Fred Astaire is at his suavest best, accompanied by two other top-drawer musical comedy stars. Nanette Fabray was Broadway's new golden girl at the time. (Three consecutive flop musicals did her in, and she was supplanted by new girl in town Gwen Verdon.) Jack Buchanan was a song-and-dance man with style, the British Fred Astaire if you will. Each has his or her moment to shine, and when the trio come together for "Triplets" (from the 1937 musical Between the Devil), they will slay you. This is musical comedy know-how, transferred to the screen. At the helm of this Band Wagon was Vincente Minnelli, whose first important Broadway credit was Dietz & Schwartz's 1935 revue At Home Abroad.

Along with those stars and those songs (which include "Dancing in the Dark," "By Myself," "High and Low" and the written-for-Hollywood rouser "That's Entertainment"), The Band Wagon has a delicious screenplay devised by Betty Comden and Adolph Green. So the whole thing is a great treat. The two-DVD set has been decked out with all sorts of watchable extras, so there's no question about this one.

The Band Wagon is available singly or as part of Warner Home Entertainment's Classic Musicals box set. Three of the four other titles are adaptations of Broadway musicals. Bells Are Ringing does the job fairly well, preserving the treasured stage performance of Judy Holliday in what turned out to be her last hurrah. "I'm Goin' Back," Judy sings in her big final number, "where I can be me, to the Bonjour Tristesse Brassiere Company." This is selling a song, all right. Once again Comden & Green and Minnelli, this time with music from Jule Styne.

The other adaptations are good examples of what not to do. Finian's Rainbow and Brigadoon, two near-perfect musicals that opened within two months in early 1947, both collapse on celluloid. For different reasons, yes, but the films are mighty curious. With On the Town, An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain under Gene Kelly's belt, M-G-M decided in 1954 to send him to the Highlands of Scotland. Not a good idea, as it turned out. For starters, what had been two strong-singing roles on stage were handed to dancers Kelly and Cyd Charisse. This one was yet another Minnelli epic, but without that magic touch.

There's Kelly, and then there's Astaire. Astaire got Finian's but it was a very different Astaire in a very different era. The show's strong social stance kept it off the screen for more than 20 years. By the time it went before the cameras, it was the age of Aquarius — Hair had already arrived on Broadway — and Astaire was pushing 70. So Fred didn't play the romantic hero, or the comic hero; instead, he played the heroine's father.  This was a non-singing role in 1947; the fellow who played it on stage, coincidentally enough, appears as the heroine's father in the Brigadoon film. In an attempt at making Finian's significant to 1968 audiences, youthful director Francis Ford Coppola was put in charge.  The results were understandably very different from what was onstage in 1947; that was the whole idea, I suppose. But it doesn't reflect well on what Burton Lane and Yip Harburg created a generation before. Continued...