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US (1951): Musical/Dance
115 min, No rating, Color, Available on videocassette and laserdisc
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| Actor | Role |
| Gene Kelly | Jerry Mulligan |
| Leslie Caron | Lise Bouvier |
| Oscar Levant | Adam Cook |
| Georges Guetary | Henri Baurel |
| Nina Foch | Milo Roberts |
| Eugene Borden | George Mattieu |
| Martha Bamattre | Mathilde Mattieu |
| Mary Jones | Old Lady Dancer |
| Ann Codee | Therese |
| George W. Davis | François |
| Hayden Rorke | Tommy Baldwin |
| Paul Maxey | John McDowd |
| Dick Wessel | Ben Macrow |
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In this film the 19 year old french balleringa Leslie Caron made her film debut. She was discovered by Gene in 1948 and by choosing Caron, it became the breakthrough for women with unconventional looks on film. The trick sequence where Oscar Levant is playing all the instruments in an orchestra, while also directing, was recording during one day. The 17 minute long dance sequence in the end of the film was rehearsed for eight weeks.
A classic film featuring the music of George Gershwin long after his death, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS has a freshness and charm rare in the musical genre, and it was the film that forever identified MGM as the studio for musicals.
Synopsis
A simple story The simple story is pure Hollywood, but it works beautifully. Gene Kelly, who created the spellbinding choreography for the entire production, stars as a young GI, Jerry Mulligan, who has stayed on in Paris to paint. Though he is unsuccessful, he is happy living and working in his cramped Montparnasse garret.
His one friend Adam Cook (Oscar Levant) is a piano player in a nearby cafe, a sarcastic and morose individual who offers nothing but discouragement to Mulligan (Oscar Levant in character and as he was). However, another friend Henri Baurel (Georges Guetary), a successful revue singer, is more encouraging. Baurel informs his pals that he is going to marry a wonderful girl, an eighteen-year-old dancer whom he rescued from the Nazis during the war.
Mulligan, meanwhile, is discovered by a rich widow, Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), who buys his paintings and encourages her rich friends to do the same. Innocently enjoying this newfound success, Mulligan visits a nightclub and meets a young girl (Caron), falling for her immediately. She fends off his advances but later agrees to a date, then tells him that she is engaged to Guetary.
Though they are in love, but do the noble thing and decide not to meet again. Mulligan pays a further price for his honor when he refuses to be Milo's gigolo, losing access to her fortune and connections. All looks bleak, but Baurel is also noble; realizing Lise Bouvier (Caron) is in love with his friend, he gives her up. The lovers fly into each other's arms for the happy ending.
Background
Meticulously authentic No one could argue the authentic look of this marvelous musical; even the French government, highly critical of any film profile of its beloved Paris, agreed that the production was genuine down to the last cobblestone. Yet only a few of the opening scenes were live shots of Paris, the rest of the film having been photographed on MGM's creative back lot, where a Parisian neighborhood was reproduced with meticulous care by Edwin P. Willis and Keogh Gleason.
Classic song and dance Everything about the film is superb, from Vincente Minnelli's direction to the lushly orchestrated Gershwin brothers standards. In all, twenty-two Gershwin greats are included, including "Embraceable You," "Nice Work If You Can Get It," and "Our Love Is Here to Stay." Kelly's dance numbers are spectacular and unforgettable, reflecting his genius as a choreographer and as a dancer of grace and joie de vivre, a unique talent equalled only by Fred Astaire.
The songs and dances blend perfectly with the story. One of the most delightful of the sequences features Kelly dancing with children in the street, the urchins matching his typically acrobatic jumps and leaps. Guetary's tenor is wonderfully suited to belting out the great "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise" and "'S Wonderful," the latter a top-hatted review number in which they harmonize, singing about the same girl, though neither realizes it.
The highlight of the film is Kelly's fantasy ballet, a terrific seventeen-minute sequence not equaled in musicals before or after this film. The ballet cost MGM $450,000 to mount, and brought "culture" of a higher sort to a public that loved it.
This sequence was done after the film was finished, with art director Preston Ames (himself an art student in Paris in the late 1920s) painting magnificent forty-foot-high backdrops around a re-created Place de la Concorde, all done in the style of French artist Raoul Dufy. (Kelly showed the elderly, wheelchair-bound Dufy the sequence at a special screening. Dufy wept when he saw it, and then asked to see it again.)
Kelly himself was also a fine judge of talent—it was he who spotted Leslie Caron in the Ballets des Champs Elysees and made the marvelous dancer an overnight star.
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Leonard Maltin Review: 3.5 stars out of 4
Joyous, original musical built around Gershwin score; dazzling in color. Plot of artist Kelly torn between gamine Caron and wealthy Foch is creaky, but the songs, dances, production are superb. Oscars include Best Picture, Story and Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner), Cinematography (Alfred Gilks and John Alton), Scoring (Johnny Green and Saul Chaplin), Art Direction, Costume Design, and a special citation to Kelly. Look fast for Noel Neill as an art student.
Roger Ebert Review: 3.5 stars out of 4
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS swept the Academy Awards for 1951, with Oscars for best picture and the major technical categories: screenplay, score, cinematography, art direction, set design, and even a special Oscar for the choreography of its 18-minute closing ballet extravaganza.
SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, released in 1952 and continuing the remarkable golden age of MGM musicals, didn't do nearly as well on its initial release. But by the 1960s, SINGIN' was routinely considered the greatest of all Hollywood musicals, and AN AMERICAN IN PARIS was remembered with more respect than enthusiasm.
Now that the film has been restored for a national theatrical release and an eventual relaunch on tapes and laser discs, it's easy to see why SINGIN' passed it in the popularity sweepstakes. Its story of two Americans in Montparnasse—a struggling painter (Gene Kelly) and a perennial piano student (Oscar Levant)—is essentially a clothesline on which to hang recycled Gershwin songs ("I Got Rhythm," "S'Wonderful") and a corny story of love won, lost, and won again. Compared to SINGIN'S tart satire of Hollywood at the birth of the talkies, it's pretty tame stuff.
And yet AMERICAN has many qualities of its own, not least its famous ballet production number, with Kelly and Leslie Caron symbolizing the entire story of their courtship in dance. And there are other production numbers, set in everyday Parisian settings, that are endlessly inventive in their use of props and locations.
The stories of the two movies are curiously similar. In both of them, Kelly must break his romance of convenience with a predatory older blonde (Nina Foch in AMERICAN, Jean Hagen in SINGIN') in order to follow his heart to a younger, more innocent brunette (Leslie Caron and Debbie Reynolds). In both, he is counseled by a best friend (Oscar Levant and Donald O'Connor). And in both there is a dramatic moment when all seems lost, just when it is about to be gained.
SINGIN' is the more realistic picture, which is perhaps why it holds up better today. AMERICAN has scenes that are inexplicable, including the one where Levant joins Kelly and their French friend Henri (Georges Guetary) at a café. When he realizes they are both in love with the same woman, Levant starts lighting a handful of cigarettes while simultaneously trying to drink coffee. Maybe it seemed funny at the time.
There's also a contrast between the Nina Foch character—a possessive rich woman who hopes to buy Kelly's affections—and Jean Hagen's brassy blonde, a silent star whose shrieking voice is not suited to the sound era. Foch's blonde is just plain sour and unpleasant. Hagen's blonde is funny and fun. And, for that matter, there's no comparing the ingenues, either: Caron, still unformed, a great dancer but a so-so actress, and Reynolds, already a pro in her film debut, perky and bright-eyed.
The version now being released is a "true" restoration, according to the experts at Turner Entertainment, who say the job they did on AMERICAN compares to the salvage work in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) and LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962). Because two reels of the original negative were destroyed by fire, painstaking lab work was necessary to match those reels to the rest of the film. The result is a bright and fresh-looking print, in which the colors are (probably deliberately) not as saturated or bold as in the classic Technicolor process.
The ads say the movie is now in stereo. This is not quite true. Only the 18-minute ballet has been reprocessed into a sort of reconstructed stereo, and if a theater plays the whole film in stereo, the result may be the kind of raw-edged sound I heard at a press screening, before the projectionist gave up and switched to mono. The best choice would probably be to start in mono and physically switch to stereo when the ballet starts—although why so much labor is expended on quasi-stereo effects is beyond me. The real reasons to see AN AMERICAN IN PARIS are for the Kelly dance sequences, the closing ballet, the Gershwin songs, the bright locations, and a few moments of the ineffable, always curiously sad charm of Oscar Levant.
Pauline Kael Review
The Academy Award-winning musical, directed by Vincente Minnelli, about a romance between an American painter (Gene Kelly) and a French girl (Leslie Caron). Too fancy and overblown (there's a ballet with scenes in the styles of Dufy, Renoir, Utrillo, Rousseau, van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec), but the two dancing lovers have infectious grins and the Gershwin music keeps everything good-spirited. The songs include "I Got Rhythm," "Embraceable You," and " 'S Wonderful," and Georges Guétary sings a spiffy arrangement of "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise." With Nina Foch as a rich, decadent American, and Oscar Levant thumping away happily on the piano. Written by Alan Jay Lerner; choreographed by Kelly; art direction by Cedric Gibbons and Preston Ames; produced by Arthur Freed. MGM.
CineBooks' Motion Picture Guide Review: 5.0 stars out of 5
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AN AMERICAN IN PARIS won six Oscars: Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography (color), Best Art Direction (color), Best Musical Scoring and Best Costume Design (color). Minnelli was nominated for Best Direction and Adrienne Fazan was nominated for Best Editing.
The film also garnered a special Academy Award for Kelly "in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and especially for his brilliant achievements in the art.
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