The Mikado
|  Made just before the outbreak of World War II, Victor Schertzinger’s film version of The Mikado marked the first cinematic rendition of one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s lively operettas. It is not surprising that the newly formed British production company behind the film, which was funded largely with Hollywood money, chose to adapt The Mikado, since it was the most popular and widely renowned of Gilbert and Sullivan’s works. It is also not surprising that the film incorporated many of the players and the general style of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which held exclusive rights to the entirety of Gilbert and Sullivan’s oeuvre in England (and would until the early 1960s) and therefore was able to define what Gilbert and Sullivan looked like on stage. Thus, this screen version of The Mikado, unlike all others, is most interesting as a little slice of history: a snapshot of what the opera looked like with the D’Oyly Carte touch, even as Schertzinger and Geoffrey Toye, the former D’Oyly Carte musical director who wrote the adaptation, take a few careful liberties with the original text--just enough to open it up for the screen and introduce some fundamentally cinematic elements to its treatment, but not so much that it unduly tampered with what Gilbert and Sullivan fans had come to prize as the definitive approach to the material.The result is a mish-mash of visual and narrative approaches, some of which are successful, and some of which are not. The Mikado is best described as a hit-or-miss affair: Some scenes work with delightful buoyancy, while others feel strained. At times the film stays inordinately true to the D’Oyly Carte stage treatment, while at other times it exploits the possibilities of the big screen and reworks the material, including the addition of a prologue that visualizes what had previously been contained entirely in dialogue and lyrics while also cutting out certain songs and shortening the entire affair by close to an hour, partly by kicking up the tempo (there are points when the image is fading to black before songs have had a chance to end). We can see the desire to make the material more cinematic in the substantial monetary investment required to shoot the film in three-strip Technicolor, which gives the film outlandish candy hues that makes its setting in a mythical, nonexistent Japan feel all the more fantastical and cartoonish. Unfortunately, while the color is ravishing, the camerawork by Bernard Knowles, who had worked on several of Alfred Hitchcock’s British films, including The 39 Steps (1935) and Secret Agent (1936), feels consistently hemmed in, dwarfed by the outlandish sets and costumes by the Hungarian-born Marcel Vertès (who also worked on Alexander Korda’s production of The Thief of Bagdad and John Huston’s Moulin Rouge). The film’s production design is fundamentally absurd in its willfull exaggeration of East-through-the-eyes-of-the-West medieval Japanese styles, although it does tend to draw attention away from the awkwardness of all the Caucasian actors and actresses in “yellowface,” a then-acceptable practice drawn from a long theatrical tradition. The film’s inconsistency is evoked most prominently in the performances, which are as varied as the stars on screen. To play the role of Nanki-Poo, the lovestruck prince who is masquerading as a poor ministerial to escape enforced marriage to a much older woman by his father, the ruthless Emperor of Japan (John Barclay), the production tried to please potential American viewers by casting radio crooner Kenny Baker, who brings strong vocal chops to the role, but also a goofy grin and a complete lack of irony. On the other hand, the important roles of Ko-Ko, the chief executioner of the fictional town of Titipu, and Pooh-Bah (Sydney Granville), a corrupt official who comically fills more than a dozen different civic positions all at the same time, the production went with D’Oyly Carte veterans Martyn Green and Sydney Granville, who were sure to placate hardened Gilbert and Sullivan fans who wanted to see on screen exactly what they saw on stage. Green plays up his signature shtick as Ko-Ko, soft-shoeing around the soundstage and enacting various pratfalls to emphasize the fundamental absurdity of his character. Granville, on the other hand, a sizable baritone with a wonderfully expressive face, takes a more subtle approach, and as a result gets some of the biggest laughs in the film (he clearly understands that he is now playing to a camera lens, rather than the back row). Critics at the time recognized that The Mikado, at least in this iteration, didn’t comfortably make the leap from stage to screen (New York Times critic Frank S. Nugent, although largely generous in his review, still couldn’t help but wonder “whether it ever should be taken away from the footlights, from the realm of unabashed nonsense and make-believe”). Although there is a clear attempt to maintain the idea of exotic fantasy in the film version (note the painterly clouds that float through the foreground in one of the opening shots and the studious lack of disguising the painted backdrops), the film version still feels grounded, partly because of the tension between its semi-theatricality and the inherent transcendence of the camera lens. Because it is based on Gilbert and Sullivan, the film can’t help but be fun, full of memorable songs and whimsical moments of humor, much of which is anchored to a satirically dark, morbid sensibility (I can’t remember ever having seen a musical so obsessed with beheading). So, while not a particularly good film, The Mikado is still a worthy historical artifact, best seen as a pioneering first attempt to translate the immense popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan from one medium to another.
Copyright ©2011 James Kendrick Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick All images copyright © The Criterion Collection | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Overall Rating: 
(2.5)
