In 1953, the golden age of the MGM musical by the Freed Unit was at its absolute zenith, but it was a twilight zenith; television was already eroding audiences and tastes were changing. Against this backdrop, Vincente Minnelli, the high priest of aesthetics, the demiurge of Technicolor and neurosis applied to set design, directs the most metatextual, self-deprecating, and ultimately intellectually profound work in the history of the genre. It is a film that uses the oldest plot in the world—“Let's put on a show!”—to orchestrate a critical essay on itself, on art, on entertainment, and on the thin (and perhaps non-existent) line that divides them.

The film is an almost painful act of courage, a Sunset Boulevard in tap shoes. The opening is brutal in its honesty: Tony Hunter (Fred Astaire) is not playing a musical star on the decline; he is a musical star on the decline. Astaire, the icon of 1930s Art Deco grace, the man who defined masculine elegance for two decades, is now a relic. He arrives at the station and no one recognizes him (except to mistake him for someone else). His “memorabilia”—the top hat, the walking stick—are up for auction, sold off cheaply. Minnelli and the screenwriters (the legendary Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who essentially play themselves here through the characters of Lester Marton and Lily Marton) take Astaire's professional anxiety and turn it into the narrative engine. Tony is obsolete. He is a hoofer, a line dancer, in a world that now wants Marlon Brando and the Method.

The central conflict of the film is not romantic, it is hermeneutic. It is a holy war between “High Art” and “Low Entertainment.” When Tony agrees to return to Broadway, he finds himself trapped in the project of Jeffrey Cordova (a Jack Buchanan who delivers one of the most sublime comic performances ever). Cordova is a genius, a megalomaniac, a monstrous hybrid of Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier, and José Ferrer. He is the archetype of the auteur director who believes that entertainment is vulgar. So he decides to transform Tony's light musical comedy into a modern, pretentious, and unreadable version of Faust, complete with smoke, revolving platforms, hellfire, and (of course) no dance numbers. The sequence of the failure of this “serious” show is the most cathartic and intellectually honest catastrophe in MGM history. It is the revenge of Hollywood craftsmanship against sterile intellectualism. It is the film that says: selling your soul to the devil for Art (with a capital A) is stupid; but selling Art for Entertainment (with a capital E) is a form of salvation.

When Faust fails, the film is reborn. And this is where it sets out its philosophical thesis, its programmatic manifesto, condensed into the song “That's Entertainment!”. It is a number that should be studied in every semiotics course. It is a treatise on aesthetics that, in three minutes, demolishes the cultural hierarchy. The lyrics by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz (taken, like most of the score, from their golden catalog) are brilliantly cheeky: they equate Oedipus Rex (“where a guy kills his father and ends up with his mother”) to a clown getting a pie in the face, equate a tear-jerking soap opera to Hamlet delivering a monologue. The point is not the subject, Minnelli tells us. The point is the form, the execution, the impact. If it works, if it moves you, if it entertains you, if it transports you, then it is entertainment. And entertainment is not the opposite of art: it is its purest and most democratic form. The rest of the film is a practical demonstration of this thesis.

To prove the thesis, you need a muse. And here, The Band Wagon performs its second miracle. Forget Ginger Rogers (love is also for her, but that's another thing). Gabrielle Gerard (Cyd Charisse) is a creature from another universe. She is the epitome of High Art: a classical dancer, technical, icy, and (as the script points out) “too tall” for Tony. She is ballet, he is tap dancing. Their meeting is a clash of artistic civilizations. But it is in the number “Dancing in the Dark” that the fusion, the Hegelian synthesis, takes place. In a Central Park that is clearly a soundstage (and therefore even more magical, a metaphysical utopia of movement), Minnelli orchestrates their meeting. It is not a dance, it is levitation. It is not a duet, it is a dialogue. Astaire, the man who always hid his effort, finds in Charisse a partner whose technique is so absolute that she seems weightless. It is the perfect union between Broadway and the Bolshoi, proof that the two languages can create a new and sublime syntax.

But the apotheosis of the film, the point where the thesis of “That's Entertainment!” becomes flesh and Technicolor, is the final ballet: “The Girl Hunt Ballet.” It is the musical noir. It is Minnelli unleashing his fetish for pulp fiction, taking Mickey Spillane's novels (the most “lowbrow,” popular, and ‘vulgar’ art of the time) and transforming them into an expressionist ballet. Astaire, complete with a hard-boiled detective voiceover (“It was one of those nights...”), is perfect in the role of detective Rod Riley. And Charisse, in a fiery red velvet dress (Minnelli red!) that cuts through the frame, is the archetypal femme fatale, split in two (the innocent brunette, the lethal blonde). It is a masterpiece of set design (with pulp writing floating in the air), color, choreography, and, above all, intelligence. It is the ultimate demonstration that the “lowbrow” (pulp) and the “highbrow” (ballet) can not only coexist but, in the hands of a genius, can create a masterpiece that is greater and smarter than the sum of its parts.

The Band Wagon is a twilight film, but one of a dazzling twilight. It is the most acute and self-aware love letter Hollywood has ever written to itself. It is the musical that understood that, in order to survive in the age of television and cynicism, it was no longer enough to be flawless; one had to be conscious. Minnelli, Astaire, Comden, and Green took a corpse (the Broadway revue) and used it to resurrect another dying entity (Astaire's career), creating in the process the definitive testament to why the art of entertainment is not only necessary: it is sacred. It is a film that does not age, because its thesis—that a well-made show is the highest form of intelligence—is eternal.