Call Me Madam doesn’t quite live up to my requirement of having left an obvious and noticeable impression on pop culture. It’s basically a piece of forgettable, if enjoyable, fluff. But it does fulfill my requirement of becoming intimately familiar with the filmography of Donald O’Connor, although I’ll probably skip all the Francis the Talking Mule bits. (You probably know O’Connor as Cosmo in Singin’ in the Rain. That’s where I first saw him, and fell in love with his rubber-faced grace.)
The film is adapted from a broadway play, which in turn was inspired by Eugenie Anderson, who, in 1949, was the first female ambassador appointed by the United States. Not the most promising pedigree for a film, but I knew right off this movie was going to be great because it starts out in DC, and just to make sure you know it’s in DC you can see every national monument out of every window from every angle. I’m pretty sure this movie paid more attention to the geography of the made-up country it spent the rest of its time in, Lichtenburg, than the actual geography of DC. What else is new?
In this film, like in many musicals, dancing is the main form of courtship. I could probably count on one hand the number of times Donald O’Connor and Vera-Ellen, his love interest, speak to one another, but they dance circles around each other. (That first link not only contains a self-referential joke, it also takes place in a hat shop! It’s like O’Connor knows all my buttons.) That’s how the audience is shown a couple is compatible. It’s the way they move with each other, not the way they converse with each other, that’s important.
This sort of leaves Ethel Merman out in the rain, as her character is established as clumsy very early on. In fact, in quite a few ways Ethel Merman’s character is slighted out of plot opportunities, which is strange seeing as she’s ostensibly the main character. Merman totally makes up for this though, by being brash, and confidant, and just generally awesome. I actually found the dynamic between her and O’Connor to be the most interesting aspect of the film. They’re presented almost entirely as equals. This is possible since they’re both busy pursuing their own respective love interests instead of being interested in each other, so neither of them is forced into a constricting gender role within their relationship. Their friendship was a wonderful surprise from a movie that I’d chalked up as a loss to the normative ’50s right from the start.
The first time “You’re Just in Love” crops up in the film it already displays their platonic friendship. It places Merman in a role usually reserved for a male sidekick to the romantic lead, a role similar to the on O’Connor plays in Singin’ in the Rain actually, she’s there to pick O’Connor up and dust him off in the second act. When “You’re Just in Love” reappears however, O’Connor and Merman have switched parts, cementing their relationship as one of equals.
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