DVD Review: Vincente Minnelli’s Brigadoon (1954)

Brigadoon was hardly the most memorable of Lerner and Loewe’s Broadway collaborations (that honor goes to My Fair Lady). Even so, it’s a fine fantasy featuring one of the most entertaining grouches in the showtune universe. His name is Jeff Douglas (wryly played here by Van Johnson). He hardly sings, almost never dances, and spends a good portion of the show completely plastered.

Jeff Douglas is an early incarnation of the kind of character that Lerner and Loewe would later make into a specialty: much like Gigi’s Gaston and My Fair Lady’s Henry Higgins, Jeff is the antimatter—the representative of anyone who doesn’t, or can’t, sing to the birds.

Brigadoon’s frothy plot concerns a magical Scottish town that emerges from the mist for a single day every 100 years, only to disappear again by nightfall. Johnson and Gene Kelly are two American hunters who stumble upon this wee miracle; Cyd Charisse is the local girl who, owing to her situation, possesses the mating prospects of a mayfly.

If you can overlook the particularly bad sets, you’ll find that the production numbers are solid enough (although, with the exception of “Almost Like Being in Love,” none of the songs are very memorable). And the pairing of Kelly and Charisse—reprising their legendary pas de deux from Singin’ in the Rain—allows us to ignore that neither of them are terribly good singers.

The under-accessorized DVD includes four numbers that never made it into the film: “There but for You Go I,” “From This Day On,” “The Sword Dance,” and the unintentionally randy “Come to Me, Bend to Me.”