Gabey (Gene Kelly), Chip (Frank Sinatra) and Ozzie (Jules Munshin) have been let loose on the city by the U.S. Navy for 24 hours and they are looking to experience as much of the Big Apple as they can. The prime directive for Gabey and Ozzie is to find “girls”. Chip, on the other hand, just wants to see all the sights the city has to offer, using an outdated guidebook dating back to 1905. When Gabey falls for the pin-up girl, “Miss Turnstiles”, AKA Ivy Smith (Vera Ellen), after seeing her picture on a poster whilst travelling on the subway, he drags his pals along to find her, using the poster for clues. Along the way, our buddies hail a cab driven by Hildie (Betty Garrett), who takes a fancy to Chip, who is only interested in seeing the highlights of New York City. When Hildie takes the guys to the Museum of Anthropological History on their quest to find “Miss Turnstiles”, Ozzie falls for Claire Hudson (Ann Miller), a scientist doing a paper for the museum on prehistoric man. Claire notices a distinct resemblance between Ozzie and the museum’s own specimen of Pithecantropus Erectus. Here, Claire launches into “Prehistoric Man” which is a number just full of double entendre like “bearskin… he just sat around in nothing but bearskin – I really love bearskin”. After making a hasty exit from the museum and spending the entire morning searching together for Ivy, our pals split up to look for her independently. Hildie manages to convince Chip to come up to her place where her roommate Lucy Shmeeler (Alice Pearce – some may recognise her as Mrs. Kravitz in the Bewitched television series), is nursing a cold. Hildie persuades Lucy to go to a movie so that she and Chip can be alone. Meanwhile, Gabey manages to track Ivy down and make a date to meet at the Empire State Building where he was to reconnect with his friends and head off for an evening “on the town”.
On the Town contains all the elements one comes to expect from a good musical – great songs like “You’re Awful” and “Come Up To My Place”, fabulous dance numbers like “Count On Me” and “A Day In New York”, comic relief from madcap character actors like Garrett, Munshin and Pearce, and a happy ending. It also incorporates a number of techniques and concepts that directors Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, along with writers Adolph Green and Betty Comden, not only used in this film, such as the use of the same song and dance customised over and over to show the passage of time and space, but also in their 1952 classic Singin’ in the Rain.
When you have the unbeatable combination of Kelly, Donen, producer Arthur Freed and composer Leonard Bernstein mixed with the writing talent of Betty Comden and Adolph Green, you can’t help but have a truly great musical. This one is a keeper!
