Joss Whedon shares his love of Brigadoon

Today's Daily Telegraph offers yet another installment of their Film-makers on Film series, as musical buff Joss Whedon discusses Vincente Minnelli's 1954 film adaptation of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, starring Gene Kelly, Van Johnson and Cyd Charisse. Here's an excerpt:

"I would say that the most important part of Brigadoon is Van Johnson's character," Whedon says. "This is a movie that, while completely venerating the classic Hollywood romantic love story, completely deconstructs it at the same time. Johnson is constantly telling you there's no such thing as a musical, that people don't really break into song.

"That basic idea of having something that is hiding its intelligence in song and dance and hiding its romanticism in cynicism is to me very difficult but very dazzling. If the movie was all sunshine and roses and heather on the hill, even I would be like, OK, forget it. But in fact there's an unrelenting darkness about it."

Whedon has a theory that every movie aspires to the state of the musical. "You can take any genre and say these horror bits, these action bits, these are the musical numbers - these are the moments where we are uplifted. The shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, the Neo and Agent Smith fight in The Matrix - those are the big closing numbers. The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don't have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead."

(Brigadoon is currently on sale at Amazon - and also airs this Wednesday morning at 6am/5am CST on Turner Classic Movies.)