Masculinity, Credibility, and Gene Kelly: A Scotsman’s Quandary
How I came to terms with MGM’s bloody Brigadoon
By MARC ORR
I’ve been a fan of Hollywood star/dancer Gene Kelly, and film musicals in general, since my childhood. This has sometimes burdened me with two formidable dichotomies: how to defend my masculinity as a heterosexual male, and my credibility as a student of Scottish history.
The film musical genre, I am told constantly, is the forte of gay men, a more potent defining characteristic, it would seem, than any lifestyle choice.
Stand-up comics and a host of poorly written situation and romantic comedies regularly endorse this understanding. I seem to remember a joke of this ilk in every other episode of Will & Grace (note the Judy Garland memorabilia on the wall below). That was quite enough for a straight boy growing up in the 1970s to contend with.
However, it is a film musical, and a Gene Kelly film musical, that is held mostly responsible for the “tartanification of Scotland,” the cultural dismantling of our great nation into the Highland-jigging, kilted, tartan-clad land as portrayed on the front of shortbread tins around the world. That musical is Vincente Minnelli’s Brigadoon (1954).
Something Special to Get You Through the Summer
My love of Gene Kelly became common knowledge at school when I was 9 years old. We were asked to name our favourite film stars. Steve McQueen was a popular choice for the boys, as were Sean Connery and Roger Moore (Bond was huge in the ‘70s). And I seem to remember that even Elvis Presley got a mention (he’d just passed away and all of his films were shown on television).
As you’ve probably already anticipated, my choice was met with particular derision. Two things allowed me a modicum of redemption: football and humour. If you can play the national sport well and are also perceived as funny, then the respect and freedom from your contemporaries can be invigorating. Mostly.
Barry Floyd was his name: a tall, stocky bully with a huge mane of blonde curls — an anti-Harpo, if you will. He made the next six months of my young life, a very long time to a nine year old, an absolute misery. Simply because my celebrity of choice was Gene Kelly, he would punch, kick, and spit on me with every opportunity that presented itself.
Despite a visit to the school by my mother and admonishment from teachers, the bullying continued. My father’s advice, doled out early on in the period of persecution, seemed to me a last resort: “There’s only one way to deal with bullies, son. You hit them right back.” I had never hit anybody in my life, and the thought of any kind of violence abhorred me.
On the final day of school before the summer break, my tormentor cornered me in the library, advising me he was going to give me “something special that would get me through the summer.”
Barry Floyd had hardly advanced when I caught him square on the jaw with my right fist and sent him sprawling into a portable trolley of cheap paperback Westerns. Fitting, I thought.
He stared up at me from the floor with an expression of pained incredulity, but said nothing more. I turned and walked out of the library followed by, I like to think, the spirit of an athletic dancer in t-shirt and chinos who leapt into the air and triumphantly clicked the heels of his loafers.
Barry Floyd didn’t bother us again. He never laid another finger on me, nor did he ridicule Gene Kelly after that. Not to my face, at least.
Spreading The Word of Gene
In my teenage years, my love of Gene Kelly is something I only shared with those closest to me, and I spread The Word of Gene with wonderful success.
For example, when I taped On the Town (1949) on Betamax in 1982, it had such a profound effect on my brother that years later, when he began his career as a carpenter, he would walk onto building sites singing, “I feel like I’m not out of bed yet.” Likewise, after I recorded Singin’ in the Rain (1952), I caught my other brother watching the titular number after, falsely, denouncing its merits.
With women, my Gene Kelly fandom is something I reveal early. I once used the DVD of Gene’s AFI Tribute to court a woman (with whom I’d eventually have a nine-year relationship). She told me she’d never liked Gene Kelly but admitted after watching the Tribute that she had found him funny, talented, and humble.
Another woman not only fell in love with Singin’ in the Rain after I showed it to her, but also bought it as a present for her little girl who similarly adored it and showed it to her friends.
In my adulthood, I’ve never tried to conceal my love of Gene Kelly. On the contrary, it is something I wear on my sleeve with pride: an adornment of muscular, joyous, and inventive brilliance. Equipped with an extensive knowledge of his work and opinions formulated after years of viewing and reading, I will, and have, gone to war in Gene’s defence.
So it is an irony not lost on me — again, a Gene Kelly fan and a student of Scottish history at the nation’s oldest University — that one of Kelly’s films, MGM’s Brigadoon, is regularly accused of perpetuating the myth and image of Scotland as a primitive country driven by a supernatural thirst for the following: whimsy, legend, whisky, dancing, quaintness, and tartan. Acres of tartan. Swathes of tartan. Huge, billowing, terrifying mounds of tartan.
Bloody Brigadoon
Derision in Scotland and the wider UK for MGM’s Brigadoon was instantaneous. According to Colin McArthur, the most extensive coverage of the film was in the Glasgow Press (109–11):
- “It’s the queerest village in the Highlands.”
- “It’s got colour… It’s got Cinemascope… It’s got Kelly. BUT IT’S PHONEY BALONEY.”
- “A couple of Americans ‘huntin’ grouse among trees with the wrong kind of guns and without dogs and beaters…”
- “The director seems to have gone out of his way to make the film look as unauthentic as possible.”
- “Someone should’ve told [MGM] just a little about Scotland and how the place looks and how the natives talk.”
Even the NY Times reviewed Brigadoon as “pretty weak synthetic Scotch.” And the fact that it followed Walt Disney’s equally ludicrous Rob Roy: The Highland Rogue (1953) — in which an Englishman portrayed one of Scotland’s most celebrated outlaws (the ignominy!) — compounded the resentment tenfold.
Some reports suggest that Gene Kelly came to Scotland to scout locations for the film in 1953. Photographs of him outside Glasgow Central Train Station and receiving an award in Edinburgh exist (below). But this seems rather implausible given that the film musical was on the wane and MGM no longer had faith in the genre.
Furthermore, if Kelly’s An American in Paris (1951) wasn’t shot on-location when the genre still had legs, then what would have compelled the studio to embark on a location shoot in a country notorious for intemperate weather and difficult terrain?
I’m not sure exactly where in the Gene Kelly pantheon I would place Brigadoon. It doesn’t make my eyes and ears bleed like Living in a Big Way (1947) or Summer Stock (1950). But then again, it doesn’t possess flashes of brilliance that can be found, albeit fleetingly, in both of those films.
In his Film Guide, Leslie Halliwell described Brigadoon as “Lost Horizonish.” I cannot agree with that. The lamasery of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel was a Utopian ideal of contentment, long life, perfect health, and cultural preservation. But MGM’s village of Brigadoon has none of that — just sheep, a market, men walking around aimlessly with bales of hay, candy, and some heather ale (what is that?).
Also, Cyd Charisse’s lilt rivals Dick Van Dyke’s from Mary Poppins (1964) for the worst accent in cinematic history. Finally, the removal of the finest song from the original score, “Come to Me, Bend to Me,” is bewildering. Perhaps Gene and Minnelli thought it slowed down the narrative? Such as it is, MGM’s Brigadoon is not blessed with the kind of score that can survive without its best song.
Caledonian condemnation of Brigadoon is not unanimous, however. A popular Glasgow DJ of the ‘70s and ‘80s always spoke highly of the film. Also, I remember my own grandmother’s insisting, when Kelly and Charisse face the Highland landscape after “Heather on the Hill” (video below), it must have been filmed in Scotland because of how beautiful the scenery was. Extraordinary — this was a woman who’d seen the real landscape in all its glory!
For most of us Scots, however, Brigadoon is the watchword for the trite, whimsical, and patronising manner in which our country has been portrayed in popular culture.
IMDB lists dozens of ways the film has been referenced in media texts like The Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, and RuPaul’s Drag Race. The best comes from Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). When Simon Callow is met by the sight of kilted dancers at the Scottish wedding, he exclaims, “It’s Brigadoon, It’s bloody Brigadoon!”
These are perhaps the greatest examples of Brigadoon’s impact. People need not have seen the film (or the Broadway original) to understand the reference.
In spite of its aesthetic and narrative issues, what MGM’s Brigadoon has been held responsible for is rather unfair, I suppose — at least when compared to other onscreen interpretations of Scottish legends and myths like Highlander (1986), Rob Roy (1995), Loch Ness (1996), and Braveheart (1995).
Brigadoon is a fictional tale of fantasy and claims to be nothing more than this — unlike Braveheart, for instance. Hollywood’s account of William Wallace whipped Scotland into such a frenzy that a political party even adopted Mel Gibson’s painted face on their literature. Further, posters read,
Today it’s not just ‘Bravehearts’ who choose independence — it’s also ‘wise heads’ — and they use the ballot box. You’ve seen the movie. Now face reality.
Crivvens! In the end, I guess I should ask myself, which is really the greater crime?
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