An American in Paris (1951)

Official trailer

An American in Paris is Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 American musical built around Gene Kelly as ex-GI Jerry Mulligan attempting to establish a painting career in postwar Paris. Leslie Caron plays French shop assistant Lise Bouvier in her American film debut. Oscar Levant plays Jerry’s friend Adam Cook.

Georges Guétary plays singer Henri Baurel. Nina Foch plays American heiress Milo Roberts who funds Jerry’s painting. Alan Jay Lerner wrote the screenplay.

The score uses George Gershwin music throughout, including the 1928 An American in Paris orchestral piece that provides the climactic seventeen-minute ballet sequence. MGM’s Arthur Freed unit produced the film on a budget of approximately 2.7 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 7 million dollars worldwide. The work won six Academy Awards including Best Picture.

I adore the dancing in this film and feel lukewarm about the story wrapped around it. Kelly is a joy every time the music starts, and the Gershwin catalog gives him songs worth moving to, but the romance between Jerry and Lise is thin enough that I find myself waiting for the next number.

The film represents the Freed unit at MGM at its peak production and one of the principal achievements of the American studio musical. The seventeen-minute closing ballet is among the most ambitious sequences ever attempted in a Hollywood musical.

The Gershwin score gives the film better material than typical original musical compositions provided. The Kelly choreography combines tap with modern dance and ballet vocabulary in ways that pre-Kelly American musicals hadn’t attempted.

The result is the film that established Kelly as the principal American film dance figure of his era and showed what the Freed unit could accomplish when given full studio support.

The Gershwin Score

The score uses Gershwin songs and orchestral works composed between 1924 and 1937. The film constructs its dramatic situations around the existing music instead of commissioning new material. The picture avoided the standard musical problem of mediocre original songs. Gershwin had been dead thirteen years when the film began production. MGM bought the rights to the orchestral suite and contracted with Ira Gershwin for the songs.

The strategy of building films around existing musical catalogs would become standard practice later. Mamma Mia, Across the Universe, Moulin Rouge, and others use the same approach. An American in Paris showed the method’s viability decades before it became common. The film’s success made other studios consider whether building productions around famous composers’ catalogs might produce stronger material than commissioning new work.

I think licensing Gershwin was the smartest decision anyone made on this picture. I’d take one great Gershwin song over a whole score of passable originals, and this film is stuffed with them.

Kelly as Dancer-Choreographer

Kelly choreographed the film’s dance sequences and starred in them.

The combination was unusual in 1951 studio production. Kelly’s vocabulary combined the athletic American tap tradition with modern dance ideas from Jack Cole and ballet movement Kelly had studied in Pittsburgh. The result was a dance style that no previous American film dancer had used.

Kelly’s approach contrasted with Fred Astaire’s. Astaire emphasized elegance and ballroom technique. Kelly emphasized athleticism and street-derived movement. The two styles defined American film dance for decades. Astaire was the gentleman dancer.

Kelly was the working-class dancer. Their styles served different dramatic situations. An American in Paris showed what Kelly could do when given full creative authority.

Kelly’s athletic, street-bred style suits an ex-GI painter perfectly, and I get more of a charge out of watching him work than from almost any other dancer of his era. When he’s moving, I forget how slight the plot is.

The Seventeen-Minute Ballet

The closing dream ballet sequence runs seventeen minutes and depicts Jerry imagining Paris through the styles of French painters.

Sets reference Dufy, Renoir, Utrillo, Rousseau, Van Gogh, and Toulouse-Lautrec. The sequence cost approximately half a million dollars to produce. The result contains no dialogue and almost no plot. It exists as pure cinematic ballet at a length and ambition that American studio musicals hadn’t previously attempted.

The studio executives initially resisted the sequence. The runtime was major. The lack of dialogue concerned them. The cost exceeded what the film’s plot required. Minnelli and Freed kept fighting for the sequence. The result was among the most ambitious dance sequences in American film. The Academy Award for Best Picture vindicated the production team against the executives who had wanted the sequence reduced or eliminated.

The ballet is the reason this gets an 8. Seventeen minutes of painted Paris with no dialogue sounds like a slog on paper, and it’s the part of the film I’d least want to lose. My reservation is that it makes the romance that came before it look slight by comparison.

Does An American in Paris still hold up?

An 8. The Gershwin songs, Kelly’s choreography and that seventeen-minute ballet put it at the top of the Freed unit’s work, and the ballet alone justifies a watch. What keeps it from climbing higher is the story: Jerry, Lise, Henri and Milo never feel like more than a pleasant excuse to get from one number to the next, and I’d have liked a romance with half the ambition of the dancing.

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