiss Me Kate was not likely to get a good response from me. It turns out there is much more to the movie than we watched in middle school. The more than we watched in middle school isn’t really made up parts relevant to the plot, rather it is all of the famous show tunes that you have never placed: It’s too darn hot, Brush up your Shakespeare, True to you in my own fashion, Why can’t you behave, etc. These songs are great, they are catchy, they are famous, they have nothing to do with each other or the plot. So essentially Kiss Me Kate excels at being a musical. It has an absurd plot that is largely disregarded by the actors and audience, it has long dance interludes for no apparent with remarkably talented performers, it has songs that will be sung by show choirs with better vocals and better staging than the original. The film also had some fun plays on Shakespeare in general and Taming of the Shrew in particular like not letting the leading lady eat the whole night because stage fright upsets her stomach a parallel to one of the tactics used in Taming of the Shrew. I also really liked the dumb thug, he was very funny and I thoroughly enjoyed his performance.
What I didn’t: Many of the advantages that make this undeniably a musical are limitations for a normal movie. What was the plot? wait was this actually mostly the plot of Singing in the Rain? How exactly did the plot resolve? Why do the mafia guys dance? How did this acting troop actually make money? Was the script writing process just “hey look we have all these songs that didn’t fit into any of our other musicals, let’s put them all together and pretend they are related”? Also some of the filming was odd, for example the standard way to shoot a tap dance number is to focus on the feet and zoom in when there is particularly fancy footwork. It is not to focus on the person’s face while fancy footwork is happening, leaving us to wonder if the dancer can actually dance. Finally, the musical was written in 1948 and is a retelling of Taming of the Shrew, so as you can guess, the relationships are highly questionable by today’s standards.
Who should watch this: People who love musicals. Not people who love Shakespeare.
Would I watch it again? No but now I know where all those songs come from.
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