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?

Anchors Aweigh (George Sidney, 1945)

Gene Kelly and Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh

Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Kathryn Grayson, José Iturbi, Dean Stockwell, Pamela Britton, Rags Ragland, Billy Gilbert, Henry O'Neill, Carlos Ramirez, Edgar Kennedy, Grady Sutton, Leon Ames, Sharon McManus. Screenplay: Isobel Lennart, Natalie Marcin. Cinematography: Charles P. Boyle, Robert H. Planck. Art direction: Randall Duell, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: George Stoll.

Anchors Aweigh is not in the top tier of MGM musicals. It doesn't have the smooth integration of story with music found in Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) and An American in Paris (1951) or Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' in the Rain (1952). What it does have is Kelly in his breakthrough film, blazing with his uniquely muscular dancing style in some great set pieces, not only the famously beloved sequence in which he dances with Jerry the Mouse, but also in the charming "Mexican Hat Dance" with little Sharon McManus and the spectacular "La Cumparsita" that has him doing stunt leaps and swinging from a curtain to a balcony occupied by Kathryn Grayson. Kelly did the choreography for these numbers, and they depend heavily on long takes that show the dancing to best advantage. But the film also has Frank Sinatra, still in his skinny idol-of-the-bobby-soxers phase, which earned him top billing -- Grayson is billed second and Kelly third. He's in fine voice, and the phrasing that would make him one of the best singers who ever lived is already in evidence; he was also coached by Kelly into being a more-than-passable dancing partner. Unfortunately, the film also has Grayson, the least charming and talented of the run of Hollywood sopranos that began with Jeanette MacDonald and encompassed singers like Grace Moore, Lily Pons, and Deanna Durbin before fizzling out with Jane Powell. Plus there's José Iturbi, the pianist and conductor whose movie stardom remains a mystery (at least to me); he hashes up the Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in a number shot at the Hollywood Bowl where he's accompanied by a stage full of young pianists. The plot, such as it is, hangs on Kelly and Sinatra getting Grayson, with whom both have fallen in love, an audition with Iturbi at MGM and then figuring out which of them will get Grayson. The whole thing unaccountably earned an Oscar nomination for best picture, but it also landed Kelly his only nomination as best actor. It was also nominated for cinematography and for Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn's song "I Fall in Love Too Easily," which Sinatra introduced, and it won for George Stoll's scoring.

Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956)

Kirk Douglas and Anthony Quinn in Lust for Life

Cast: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn, James Donald, Pamela Brown, Everett Sloane, Niall McGinnis, Noel Purcell, Henry Daniell, Madge Kennedy, Jill Bennett, Lionel Jeffries, Laurence Naismith, Jeanette Sterke. Screenplay: Norman Corwin, based on a novel by Irving Stone. Cinematography: Russell Harlan, Freddie Young. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons, Hans Peters. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Miklós Rózsa.

After watching Julian Schnabel's take on Vincent Van Gogh in At Eternity's Gate (2018), I thought it made sense to go back and see Hollywood's portrait of the artist, Vincente Minnelli's Lust for Life. Schnabel is himself an artist, of course, so it's not surprising to find his film focused on the aesthetics of madness (along with propounding a theory that Van Gogh didn't commit suicide but was the victim of an accidental gunshot). Minnelli and screenwriter Norman Corwin are less successful in finding a coherent image of Van Gogh than Schnabel and his co-screenwriters Jean-Claude Carrière and Louise Kugelberg were, partly because the latter were working with one of the most insightful actors of our time, Willem Dafoe, while Minnelli's Van Gogh is played by Kirk Douglas, who brings to the role a physical resemblance to the artist but is never quite strong enough to craft an integrated characterization. Lust for Life seems to suggest that Van Gogh's problems stemmed from a lack of reciprocated love -- from his father, the church he tries to serve, the several women in his life, the art-buying public, the citizens of Arles, and his fellow artists -- most notably Paul Gauguin, played (perhaps overplayed) by Anthony Quinn in an Oscar-winning performance. The film is visually stunning, although the transformation of the landscapes that Van Gogh sees into what he painted is handled more subtly and intelligently in Schnabel's film. Minnelli seems content merely to juxtapose place with painting. The sensational events in Van Gogh's life, especially the amputation of an ear, are treated sensationally in Minnelli's film, which only suggests that Van Gogh did it out of frustration with Gauguin, as if pleading for that artist's attention. We also get a sentimental deathbed scene, a kind of reconciliation with Vincent's brother, Theo (James Donald). Lust for Life is a watchable but flawed and inconsistent film -- even the name of the artist gets a variety of pronunciations, from "Van Gokh" to "Van Gog" to "Van Goh."

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli, 1958)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, Martha Hyer, Arthur Kennedy, Nancy Gates, Leora Dana, Betty Lou Keim, Larry Gates. Screenplay: John Patrick, Arthur Sheekman, based on a novel by James Jones. Cinematography: William H. Daniels. Art direction: William A. Horning, Urie McCleary. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Like Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli had a special touch with the movie melodrama, taking its often objectively silly elements seriously enough that you can actually believe in them. The James Jones novel on which the screenplay for Some Came Running was based is one of those semi-autobiographical books that writers seem to need to get out of their systems, but adapting it meant challenging the Production Code strictures, particularly on sex, at almost every turn. So the characters in the film are only as believable as the actors can make them. There's a lot of shorthand in the film about the relationships between Dave Hirsh (Frank Sinatra) and the two women in his life, the "schoolteacher" Gwen French (Martha Hyer) and the "floozie" Ginnie Moorehead (Shirley MacLaine). It's not immediately clear why Dave falls in love so swiftly with Gwen, who seems to want to mentor him as a writer more than she does to sleep with him, or why he stays connected with the illiterate and rattle-brained Ginnie, to the extent of marrying her on the rebound from Gwen. Fortunately, all three actors are adept at pulling characters out of the script, where they don't seem to have been fully written. Dean Martin was just beginning to show that he could act -- Howard Hawks would complete the process the following year with Rio Bravo -- and Minnelli helped give his career a boost by casting him as the alcoholic gambler Bama Dillert. And Arthur Kennedy completes the ensemble as Dave's go-getter older brother, Frank. Minnelli makes the most of these colorful performers, to the extent that MacLaine, Kennedy, and Hyer all received Oscar nominations. But he's also adept, as he would show in 1960 with Home From the Hill, at taking a real small town location and bringing it to full life, especially in the climactic scene that takes place in the carnival celebrating the town's centennial. The location gives the film a substance and reality that the script never quite supplies.

It's Always Fair Weather (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1955)

It's Always Fair Weather (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1955)

Cast: Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse, Dolores Gray, Michael Kidd, David Burns, Jay C. Flippen. Screenplay: Betty Comden, Adolph Green. Cinematography: Robert J. Bronner. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Arthur Lonergan. Film editing: Adrienne Fazan. Music: André Previn, songs by André Previn, Betty Comden, Adolph Green.

Since they satirized (albeit mildly) Hollywood and Broadway in their screenplays for Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen, 1952) and The Band Wagon (Vincente Minnelli, 1953), it seems almost inevitable that Betty Comden and Adolph Green should set their sights on television, and particularly TV advertising, in the screenplay for It's Always Fair Weather. Maybe it's just that television was seen as the enemy in Hollywood, but the last in their triad of MGM musicals of the 1950s seems a little sharper in tone than than the other two. The movie scores some nice hits on TV tearjerker shows like Ralph Edwards's This Is Your Life and on absurd commercials: The row of dancing soapboxes is a hit at the actual commercial in which a dancer wore a giant Old Gold cigarette pack. The unsentimental tone is there from the very beginning, when after a trio of just-demobilized GIs vows to reunite and celebrate their friendship ten years later, the film jumps ahead to a sour and disillusioning revelation of their midlife failures. Ted Riley (Gene Kelly) has become something of a lowlife, the manager of a boxer he won in a crap game; Angie Valentine (Michael Kidd) had wanted to become a famous chef, but runs a hamburger joint in Schenectady that he calls the Cordon Bleu; and Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), once an aspiring artist, is now an advertising executive with a sour stomach and an impending divorce. It all ends well, of course, with the help of a brainy TV producer played by Cyd Charisse and her feather-brained star played by Dolores Gray. Although André Previn's song score is only passable, it supports some fine production numbers staged by Kelly and Donen that take full advantage of the CinemaScope screen, like the trio in which Kelly, Dailey, and Kidd dance with garbage can lids on their feet, or the split-screen effect in which they perform a perfectly synchronized number with each in a different setting. Kelly gets one of his big solo numbers, a kind of echo of the celebrated "Singin' in the Rain" routine, but this time on roller skates, and Dailey, Charisse, and Gray also have good solos. (Kidd, better known as choreographer than performer, got shorted.) I think one reason that It's Always Fair Weather may not have the reputation of the other MGM musicals of the period is that when it came time to release it on television, the big numbers had to be chopped up, panned-and-scanned for small TV screens. Fortunately, it works well letterboxed on today's bigger, wider screens.