Claudio Carvalho The New Yorkers Tommy Albright (Gene Kelly) and Jeff Douglas (Van Johnson) travel in a hunting trip to the highlands of Scotland. Tommy and Jeff are best friends and Tommy is taking a break from his engagement with his fiancée Jane Ashton (Elaine Stewart).Tommy and Jeff get lost on the hills and out of the blue, they see a small town that is out of the map. When they arrive in town, Tommy meets the local Fiona Campbell (Cyd Charisse) and they learn that the place is called Brigadoon. Further, it is the wedding day of her younger sister and they are invited to stay to the party. Meanwhile Tommy and Fiona fall in love with each other. Later Tommy and the skeptical Jeff discover that a local preacher had prayed to God on the Eighteenth Century asking for a miracle to protect Brigadoon from witches that lived in Scotland. From that day on, when the locals go to sleep in the night, they wake up 100 years later. However, if a dweller leaves Brigadoon, the town and the citizens would all disappear forever. But an outsider could stay forever in Brigadoon provided he or she loves someone in the enchanted town."Brigadoon" is a fairy tale that combines "Lost Horizon" with "The Sleeping Beauty". The plot is silly and the songs are dated, but the romantic story and Cyd Charisse are delightful and the final message ("when you love someone, everything is possible, even a miracle") is very beautiful. My vote is seven.Title (Brazil): "A Lenda dos Beijos Perdidos" ("The Legend of the Lost Kisses")

dimplet The bottom line in a review is, did you enjoy the movie? The next question is why, or why not? For me, the movie is OK, but not great. Why? The music is as good as it gets, the acting is good, the story line tugs at your heartstrings. Yet it generally falls a bit flat. This is the same puzzle that Bosley Crowther confronted in his New York Times review of 1954. He had two complaints: several of the key songs from the Broadway production were cut, and the dancing was too mechanistic:-- "But the dancing and the performance—well, we're afraid that it is in here that the life and the smoothness of the original have been perceptibly lost—which is odd, because the personable Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse have the lead dancing roles. Even so, their several individual numbers are done too slickly, too mechanistically. What should be wistful and lyric smack strongly of trickery and style. And the several ensemble dances—with the exception of the wild and fierce "The Chase," wherein the Scots pursue a fugitive from their village—seem as calculated as Rockette parades.It might be noted that Mr. Kelly has taken credit for the choreography. On the stage, it was by Agnes De Mille." --Re-examining "The Heather on the Hill" dance routine, I have to agree. It is a long ballet number that seems to be saying, "We've got good taste." If there had been a separate choreographer, rather than the lead dancer, it might have been easier for the director to identify and correct the weaknesses. Brigadoon, which opened in 1947, is one of the early modern musicals. Oklahoma! in 1943 is generally credited as being the first modern musical, which fully integrated song and dance with the story, without resorting to gimmicks like making one or more of the roles a singer/dancer, such as in Showboat or the Fred Astaire movies. Actually, you could make a case for "The Wizard of Oz" as being the first. The problem confronting these musicals is how do you retain some credibility when people start singing and dancing? With Rodgers and Hammerstein, they worked hard to make the dance numbers fit the characters and locale, so in Oklahoma! we have cowboy-style dancing. With How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, we get whimsical officer worker dance routines. In Brigadoon, we do get Scottish dance routines, and it is unlikely that one or two numbers, like Heather on the Hill, would deflate the whole show. But we see a problem that would sink Hello, Dolly!, which Gene Kelly would both direct and choreograph: There is too much emphasis on technique. Hiring a separate choreographer would have helped, but the studio was in a cost-cutting mode.Filming it entirely in a studio didn't help, given that Scotland was like one of the characters in the story. Wikipedia says the weather in Scotland was too unpredictable, but they had found a spot in California that could have been a stand-in. I think the realism of filming outside would have helped make this fantasy work. Omitting four songs may also have hurt character development. More depth to the story might have helped bring the village of Brigadoon alive for the viewer.Ultimately, I do not know why Brigadoon is a bit disappointing. But it is worth watching. And when you do, you need to make an extra effort to shelve disbelief because this is a fairy tale. The strength of the story is wanting to escape from the rat race of the modern world, something many have felt for a long time. But the problems in the world are not just due to society, but to troubled individuals, and there is no full escape. In this regard, Brigadoon anticipates The Village, though it is certainly not as central to the plot.One element of the story is believable. I would move to Brigadoon in a heartbeat to be with Cyd Charisse!Spoiler alert:On Tuesday the village of Brigadoon gets bulldozed to make way for a hyper-space bypass and factory outlet shopping mall.Idea: Brigadoon is ripe for a remake with the missing numbers restored. It would look fantastic shot on location, or at least some CGI. It would seem George Clooney would be a natural for Tommy Albright, Tom Hanks could play Jeff, and Catherine Zeta-Jones would be a dynamite Fiona. Until you try to imagine them singing and dancing across the heather. Are there any leading men in Hollywood that can sing and dance? Well, there's always ballet dancers.

angusalastair I saw Brigadoon on TV last night (12 Sept 2009). I am 61 years old and have been watching films as long as I can remember. I can truthfully say that Brigadoon stands alone as by far and away the worst film I have ever seen. The accents were shameful. The local children's club would have produced better sets. The characters were so wooden that they probably contracted dry rot from the tears of the patrons who had the misfortune to watch them. It is to be hoped that the stars of this film had hides thick enough to protect them from the embarrassment which they must have suffered on seeing this film. The owners of this tripe should perform a great service to mankind and destroy all copies of this film.

Neil Doyle I love MGM musicals but I have to confess BRIGADOON is never one that captured my fancy. You'd think that a fantasy about a village that only comes to life once every hundred years wouldn't require the use of real settings as a background for the story. But the artificiality of all the studio soundstage sets is so striking that it immediately clashes with the story, even though it's supposed to be a fantasy.I understand the Broadway musical was really designed around singers in the leading roles since some of the songs required real voices. Here the switch has been made to give dancers GENE KELLY and CYD CHARISSE the main chores and they've even dropped several good songs in order to accommodate them. Kelly requested that a certain number be dropped because he wasn't up to it vocally.And so, we have a rather dreary looking production with artificial sets for the village, a painted cyclorama screen for the hillside settings, and a grumpy VAN JOHNSON in a role that offers very little sympathy to his plight. Unfortunately, all of it seems curiously lifeless and artificial.At least CYD CHARISSE makes a lovely, intense Fiona and her dance routines with Kelly are, of course, nicely executed. Kelly did all the choreography rather than Agnes deMille who did the stage version.But somehow it all falls flat, perhaps due to the trite dialog that's supposed to be humorous--and the pacing is poor. The final scene in a New York restaurant seems to throw the whole story off kilter.Summing up: This is one MGM musical I had trouble sitting through, to be absolutely honest. What was Vincent Minnelli thinking?