Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/23/20

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Sunday, August 23, 2020

An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951)

Georges Guétary, Oscar Levant, and Gene Kelly in An American in Paris

Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guétary, Nina Foch. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner. Cinematography: Alfred Gilks, John Alton. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: George Gershwin, Ira Gershwin, songs; Conrad Salinger, orchestrator.

Sure, there are things wrong with An American in Paris. The Oscar-winning screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner relies on clichés like the infatuation at first sight by Jerry (Gene Kelly) with Lise (Leslie Caron) and the threat of the predatory wealthy divorcee played by Nina Foch, and it serves too often as a mechanical way of setting up the musical numbers. Some of the numbers, like Oscar Levant's performance of the third movement of Gershwin's Concerto in F and Georges Guétary's "Stairway to Paradise," are simply shoehorned into the story. And the once-celebrated concluding 17-minute ballet now seems a little overblown and pretentious. Yet I cherish the film for serving up as many Gershwin songs as it does, including some comparative rarities like "By Strauss" and "Tra-la-la (This Time It's Really Love)." I like, too, that Kelly's sometimes overbearing charm offensive is checked by Levant's acerbity and by Guétary's less strenuous effort at being charming. It's not the greatest of MGM musicals, lacking the wit that Betty Comden and Adolph Green infused into their screenplays and the style that Stanley Donen brought to his directing. I sometimes think that Vincente Minnelli was a better director of melodramas like The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Some Came Running (1958), and Home From the Hill (1960) than he was of musicals like Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), An American in Paris and Gigi (1958), in which he could let the songs do the work for him. Still, if you've got Gershwin to do the work for you, why not just lean back and let go?