Vincente Minnelli (1951)
It now seems a very odd collision of American popular art and a Hollywood idea of French art. At the start – when their voiceovers introduce us to the expatriate Americans Jerry Mulligan and Adam Cook – the filmmakers seem at pains to reassure the audience that the pair are regular guys. Although Jerry is a painter and Adam a would-be concert pianist, they’re wise-cracking, self-deprecating, not remotely arty. The film’s climax, by contrast, is a ‘dream ballet’ – an element of American musicals which always feels like an essentially anxious attempt to underline the artistic credentials of the genre and which suppresses its dynamic glories. Jerry is woken from his reverie by a car horn, looks down from the balcony of a building to the Paris street below and sees Lise Bouvier, the young French girl he loves and thought he’d lost, returning to him; he races down a long flight of steps as she runs up them. The moment is elating and much more expressive than the whole of the seventeen minutes of ballet – based on visual compositions inspired by French art history – that have preceded it. There’s a similar irony in Gene Kelly’s choreography and Vincente Minnelli’s staging of the musical numbers: Jerry’s rival in love, the French theatre singer Henri Baurel, deplores ‘I Got Rhythm’ as crude and rowdy yet it’s Henri’s rousing rendition of ‘I’ll Build A Stairway to Paradise’ – given a glitzy production with a very Hollywood-looking chorus of Parisian dancing girls – that’s the high point of the show.
In spite of the pleasures of hearing the George and Ira Gershwin numbers and the awesome combination of other American musical talents involved – Minnelli, Kelly, Alan Jay Lerner (who did the script) – An American in Paris is mostly stodgy going. The chronology of the piece is another awkward concoction: the Gershwin music and songs are mostly from the 1920s but Lerner’s screenplay includes heavy-handed references to the recently-ended Second World War, presumably to make it seem ‘modern’. Viewed from this distance in time, the most inalienably 1950s quality of the picture is its harsh colours – electric blues and oranges, fuchsias, crimsons all as shocking as the shocking pinks. On the rare occasions when a character appears wearing clothes of a more subtly pleasing colour – or at a masked ball with everyone in black-and-white costumes – the impact of the contrast with the prevailing exaggerated brightness is terrific.
I liked Gene Kelly’s first scene – a semi-danced routine of his waking up and preparing for a new Parisian day – but a little of his grinning exuberance and extravert athleticism goes quite a long way with me. I’m afraid I began to look forward to Jerry’s occasional low points, when Kelly is more restful. Leslie Caron was only twenty when she made this film, her first. She’s more physically solid than I expected – her face can look quite heavy – but she’s strong and likeable, both as an actress and a dancer. Oscar Levant is agreeably droll as Jerry’s pal Adam, although he isn’t remotely convincing as the classical musician he longs to be (Kelly, on the other hand, is good at miming being a painter). It’s not the fault of Levant or Vincente Minnelli that the sequence in which Adam plays all the musical parts in a fantasy performance of Gershwin’s concerto in F for piano and orchestra reminded me of the terrible TV comedy ‘classic’ of Charlie Drake doing the same with the 1812 Overture. Georges Guétary sings very well as Henri Baurel, although the character is dreary. Nina Foch gives a stiffly proficient, gesturally antique performance as a lonely American socialite who takes a shine to Jerry. There are lots of busy but fairly jolly cartoons of Gallic locals in the minor roles.
Academy Awards for Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Cinematography, Costume Design, Musical Score – and, incredibly, Best Picture (the other nominations included A Place in the Sun and A Streetcar Named Desire) and Screenplay-Story.
28 December 2009
