Gene Kelly

and Leslie Caron

MORE THAN SIX DECADES BEFORE

LA LA LAND,

SHATTERED THE MOLD,

W O N B E S T P I C T U R E , A N D A LT E R E D

THE COURSE OF

HOLLYWOOD HISTORY.

By Joe McGovern @jmcgvrn

E W.C O M 83
OSCARS

O N A C A D E M Y AWA R D S N I G H T, M A R C H 2 0, 1 9 5 2 , M I L L I O N S O F M O V I E FA N S H U D D L E D A R O U N D

their radiosthe Oscars still werent a tele-

vised eventto nd out if George Stevens
tragedy A Place in the Sun or Elia Kazans
seismic, sex-charged A Streetcar Named Desire
would take Hollywoods top prize. After
Stevens picked up Best Director and Streetcar
scored three of the four acting categories,
Best Picture seemed like a two-horse race.
But the winner that night was Vincente
Minnellis An American in Paris, the sunny
MGM musical starring Gene Kelly. Colum-
nists were outraged by the choice (at least
one called for a vote recount), but history
 ( From left ) French actress Caron, who was
19 when she made her acting debut in An
American in Paris, in the films Embraceable
You musical sequence; the movies French
poster; Kelly and Caron dancing to George
and Ira Gershwins Our Love Is Here to Stay
on a nighttime version of Paris River Seine
created on MGMs Hollywood backlot
POSTER, KELLY AND CARON: MGM/PHOTOFEST (2); KELLY: AL AMY STOCK PHOTO;
has been a kinder judge. For its unabashed
romanticism, kaleidoscopic imagery, and
audacious, wordless finale, the movie has
been a touchstone for artists, authors, lm-
makers, choreographers, and dancers
not to mention the creator of this years
PAINTING: ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NY
celebrated awards darling. An American in
Paris is such a stunner, says La La Land
director Damien Chazelle. Thats a movie
that we just pillaged. Its an awesome exam-
ple of how daring some of those old musicals
really were. Its incredible that it ever got
made, let alone that it won Best Picture.
ts no coincidence that the first
sound movie, 1927s The Jazz
Singer, was a musical. Watching
people sing and dance became
the denition of popular entertainment on
the big screen in the 1930s and 40s. There
were Technicolor marvels like The Wizard of
Oz (1939), but most musicals of the day were
simply black-and-white filmed theater
some elaborately so, in the case of a maestro
like Busby Berkeley. Yet with the presence of
television spreading rapidly in American
The films ballet finale features
Kellys character dissolving
into Parisian artwork, including
Toulouse-Lautrecs Chocolat
( above ) . Gene read poetry and
studied art, says his widow, Patricia
Ward Kelly, and he saturated An
American in Paris with influences
from the art worldRenoir,
Rousseau, van Gogh, Raoul Dufy.
homes by 1950, Hollywood needed to dust the
cobwebs o its old-fashioned signature genre.
Enter Arthur Freed. The MGM executive
had produced musicals for Minnelli (1944s
Meet Me in St. Louis) and Kelly (1949s On
the Town), and he hired the former to direct
and the latter to choreograph and star in
An American in Paris. It was inspired by a
scintillating orchestral piece composed by
George Gershwin more than 20 years
earlier. The famed composer died in 1937,
but Freed persuaded Georges brother Ira
to sell him the whole Gershwin catalog in
the late 1940s. Freed thought the title and
SPECIAL OSCAR GUIDE 2017 E W.C O M 85
the postwar sentiment it evoked would
strike box oce gold.
He was right. Audiences ocked to watch
the story of an ex-GI named Jerry (Kelly)
whos struggling as a painter in the French
capital while falling for a sweet shopgirl
(Leslie Caron). Ten of Gershwins tunes were
matched to musical set pieces, including the
standards I Got Rhythm, Our Love Is
Here to Stay, and Nice Work if You Can
Get It, with George Gershwins instru-
mental An American in Paris reserved for
the movies 17-minute nale.

reached in the early 50s, Martin Scorsese decades of exceptional movie musicals that
ilmed entirely on 44 elaborate explained in his documentary A Personal challenged mainstream sensibilities and the

EVERET T COLLECTION (2); THE SOUND OF MUSIC: T WENTIETH CENTURY FOX FILM CORP/PHOTOFEST;
sets on MGMs backlot (except Journey Through American Movies. Minnellis artistic status quo. The list includes Kellys

MINNELLI, KELLY, AND CARON: AL AMY STOCK PHOTO; WEST SIDE STORY, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS:
for a few second-unit shots of musicals celebrated the triumph of the imag- masterpiece Singin in the Rain (1952), A Star

MY FAIR L ADY: WARNER BROS. PICTURES/PHOTOFEST; CHICAGO: DAVID JAMES/MIR AMA X

Paris), the movie presented a
fancied vision of the world that tapped into
an audience craving for the illusory. People
were still grieving over World War II,
says playwright Craig Lucas, who wrote the
book for the 2015 Tony-winning Broadway
adaptation of the lm. So here was a Holly-
wood version of Paris that gave very little
indication that it had just been occupied by
Nazis. But it didnt really matter. Gene Kelly
and Leslie Caron made people feel trans-
ported to someplace lovely and amazing.
It was popular entertainment, yes, but
Minnelli and Kelly had their hands on the
steering wheel of a genre in the midst of radi-
cal change. The pinnacle of the musical was
inary over the real. Any aspect of reality,
however trivial, could be transformed, styl-
ized, and incorporated into a ballet.
And in that light, An American in Paris
Best Picture victory was truly a game
changer. Prior to the awards in 1952, Kelly
had lamented the shunning of his favored
genre. There is a strange sort of reasoning
in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy
of Academy consideration than dramas, he
said. Its a form of snobbism. (On the
night before the ceremony, the Academys
Board of Governors voted to give Kelly an
Honorary Award for his cumulative work on
the lmthe only Oscar hed ever receive.)
But An American in Paris ushered in two
Is Born (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), Funny
Face (1957), The Music Man (1962), The
Young Girls of Rochefort (1968, costarring
Kelly), and ve musicals that went on to win
Oscars highest honor (see below).
innelli and Kelly saved
their masterstoke in An
American in Paris for
last. The films daz-
zling, drawn-out climax, synched to the
rhythm of Gershwins symphonic poem,
still astonishes. Dejected after his sweet-

BEST PICTURE MUSICALS In 89 years, 10 musicals have won the Academy Award for Best Picture. Here, we rank them, from

W E ST S I D E STO RY 1961 THE SOUND OF MUSIC M Y FA I R L A DY 1964 AN AMERICAN IN PARIS C H I CAG O 2002
1965 1951
DIRECTED BY DIRECTED BY DIRECTED BY
ROBERT WISE & DIRECTED BY GEORGE CUKOR DIRECTED BY ROB MARSHALL
JEROME ROBBINS ROBERT WISE VINCENTE MINNELLI
OSCARS WON 8 OSCARS WON 6
O S C A R S W O N 10 OSCARS WON 5 OSCARS WON 6

86 E W.C O M SPECIAL OSCARS GUIDE 2017

 The full finale required four weeks and
about a half-million dollars to pull oplus
the belief that people would go along with it.
Irving Berlin passed Kelly on the MGM lot
during lming and said, Seventeen minutes?
I hope you know what youre doin, kid. Kelly
and Minnelli even reconsidered putting it at
the end out of fear that confused audiences
( From far would head for the exits. That nale is com-
left )
Vincente pletely experimental, avant-garde lmmak-
Minnelli, Kelly,
and Caron on
ing, Chazelle says. Nothing but Gershwin,
the set of An Gene Kelly, and painted sets. You look at that
American in
Paris in 1951; and you realize how daring the lm was.
AN AMERICAN IN PARIS: MGM/PHOTOFEST; OLIVER!, GIGI, THE GRE AT ZIEGFELD: EVERET T COLLECTION (3);

Kelly and
Caron in the Indeed, the movies Best Picture win can
films finale be attributed to the boldness of that nal
GOING MY WAY: PAR AMOUNT PICTURES/PHOTOFEST; THE BROADWAY MELODY: MGM/PHOTOFEST

production number. My dad pushed MGM

heart abandons him for another man, Kelly
turns inward and interprets his love aair as
a dream balleta bright, alive rendezvous
through the iconic artwork of van Gogh,
Renoir, and others, depicting Paris.
In the sequences lustiest segment, Kelly
and Caron dance in a ripe romantic embrace
on a fountain. That scene is the dierence
between the sexual and sensual, says Dancing
With the Stars Derek Hough. It leaves more
to the imagination, and were more than
capable of lling in the blanks. Adds Patricia
Ward Kelly, who was married to Kelly for
six years until his death in 1996 at age 83,
The sequence is pure lovemaking. Several
countries gured it out and that piece was
cut because it was considered too risqu.
Risqu might have been Kellys goal.
Originally aspiring to be a shortstop for the
Pittsburgh Pirates, he possessed the solid
build of an athlete more than a dancer. He
often hemmed his own outts so that they
were tighter around the thighs and hips.
And today there are Tumblr pages devoted
to his muscular derrieresomething that
cannot be said of Fred Astaire or Bing
Crosby. When Im watching Gene Kelly,
says Hough, it doesnt feel like hes in
an older lm. That charm and that athleti-
cism feels like now.
hard to include the ballet sequence, says
Oscar winner Liza Minnelli, who visited the
set as a 4-year-old. That movie pushed the
boundaries of the American lm musical.
Its rightly regarded as the pinnacle of
Hollywoods studio era.
But in the past four decades, original
movie musicals have slumped from the
popular imagination. That seems to be
changing. Are we craving more escapism via
the genre thats always done escapism best?
Kelly and Minnelli offered audiences
an invitation to a cinematic spectacle
that also celebrated romantic dreamers.
Perhaps we have more in common with
1951 audiences than we think. X

the true showstoppers to the merely charming summer stock.

O L I V E R ! 1968 G O I N G M Y WAY 1944 G I G I 1958 THE GREAT ZIEGFELD T H E B R OA DWAY

1936 M E LO DY 1929
DIRECTED BY DIRECTED BY DIRECTED BY
CAROL REED LEO MCCAREY VINCENTE MINNELLI DIRECTED BY DIRECTED BY
ROBERT Z. LEONARD HARRY BEAUMONT
OSCARS WON 5 OSCARS WON 7 OSCARS WON 9
OSCARS WON 3 OSCARS WON 1

E W.C O M 87
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