By Scott Ross
I had a roommate once who loathed Leslie Caron generally, despised this movie in particular, and hated especially the 17-minute ballet to the Gershwin tone-poem at the end. Nothing I could say would budge her an inch from her, to me, somewhat hysterical position. I still don’t understand her objections. I was particularly flummoxed by her rejection of the ballet as a fantasy of the Gene Kelly character’s love of French Impressionism: Since Kelly’s character is a painter, the ballet has a logic that Agnes de Mille might have envied. Despite its numerous flaws — not the ones my friend enumerated — An American in Paris not only continues to look good; it looks better with the passing years. I will admit it doesn’t always sound terrific, mostly during the smart-ass triple narration sequence at the beginning. I don’t mind the thinness of Alan Jay Lerner’s screenplay nearly as much as his irritating stabs at boulevard wit, especially for the genuinely witty Oscar Levant. (Although for all I know Levant may have written, or re-written, his own lines.) The only really bad scene in the picture also involves Levant, frantically slurping coffee, gulping down cognac and smoking multiple cigarettes out of nervousness. I realize that this is a 1950s movie musical and therefore unrelated to life on any known planet, but if anyone actually behaved this way in public he’d be either institutionalized, or cast into outer darkness forever. Did anyone ever laugh at this bit?
There is also exactly one unfortunate musical sequence: The “Embraceable You” introduction of Leslie Caron as, variously, a voluptuary, a studious drone and a party girl. It’s an astonishingly obvious rip-off of the “Miss Turnstiles” number originated by Jerry Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Betty Comden and Adolph Green for the Broadway On the Town and repeated two years earlier in the MGM movie of that show, starring and choreographed by one Gene Kelly, otherwise known as the star and choreographer of An American in Paris. Otherwise the songs and dances are marvelously designed, shot and executed, especially the wonderful “I Got Rhythm” number for Kelly and a gaggle of excited French children. It’s the simplest number in the picture, and nothing else in An American in Paris touches it for sheer pleasure. Kelly is clearly having a ball, and the kids are delightful: The young boy in blue who ingenuously says, “Massachusetts” is charming and the little boy in the smock who shouts, “Non!” unselfconsciously adorable. As Gary Giddins notes in the Blu-ray documentary, the Kelly character, whose canvases are imitative of Utrillo, seems to be less an aspiring painter than a hoofer. I would add that Levant, as a pianist/composer, appears capable only of playing and writing George Gershwin’s tunes. It can take a heap o’ tolerance to watch old musicals without constantly rolling one’s eyes.
I sound as if I dislike the picture, and nothing could be further from the truth; when you admire a movie as much as I do this one — when it strives for so much, and calls forth such splendid results from its creators — you want it to be better, and because of that its flaws loom larger. An American in Paris is no Singin’ in the Rain (what is?) but it comes in a thoroughly respectable second. It was put together by people who cared, and who seemed to be trying to push beyond the limits of their own creativity. Vincente Minnelli was occasionally dismissed as a mere colorist, or a designer-director, but his best work is characterized by intelligence and wit, and by a sense of the totality of the picture, not merely its outward design. And when you reflect on the fact that aside from some establishing images of Paris at the beginning the entire movie was shot in the MGM studio and on its back-lots, the fulsomeness of that design is overwhelming. Things like this can look so phony, yet there is nothing in An American in Paris that betrays it as almost entirely set-bound. You believe in it as you believe a melancholic’s reverie can become a colorful ballet performing lively homages to the masters of French Impressionism. The approach to the Gershwin music is intelligent too, and almost too conscientious; Saul Chaplin was so concerned about the changes he had to make to the tone-poem that accompanies the ballet at the end that he was still apologizing to Gershwin’s shade decades later. He needn’t have. Not only is his adaptation a good one, it’s the right one for the movie. The original piece can be, and has been, played and recorded repeatedly, and will continue to be. Chaplin’s 17-minute reduction can be thought of as a variation, done once, for a specific purpose, and done right well.
Rather startlingly, the great ballad “Love is Here to Stay” was not a standard until it was presented here, in one of the most beautifully atmospheric dance numbers in all of American musicals, set on a Left Bank quai (itself of course entirely fabricated) and entrancingly performed by Kelly and Caron. Minnelli has three additional visual tours de force in the picture, and two of them work wonderfully. The first is the “Concerto in F” sequence for Levant, the last the ballet; the one that falls flat is the black and white Beaux-Arts ball that precedes the ballet. White in a color picture has to be handled delicately to register on eyes accustomed to looking at imagery in a fuller spectrum. I can think of very few filmmakers who could carry white off in a color movie that wasn’t an animated cartoon: Huston, twice, with The Kremlin Letter and The Man Who Would Be King; Altman at the end of McCabe and Mrs. Miller; the Coens with Fargo; and Lean with Doctor Zhivago. And in all these cases the directors were depicting snow as a more or less deadly force of nature. I understand why Minnelli wanted to use black and white as a means of making the sudden explosion of color in the ballet register with even greater force, but with everyone on screen dressed in white with black touches and photographed in front of largely white sets, the concept just doesn’t work. The “Concerto in F” fantasy, however, taking off on Buster Keaton’s multiple roles in The Playhouse, succeeds wonderfully as Levant’s daydream of a concert hall performance with himself not only as pianist but conductor, timpanist, the entire violin section and, at the end, overly enthusiastic spectator. It’s exquisitely lit by the cinematographer Alfred Gilks and just brief enough to work perfectly; the repeated revelations of Levant in this musical role or that becomes increasingly funny rather than, as it might have, obvious and annoying.
Georges Guétary’s big Folies Bergere solo, “Stairway to Paradise,” is likewise wittily designed and executed and there are several other good numbers, chief among them the little known “Tra-La-La” for Kelly and Levant. I am not an inveterate admirer of Ira Gershwin’s lyrics, which often seem to me to drag his brother George’s airborne melodies down to the earthen level of mediocrity, and who needs that? Still, those for “Tra-La-La” are amusing, as are those for the shoehorned-in “By Strauss,” which seems to exist solely to get Kelly, Levant and Guétary together for one number (why is a Folies Bergère performing carping about popular music?) although I’d hate to lose it since the waltz with the old lady is so beguiling.
It’s time I acknowledged the single non-musical star of An American in Paris, and sang her praises. Nina Foch, playing Kelly’s gently predatory art patron, gives a performance of such richness and surprise it overcomes her too-good-to-be-true moniker (Milo, “as in Venus de”) and even a formal dress that emulates the statue. Foch’s is one of those jobs of acting that transcends the limitations of the role as written, and breathes animating life into it. Her Milo may be needy, and even desperate, but surely she deserves better than Kelly’s caddish use of her toward the end, and Levant’s oblique telling-off at the ball. This is presumably what people who call Lerner a misogynist have in mind. I wonder. A man who marries as many times as Lerner did, unless he’s gay (like Minnelli) or highly suspect (like Cary Grant), is probably not a misogynist but an overly hopeful romantic, doomed always to disappointment. (Frankly, if his most recent biographer is to be trusted, Grant had more of a claim to misogyny.) Minnelli apparently just wanted someone to see to his needs, and even if he’d been more open about what everyone in Hollywood knew from the day he arrived wearing make-up there aren’t many gay men who will sign on for that. Lerner was simply bad at marriage but kept trying.
Everybody involved with An American in Paris seemed to sense they were working on something special, but for my sake as well as yours I won’t cite all of them. I will single out Gilks, who softened what was often MGM’s garish approach to Technicolor, especially in musicals, with a more muted palette; Bill Alton, who shot the extraordinary-looking ballet; Preston Ames and Cedric Gibbons for their rich set design and Edwin B. Willis for his equally commendable decoration; Orry-Kelly for his apposite “book” scene costumes (well, except for that off-the-shoulder job he designed for Foch); Irene Sharaff for her extravagantly fulsome ballet designs; and, among others, Chaplin, Green, Conrad Salinger, Robert Franklyn, Benny Carter (who appears un-billed in the cabaret sequence) and Skip Martin for their work as orchestrators and arrangers. Their labors coalesce in the ballet, and I concede that if you don’t enjoy that you probably won’t warm to the rest of the picture either. If you’re open to it the ballet is, from the opening (achieved through the use of a photographic mirror) to the end (ditto) in which the moist red rose trembles in Kelly’s hand, an aural, visual and emotional feast in which the styles and canvasses of Dufy, Renoir, Rousseau, Utrillo, Roualt, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec and Monet are not slavishly copied but imaginatively invoked. All, that is, except for Kelly’s turn as Lautrec’s Chocolat, which is indeed a copy (other than the dancer’s black skin) and which presumably caused many female and some male hearts to palpitate.* But the dance itself is what matters, and like most of the movie that surrounds it, it’s tremendous.
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
*Someone in the ’70s — I think it was the playwright Robert Patrick, but don’t hold me to that — penned an ode to Gene Kelly’s ass for After Dark magazine, and this is the picture and the costume (along with the dancer’s short shorts in The Pirate) that inspired it. I doubt that was the sensual effect Kelly was after, so forget I brought it up.
So few critics, so many poets 