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At MGM, Arthur Freed and Vincente Minnelli made their last musical together, Bells Are Ringing (1960), reunited with Comden and Green. Dean Martin joined the Broadway package, replacing Sydney Chaplin, Charlie’s eldest son.13 Adding Martin’s star persona to the Judy Holliday vehicle produced another close match of movie star to musical role. As Jeff Moss, a Broadway playwright who’s been hitting the bottle harder than the typewriter, Martin fit the public perception of his romance with the grape. Even those who don’t care for the liquid Martin style find him charming in this musical.14 The vivacious answering-service operator Holliday nurses him back to sobriety and success, and the laid back, breezy Martin hoofs with Holliday in casual soft-shoe duets like “Just in Time.” In “Drop that Name,” Minnelli’s eye adds stylish brilliance to a satire of New York’s pretentious social elite, a Black-and-White Ball of burlesques and grotesques in answer to An American in Paris. Though Bells Are Ringing is neither vintage Freed nor vintage Minnelli—cramped by a middle-class present, a CinemaScope frame imprisoned in stageset interiors, and self-conscious disguises for Holliday’s shape—it is pleasant enough Holliday and Martin.
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