The Best Picture Countdown #24: An American In Paris (1951)

Note: this post has been modified from a previously published post

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Starring: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron

An American In Paris holds a special place in my heart because it marks the moment when I fell in love with the musical as a genre. It’s a flawed film, and certainly a distant second to Gene Kelly’s best musical, Singin’ In The Rain, but it nevertheless remains a great film and a great entertainment. When you watch Kelly, who simply exudes the pure joy of performance whenever he’s on screen, you can’t help but feel happy. This film is no exception.

Kelly stars as Jerry Mulligan, an ex-G.I. who has stayed on in post-war Paris in order to establish himself as a painter. He meets two women: Milo (Nina Foch) who is wealthy and wants to be his patron (more because she wants him in her bed than out of love for his work), and Lise (Leslie Caron), a young woman with whom he’s instantly smitten, but who is already romantically entangled. She likes Jerry, but is engaged to Henri (Georges Guétary), an older man who kept her safe during the war. Jerry and Henri know each other, but neither knows of the other’s relationship with Lise. The journey towards discovery is marked with some of the best song and dance numbers you’ll ever see.

Kelly is, of course, a masterful dancer and he and Caron have great chemistry as dancers (the “Our Love Is Here To Stay” number, which finds them dancing away from and towards each other by the side of the Seine is one of the film’s many highlights), but as characters, Jerry and Lise’s relationship doesn’t quite hold up. The problem stems perhaps from the age difference (in real life Kelly and Caron were nearly 20 years apart in age) and from Lise’s similarly structured relationship with Henri. Lise comes across more as a scared girl seeking a father figure than she does like a woman burning with passion for either man. And Jerry doesn’t help things with the way he charmingly harasses her into going on a date with him after she’s already turned him down. In their conversation leading up to the “Our Love” number, Jerry tells Lise that he’s “not sure if [she’s] a still water that doesn’t run deep” and remarks that “with a binding like [she’s] got, people are going to want to know what’s in the book.” He says these lines in an adoring/romantic tone of voice but when you actually listen to what he’s saying you see how shallow this relationship is. Not only does Jerry not know who Lise is as a person, he actually doesn’t think that there’s very to her at all – the attraction on his part is purely superficial.

I mentioned the age difference between Kelly and Caron as part of the problem, but I’ve never actually been entirely sure whether or not Jerry is supposed to be the same age as Kelly was in real life. It would certainly make sense for Jerry to be younger, not only because of his relationship with Lise, but also because of his relationship with Milo. Milo is portrayed as a predator who wants to use and control Jerry, but that doesn’t entirely work because Kelly and Foch seem pretty evenly matched. In their initial scenes, Jerry is surprised to realize that Milo is after him because such a relationship hadn’t occurred to him. It seems less like Jerry is a naïve young man who wouldn’t give an older woman a thought, and more like Jerry is a proud man who wouldn’t give a thought to being with a woman who has more money than him. The idea that Milo would want to “keep” Jerry as a boy toy seems silly, because Jerry seems too old to be kept.

These are the biggest problems with the film, but what works are those elements which root it intractably in the musical genre (i.e. the singing and the dancing). Singin’ In The Rain is, without a doubt, the Gene Kelly movie, but in one particular aspect that film falls short where An American In Paris succeeds. Both films feature an extended dancing sequence at the end. In Rain the sequence, though great, feels tacked on and doesn’t flow easily with the rest of the film. In Paris, however, the ballet at the end fits seamlessly with what has come before. Lise has left Jerry. He’s heartbroken and imagines himself in a picture he’s just drawn. The picture comes to life and what follows is a ballet sequence lasting about fifteen minutes and which effectively summarizes the various emotions Jerry has felt during the course of his relationship with Lise. It’s alternately funny and sad and romantic, but above all it’s gorgeous from beginning to end. It’s definitely my favourite musical sequence in all film and it completely makes the movie for me.

The film ends happily (if there’s a girl to be had, does Gene Kelly ever not get her?), concluding only moments after the exhilaration of the American In Paris ballet, which is wise because any extended scene following that would feel like an anti-climax. Although the central relationship leaves me somewhat cold, the film as a whole makes me so happy that it’s easy for me to overlook that and be satisfied with the ending. Jerry gets his girl. Who could ask for anything more?

100 Days, 100 Movies: Singin' In The Rain (1952)

Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Starring: Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor, Jean Hagen

Singin’ In The Rain is not only one of the best musicals ever made (perhaps the best musical), but also one of the best films about Hollywood ever made. With a nostalgic and comedic eye, it looks back on the transition from silent to sound films (and what better way to look at that than through a musical?) at a time when Hollywood was still undergoing another transition – the one from the Golden Age of Bogart, Gable and Garbo to the era of the Method and Brando, Clift and Monroe. It isn’t perfect, to be sure, but damn is it ever entertaining.

It begins with a film premiere where we meet super stars Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). The studio and complicit movie magazines have created a romance between the two, and while Don can’t stand Lina, she believes the press and thinks that they really are in love. For both stars, these are the final moments free of anxiety because the advent of sound is about to be introduced to film. The reaction within the film community is negative – sound is a novelty that will quickly wear off and people will return to the old standard. But, as history shows, once sound crept in, the silents soon disappeared. Don and Lina make a talkie, and the film has a lot of fun depicting the early days of sound and how those accustomed to shooting silents had to completely reinvent the way they worked in order to adjust. The placement of microphones, especially, turns out to be problematic. The film is previewed and is a disaster, drawing laughter from the audience that is hearing Don and Lina speak for the first time. In order to salvage their film, it’s decided to turn it into a musical. This works perfectly for Don but Lina is still a problem. “She can’t sing, she can’t act, she can’t dance. A triple threat,” says Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor). Luckily, Don knows just the girl to dub her singing voice, an aspiring actress named Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds), with whom he also happens to be in love.

The musical numbers in this film are about the best collection ever assembled into a film, which is amazing since only two of the songs were actually written for the film and the rest are recycled from MGM’s storehouse. Everyone knows “Singin’ In The Rain,” even those who’ve never seen the movie, which also boasts “Good Morning,” “You Are My Lucky Star,” “Moses,” and the amazing “Make ‘Em Laugh” number where O’Connor gives everything a performer possibly could and leaves the audience feeling exhausted just by having watched him do it. This would be a good film on the strength of the musical numbers alone, but it also features a wonderfully self-referential and self-parodying story.

Singin’ In The Rain is one of the few films about making movies in Hollywood that manages not to take itself too seriously without edging so far into caricature that its moments of meta become too cutesy and winky. When it’s decided that Don and Lina will make their first sound film, studio boss R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) already has the perfect tag-line in mind: “Lamont and Lockwood: they talk!” which plays on the real-life campaign for Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie, which was “Garbo Talks!” Similarly, when the film is previewed and the audience laughs at Don and Lina’s voices, it plays on the reality of what happened to stars who had to transition from silent to sound and found their careers effectively ended with those first words. The film also plays on the personas of actual silent stars, such as Clara Bow, the “It girl,” who appears here as Zelda Zanders, the “Zip girl” (Rita Moreno).

Of all the actors in the film, Jean Hagen was the only one to receive an Oscar nomination, and it’s easy to see how the Academy just couldn’t resist. Hagen gives us a character who is enjoyably ditzy, but who could have been overwhelming irritating. She gets many of the film’s best lines, although Lina the character wouldn’t know that they were the best or why. “Don’t you dare call him Don! I was calling him Don before you were born! I mean…” she says to Kathy. Hagen is great and utterly deserved that nomination. It’s a shame that O’Connor couldn’t get one as well, but I suppose you can’t have everything.

In spite of it’s overall greatness, there are elements of the film that don’t really work. As played by Kelly and Reynolds, Don and Kathy are great individual characters, but I’ve never really seen much chemistry between them as a romantic couple. I have the same problem with Kelly’s other great musical, An American In Paris and I think the problem is that when paired with an ingénue, Kelly simply overshadows her. Compare these romances to the one in Summer Stock, which isn’t an especially good film but finds Kelly playing opposite Judy Garland in a screen relationship that actually works.

The other problem is the “Gotta Dance” number, which is great as a performance but isn’t cohesive with the rest of the film. It’s so uneasily tacked-on that it’s jarring when the film segues into it. It is a beautiful sequence to watch, it just isn’t incorporated into the film very well. All that being said though, these are really just minor weaknesses easily eclipsed by the film’s many strengths.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Inherit The Wind (1960)

Director: Stanley Kramer
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Frederic March

Generally speaking, Stanley Kramer is a filmmaker who always just falls short for me. His films always have their hearts in the right place, and they always have ideas, but the problem is that rather than dramatize those ideas, his films often explain them, and do so in a way that’s so intensely didactic that it verges on overbearing and patronizing. Inherit The Wind is the exception, perhaps because it’s a courtroom drama and therefore more easily and naturally suited to his less than subtle style of preaching.

The film is based on the Scopes trial where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan fought it out over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond, the defence attorney based on Darrow, and Frederic March is Matthew Harrison Brady, the prosecutor based on Bryan. Dick York is Bertram T. Cates, the teacher on trial, and Gene Kelly is E.K. Hornbeck, a reporter for the paper funding Cates’ defence. Kelly is good as the cynical and sarcastic reporter, and York does what he can with a role that is essentially part of the scenery. This is really Tracy and March’s film where they face off on a number of different occasions, in different sets of circumstances and with different outcomes.

Kramer makes his own position, and the opposing position of the local community, apparent immediately. The local population is clearly on the side of Brady and Creationist theory – they harass Cates when he’s locked in his cell, they throw Brady a parade, and they generally think the trial itself is a waste of time. The film, however, places itself clearly on the other side, and the viewer has little choice but to follow when the community is shown to be bigoted, reactionary and anti-intellectual. What saves this from being a “big city thinker” versus “backwoods hicks” fight is the character of Drummond himself, who isn’t arguing for the validity of one way of thinking over another, but rather for the right of a person to decide for themselves what they think. In one of the many great speeches that Tracy must have relished, Drummond sums his argument up thusly: “If you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools. And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers… And soon, with banners flying and with drums beating, we’ll be marching backward - backward - through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind.” To Drummond this is not the moral issue that it’s been framed as; it’s an issue of intellectual freedom, and of the responsibility of every human being to think for his or herself.

Brady gets to make speeches too, but is always one-upped by Drummond’s retorts. What’s interesting about the way Kramer presents the story is that, even though Brady is on the other side of the argument and even though he’s characterized as impeding intellectual progress, he isn’t the villain. It’s the community that is villanized, not just by the way that they treat Cates and Drummond, but by the way that they treat Brady as well. The most tragic moment in the film is not the verdict, which inevitably finds Cates guilty, it’s the moment when Brady realizes that he’s lost his audience, that those people who were so quick to give him a parade could turn on him with equal quickness the second they realized that he, too, is just another imperfect human being. He stands in the court, attempting to make a speech while the people who once listened to him with rapt attention turn on him in disgust and the only person listening anymore is Drummond. Whether you agree with Brady or not, it’s difficult not to feel for him at this moment.

The court room scenes are the best in the film – alternately funny, frustrating and heartbreaking – but there are also quieter, more private moments that are very moving. Brady and Drummond, though adversaries in the court, have a long and friendly history outside of it. There’s the suggestion that Drummond harbours an unrequited love for Brady’s wife who is, perhaps, a little in love with him, too, though she’s devoted to her husband. And there’s a conversation between Drummond and Brady where they set out their basic arguments and it feels more like two old friends in a healthy debate than it does like mortal enemies poised to destroy each other’s world view. These scenes are important because they make the characters more human, rather than broadly letting them be painted as “Good Guy” and “Bad Guy.”

I can’t stress enough how good this movie is, especially from an acting standpoint. Tracy is solid and dependable as always, bringing his special combination of gravitas and lightness to the role, and March – an actor who is under-rated perhaps because he’s such a chameleon that you don’t always realize that it’s him (watch this film, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Sign of the Cross and you’ll get what I mean) – is equally great. It’s their movie, their showcase, and it’s a wonder to behold.

100 Days, 100 Movies: An American In Paris (1951)

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Starring: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron

An American In Paris holds a special place in my heart because it marks the moment when I fell in love with the musical as a genre. It’s a flawed film, and certainly a distant second to Gene Kelly’s best musical, Singin’ In The Rain, but it remains nonetheless a great film and a great entertainment. When you watch Kelly, who simply exudes the pure joy of performance whenever he’s on screen, you can’t help but feel happy. This film is no exception.

Kelly stars as Jerry Mulligan, an ex-G.I. who has stayed on in post-war Paris in order to establish himself as a painter. He meets two women: Milo (Nina Foch) who is wealthy and wants to be his patron, more because she wants him in her bed than out of love for his work; and Lise (Leslie Caron), a young woman with whom he’s instantly smitten, but who is already romantically entangled. She likes Jerry, but is engaged to Henri (Georges Guétary), an older man who kept her safe during the war. Jerry and Henri know each other, but neither knows of the other’s relationship with Lise. The journey towards discovery is marked with some of the best song and dance numbers you’ll ever see.

Kelly is, of course, a masterful dancer and he and Caron have great chemistry as dancers (the “Our Love Is Here To Stay” number, which finds them dancing away from and towards each other by the side of the Seine is one of the film’s many highlights), but as characters, Jerry and Lise’s relationship doesn’t quite hold up. The problem stems perhaps from the age difference (in real life Kelly and Caron were nearly 20 years apart in age) and from Lise’s similarly structured relationship with Henri. Lise comes across more as a scared girl seeking a father figure than she does like a woman burning with passion for either man. And Jerry doesn’t help things with the way he charmingly harasses her into going on a date with him after she’s already turned him down. In their conversation leading up to the “Our Love” number, Jerry tells Lise that he’s “not sure if you’re a still water that doesn’t run deep” and remarks that “with a binding like you’ve got, people are going to want to know what’s in the book.” He says these lines in an adoring/romantic tone of voice but when you actually listen to what he’s saying you see how shallow this relationship is. Jerry not only doesn’t know who Lise is as a person, but actually thinks that there isn’t much to her – the attraction is purely superficial.

I mentioned the age difference between Kelly and Caron as part of the problem, but I’ve never actually been entirely sure whether or not Jerry is meant to be much younger than Kelly himself. It would certainly make sense for Jerry to be younger, not only because of his relationship with Lise, but also because of his relationship with Milo. Milo is portrayed as a predator who wants to use and control Jerry, but that doesn’t entirely work because Kelly and Foch seem pretty evenly matched. In their initial scenes, Jerry is surprised to realize that Milo is after him because such a relationship hadn’t occurred to him. It seems less like Jerry is a naïve young man who wouldn’t give an older woman a thought, and more like Jerry is a proud man who wouldn’t give a thought to being with a woman who had more money than him. The idea that Milo would want to “keep” Jerry as a boy toy seems silly, because Jerry seems too old to be kept.

These are the biggest problems with the film, but what works are those elements which root it intractably in the musical genre (i.e. the singing and the dancing). Singin’ In The Rain is, without a doubt, the Gene Kelly movie, but in one particular aspect that film falls short where An American In Paris succeeds. Both films feature an extended dancing sequence at the end. In Rain the sequence, though great, feels tacked on and doesn’t flow easily with the rest of the film. In Paris, however, the ballet at the end fits seamlessly with what has come before. Lise has left Jerry. He’s heartbroken and imagines himself in a picture he’s just drawn. The picture comes to life and what follows is a ballet sequence lasting about fifteen minutes and which effectively summarizes the various emotions Jerry has felt in his relationship with Lise. It’s alternately funny and sad and romantic, but above all it’s gorgeous from beginning to end. It is, without a doubt, my favourite musical sequence in all film and it completely makes the movie for me.

The film ends happily (if there’s a girl to be had, does Gene Kelly ever not get her?), concluding only moments after the exhilaration of the American In Paris ballet, which is wise because any extended scene following that would feel like an anti-climax. Although the central relationship leaves me somewhat cold, the film as a whole makes me so happy that it’s easy for me to overlook that and be satisfied with the ending. Jerry gets his girl. Who could ask for anything more?