Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen (1955)
It’s Always Fair Weather begins in 1945 but most of the action takes place ten years later. During that time, each of the three GIs we meet in the opening scenes – Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey) and Angelo ‘Angie’ Valentine (Michael Kidd) – have watched their lives turn disappointing. Ted, who was going to be a lawyer or a politician or some kind of great man, is a far from high-ranking boxing promoter. At the start of the film, he receives a ‘Dear John’ letter and he still hasn’t found the right girl a decade on. Doug’s wife now wants a divorce and although he’s a successful advertising executive he wanted to be an artist. Angie, who has not only a wife but a surfeit of kids, had ambitions of being a top chef: he calls the place he runs ‘Cordon Bleu’ but it’s actually a hamburger stand. The trio swears undying friendship on their last evening together at the end of the war; they vow to meet again in ten years’ time – on the tenth of October 1955. They keep the date but find, when they’re reunited, that they get on each other’s nerves. These soldiers three, exuberant in New York at the start, naturally echo the sailors on a day’s shore leave in On the Town, made by Kelly and Donen six years earlier: plenty had happened to those two as well in the meantime. By the time Fair Weather was made, their relationship had just about broken down and Kelly was depressed by MGM’s continuing refusal to release Invitation to the Dance. The characters’ sense of disillusionment and the tensions between them when they get back together mesh with the film-makers’ state of mind. This helps to create one of the most satisfying musicals I’ve seen.
The film may be more impressive – as well as much more enjoyable – at this distance in time than it was when first released. You might think the predicament of Ted, Doug and Angie spoke to that of many of their real-life contemporaries but audiences of the time evidently didn’t want acridness in screen musicals: It’s Always Fair Weather was a box-office failure. The very title, as well as picking up on the idea of inconstant friends, seems to poke fun at the received idea of the musical as a genre of determined optimism. The combination of the principals’ self-reproach and an unambiguous contempt for the symbiotic worlds of television and advertising must have been as potent as it was unfamiliar. Yet what may have felt subversive in 1955 seems, more than half a century later, refreshingly disenchanted and emotionally gritty for a Cinemascope musical of the era – you don’t need to make the usual adjustments to believe in the world you’re seeing and hearing. André Previn’s agreeable music is nothing special but that throws into stronger relief the witty lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who also did the screenplay. And because the melodies have the quality of being made up as they go along, and there are no over-inflated production numbers, It’s Always Fair Weather is one of those musicals where breaking into song and dance seems a truthful and natural expression of a character’s feelings (an effect which Kelly and Donen underline through the reactions of some of the onlookers on the screen).
Watching Gene Kelly here, I genuinely liked him for the first time. He might not be specifically believable as an aspiring lawyer or embryo politico but that works – it serves to reflect Ted Riley’s sense that his life isn’t working out as he planned. Kelly may or may not be drawing on his own recent disappointments but he’s convincingly subdued. The dejection is organic, not performed; he seems a little physically reduced too (he probably is a few pounds lighter than in On the Town). Because he’s less shiny, more introverted than usual, the few sequences in which he is upbeat are treasurable, especially the solo on roller-skates – when Ted likes himself and Gene Kelly is enjoying himself. As Doug, Dan Dailey has a humorous melancholy and naturalism, an irredeemably middle-aged quality, which give depth to the film. His increasingly drunken and sarcastic solo ‘Situation-Wise’ is one of the highest highlights. Dailey’s and Michael Kidd’s physical presences complement Kelly’s perfectly, as does their dancing. Kidd, best known as a choreographer, is vivid and charmingly funny in what’s essentially the Sinatra role. The trio numbers are terrific – whether the vigorous ‘The Binge’ (which includes the dustbin lids sequence the film is best remembered for); or the scene in a restaurant when Ted, Doug and Angie glumly chomp celery sticks and voice their negative thoughts about each other to the tune of the Blue Danube waltz that’s playing in the background; or dance on a split screen – synchronised but in three separate rooms. (It’s a pity, though, that the projectionist couldn’t get Dailey, in the left-hand segment, fully on the screen. And although there was no apology from BFI, the print quality was ragged in several places.)
As Jackie, the TV producer Ted falls for, Cyd Charisse doesn’t have the vocal skills needed to do full justice to Comden and Green’s lines but the exceptional wit of her movement makes up for it. Her legs are at their most astonishing in the boxing gym number (‘Baby, You Knock Me Out’) where the contrast between her elegance and the persuasive grunginess of the fighters she dances with is very amusing. Dolores Gray is superb as the unconquerably smiling TV chanteuse Madeline: the satirical brio of her main number (‘Thanks A Lot But No Thanks’) is exhilarating. As a fight-fixing Mr Big, Jay C Flippen has a splendid brutal leer and David Burns, the owner of the bar to which the three protagonists keep returning, is a fine foil to them.
The dancing is wonderfully varied, both in style and mood. The ex-soldiers regain their corps d’esprit in a climactic fight sequence with the boxing crooks in the theatre from which the ‘Midnight with Madeline’ TV show is being aired. This is superbly staged by Kelly and Donen: it’s thoroughly rhythmical but never overly choreographed. As recently noted, applause at the end is becoming nearly par for the course at BFI. On this occasion, someone clapped even as the film was starting, and there were little outbursts of applause after two or three of the numbers. Although I’m disinclined to clap in a cinema, I felt increasingly that I’d want to join in at the end. Yet the diminuendo of the last sequence is so effective that, when the moment came, I didn’t. As the three men go their separate ways again – Ted with Jackie, Doug and Angie back to their respective (and repaired) marriages – the screen says ‘The End’ and we have the sense of an ending in more ways than one. This was the last time Kelly and Donen worked together and their filmographies from this point on are very spotty, although Donen made a few good non-musicals like Charade. It’s Always Fair Weather is a great leave-taking.
13 December 2011
