My Life, and a great song called Come to Me Bend to Me. Almost Like Being In Love is in the Campbell house, and Waitin’ for My Deary isn’t. Tommy and Jeff aren’t in Bonnie Jean and there’s more to Meg Brockie than what they have in the movie. And the Campbell family is actually the McLaren family. There’s a sword dance before the reel and Tommy and Fiona don’t do as much dancing as they did.
But enough of the differences between stage and movie. It is an awesome movie, full or great, catchy songs and great dancing. My friends and I who were in it always got Bonnie Jean stuck in everybody’shead and who couldn’t like Gene Kelly singing “Almost Like Being in Love”? If you just watch the movie and not the play, then it is awesome. It shows true love is out there, you just don’t know where you’ll find it. And that “the hardest part in life is giving up everything, but that’s the only way you’ll get everything.”

Musicals cover a huge range, from the serious thought provoking productions like Cabaret (and if you don’t think a musical can have a serious outcome consider the fact that the German government edited out the song “Tomorrow belongs to me” because they felt it might inflame those with neo-nazi proclivities) to those that fill a need within people to believe in a beautiful story ( witness the fact that millions tuned in to BBC T.V. to find out who would play Maria in the new West End production by Andrew Lloyd Weber). Brigadoon falls in the middle and comes from that glorious era of Hollywood mega musicals. It epitomises everything that critics complain about when they discuss the Hollywoodisation of the world. The highlands of Scotland were never like this, the accents are hoochter, choochter nonsense, the kilts are embarrasingly bright, in fact the whole production is in Ansco, a film process that relegates gaudy to the dim recesses of dull. The performers walk about with glazed looks on their faces, even the sensational Cyd Charisse spends most of the film with a slightly stunned look which is accompanied by Gene Kelly’s permanent manic grin. The songs are generally dreadful ( Waiting for my Dearie must rank near the top in toe curling banality). Kelly and Charisse are magnificent when they dance but this is near balletic stuff and is difficult to take more than once since it is so artificial. The highland dancing is fake which is a pity since so much more could have been made of this rich lore of traditional dance. The film lacks the gusto and fun of ‘Seven Brides’and is twee and banal and all in all does not travel well through time.