He had plenty of ginger but no Ginger: although he danced affectingly with Leslie Caron, amusingly with Debbie Reynolds, snappily with Judy Garland, bouncily with Rita Hayworth, broodily with Vera-Ellen, and respectfully with statuesque, stony-faced Cyd Charisse, we think of Gene Kelly as a guy in loafers and a tight T-shirt tap-dancing up a storm all by his lonesome. His torso and his profile were beautiful, and he had a touching little scar on the left side of his mouth, and the musical comedies in which he starred never failed to deliver his dream girl into his embrace; yet somehow his image left no space around it into which a moviegoing housewife could project herself. Even boneless, balding, big-eared Bing Crosby was more of a heartthrob. In the masculine romp of “On the Town”—for this viewer the very best of all Kelly’s musicals—Frank Sinatra is cast as a sex-shy nerd, yet in this secondary and comic role he manifests that mysterious tug, that shadowy depth of contradictory possibilities, which Kelly rarely offers amid the outpouring of his glittering, genial gifts.
In contrast—in the inevitable contrast—millions of moviegoing housewives imagined themselves dancing with Fred Astaire. The two dancers, though similar in the intelligence and ardor of their dedication to their art, were differently conditioned. Astaire began his career on the vaudeville stage as his sister Adele’s dance partner, and it is as a consummate ballroom dancer, weightlessly swirling his partner through a polished and heavenly space, that he lives in our pantheon. Kelly, thirteen years younger, came too late for the ballroom tradition. As related in “The Films of Gene Kelly,” by Tony Thomas, Kelly’s first stage partner was his brother Fred, and he trained his body on high-school athletics in his native Pittsburgh; in the 1958 television documentary “Dancing—A Man’s Game,” Kelly said, “I played ice hockey as a boy and some of my steps come right out of that game—wide open and close to the ground.” His Canadian-born father flooded their back yard and gave him hockey lessons; his mother loved the theatre and saw to it that he and his two brothers attended dancing school. At fifteen, Eugene Curran Kelly was working out with a semi-pro ice-hockey team; while attending Penn State, he was a gymnastics instructor for the Y.M.C.A. After college, he founded a dancing school with his mother, and then went to Chicago to take ballet lessons from Berenice Holmes. He came to New York in 1937, at the age of twenty-four, and got his first break as the dancing character in William Saroyan’s “The Time of Your Life,” in 1939; his big break came as the star of “Pal Joey” (1940), a musical based upon his fellow-Irishman John O’Hara’s epistolary sketches of a night-club singer, heel, and loner.
Hollywood welcomed him in 1942. His dancing was more athletic and balletic than Astaire’s—one cannot imagine Astaire doing the dizzying number on a high building framework that Kelly performs in “Living in a Big Way” (1947), the aerial acrobatics of “The Pirate” (1948), the swooping roller-skate tap dance of “It’s Always Fair Weather” (1955), or the crablike sidewise scuffle on hands and feet that Kelly agilely lowers himself to in several films—and his screen persona was less partnerable. Some of his most memorable numbers, such as the duet with his own reflection in “Cover Girl” (1944), come in the lonely trough between love at first sight and eventual reunion with the heroine. In another technical tour de force, “Anchors Aweigh” (1945) had him dancing with animated cartoons, as did the “Sinbad the Sailor” episode of “Invitation to the Dance” (1956). In the latter sequence, as in many live numbers throughout his films, Kelly—the third of five children, and the middle son—is in the middle of three dancing men. Male partners seem to free him up to be his most cheerfully spectacular and inventive self, among them a creditably dancing Sinatra in their two sailor musicals; Donald O’Connor in “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952), beginning with the marvellous throwaway vaudeville bits in the opening flashback; Michael Kidd and Dan Dailey in the celebrated trash-can-lid dance from “It’s Always Fair Weather”; and Astaire himself in the introductory segments of “That’s Entertainment Part II” (1976). Astaire was seventy-seven years old, yet noticeably the looser of the two—especially in his arm movements—as he and Kelly perform some charmingly low-key dance patter.
Of course, Kelly can glide through the steps with a woman, and can execute a tap routine in perfect synchronization beside her, but up close he lacks a certain ineffable touch. In his first Hollywood film, “For Me and My Gal” (1942), there is an incidental moment in which George Murphy, in the role of the ousted suitor, does a brief turn with Judy Garland that is revelatory in its courtly ease of motion; we see, through a chink of the main romantic plot, just how a woman should be danced with—with a feathery lightness and a feather-stiff spine.
Yet it is in “For Me and My Gal” that we are most fully persuaded that the Kelly character is loved by the heroine. Garland, only twenty in 1942 but a vaudeville trouper since the age of four and for six years a Hollywood presence, had wanted Kelly for the part, instead of Murphy, who had originally been cast as the guy who gets the gal. She tutored Kelly in acting for the camera. “It was Judy who pulled me through,” Kelly later said. “She was very kind and helpful, and more helpful than she even realized because I watched her to find out what I had to do.” An intensity of attention does burn through when they gaze each into the other’s shining black eyes or crisply tap-dance side by side. Kelly, fresh from his brash Broadway role, is still swaggering, and his reedy intonation suggests a gentler younger brother of James Cagney’s sassy, defiant George M. Cohan. Kelly and Garland both have a slightly troubled, orphaned air, which lends believability when the film—with the hero’s decision to beat the First World War draft by mangling his own hand on a trunk lid—takes a film-noirish turn, and which sees them through the musical’s timely metamorphosis into a rousing war movie, complete with dead Germans and smoky battlefields. It is Garland’s nervous energy, clarion voice, and still girlish looks that carry the picture; confronted with so volatile and compelling an expressiveness, Kelly’s relatively immobile face yields traces of a sulky city waif, with something of Bogart’s or John Garfield’s bruised appeal. He was subsequently cast, in the freewheeling manner of studio-run Hollywood, in a number of non-singing roles—in one film, “Christmas Holiday” (1944), as the would-be killer of Deanna Durbin. He dies in her arms, begging forgiveness.
The chemistry between him and Garland had faded when they were paired again, in 1948, in “The Pirate.” This fanciful action farce, situated on a level of unreality that might be called arty, is Kelly’s movie, though the rights to the stage play had been purchased by M-G-M’s Arthur Freed as a vehicle for Garland, to be directed by her then husband, Vincente Minnelli. Garland has aged beyond her years, and the zany plot has her and Kelly mostly at odds; at one point, she unloads nearly all the breakable furniture of a colonial palace in his direction, in one of filmdom’s great exhibitions of throwing by a left-handed female. Kelly’s personality is so encased in his flamboyant parody of John Barrymore and Douglas Fairbanks as to be impenetrable, and the concluding number, “Be a Clown,” appears to have jumped in from some other musical. Garland sings her best number supposedly in a hypnotic trance, and her whole performance seems a bit dazed—gamely she makes her moves and hits her marks without really getting what is going on. Kelly’s most with-it partners are a pair of black dancers, the Nicholas Brothers, whom he insisted on including in spite of warnings that even such mild miscegenation would cost the film some Southern bookings.
Their third pairing, in “Summer Stock” (1950), revives the chemistry, but with the current reversed. Kelly, as a dance-happy city slicker, is in top form; Garland, who would not work for M-G-M again, looks overweight and considerably older than Kelly. Her addictions and inner travail were on their way to cutting short her precocious career; it is his physical electricity, along with the droll byplay of Gloria De Haven and Eddie Bracken, that lifts this lame bucolic romance halfway off the ground.
No one in the postwar era worked harder to expand the movie musical’s boundaries than Kelly. Making his début as a co-director with “On the Town” (1950), he persuaded the management of M-G-M, which in those days hated to leave its Culver City soundstages, to let him shoot on location in New York; in three hurried days, he and a crew captured all the various shots of New York scenery that, sprinkled among the soundstage footage, give the film an unprecedented spaciousness. Brought in on a forty-six-day schedule, on a budget of merely a million and a half dollars, and bearing little relation to the stage musical of the same name, “On the Town” has remained a proud favorite of Kelly’s; he has said, “After ‘On the Town,’ musicals opened up.” Viewing it on video, I found myself continually smiling; there is almost nothing stale about it, and nothing painful, such as the overblown ballet in “An American in Paris” (1951) or the grating voice that Jean Hagen was obliged to put on in “Singin’ in the Rain.” The opening shots of the surreal Manhattan sky-line at dawn, the unprefaced arrival of song in the voice of the sleepy dockworker, and the perennial theatricality of sailor suits instantly transport the action to a realm of buoyant make-believe where singing and dancing are the norm. Besides the Statue of Liberty and Rockefeller Center, “On the Town” has the terrific tapping of Ann Miller and some postmodern dialogue: Betty Garrett, as the amorous taxi-driver Brunhilde Esterhazy, says to Sinatra, “I like your face. It’s open, you know what I mean? Nothing in it. The kind of a face I could fall into. Kiss me.” Alice Pearce, in the now unthinkable role of a laughably ugly girl, says after a brief date with Kelly, “At last I have something to write in my diary. I’ve been using it for laundry lists.” Not quite Congreve or Shaw, but flip, sharp, and sweet. “On the Town” is that happy occasion, an ambitious film not spoiled by any sign of ambitiousness. A year later, Kelly, as star and choreographer, presented an overtly ambitious display of what dance meant to him and could mean to the movies—“An American in Paris.” His love of France gives warmth to a number of episodes, and rather paternally enfolds the gamine heroine he chose for his leading lady, the eighteen-year-old ballet dancer Leslie Caron. But Oscar Levant is a dour presence, there isn’t enough for the French performer Georges Guétary to do, and Kelly’s artist hero’s murkily dubious affair with Nina Foch’s rich patroness strikes an off-note that doesn’t go away. The climactic ballet, to the music of Gershwin’s “American in Paris,” now appears, with its French-painter sets and eclectic busyness, pretty heavy kitsch, while the dancing episodes of the corny thirties farces of Rogers and Astaire feel ever more precious and pure.
That ineluctable invidious comparison dogs Kelly’s renown. In the years when Hollywood musicals were a popular genre being churned out in abundance, Kelly’s ebullient performing prowess and venturesome spirit put him at the head of the pack; now he tends to be remembered as the Astaire-not, a chesty hoofer with a slant smile who danced the Hollywood musical into its coffin. Astaire’s thirties movies played to a giant captive audience, an America stuck in the Depression, with little else but the radio to amuse it. Kelly’s postwar movies were competing with a rising television that was keeping more and more of the adult middle class at home. The furious energy of “Singin’ in the Rain” has something desperate about it; it is, like Cinerama and the fifties Biblical epics, trying to outshout and outdazzle the little home screen. O’Connor’s frantic gymnastics to “Make ’Em Laugh” and Kelly’s delirious splashing in the famous title number have an attention-getting excessiveness; the most relaxed and old-fashioned number—the peppy furniture-hopping of O’Connor, Kelly, and Debbie Reynolds to “Good Mornin’ ”—is the most pleasing. (One wonders how much American furniture was broken by adolescents trying to emulate the smoothly controlled sofa-topple that the three dancers ride toward the camera.) Even the film’s nostalgic topic, the critical moment when sound came to the motion pictures, has a pleading undercurrent—Love us, the movies are saying, like you used to. But no brilliance of performance, no breadth of screen, no new suavity of color (the early-fifties movies all look blue, with everybody wearing powder-blue suits and even blue fedoras) could bring the crowds back. John Springer, in his 1966 history of the Hollywood musicals, “All Talking! All Singing! All Dancing!,” names “Singin’ in the Rain” “the best movie musical ever made” and yet writes:
There was something artificial about the movie musical which audiences came to resist—even to the point of wanting the songs snipped out! It has almost always been a tense and potentially awkward moment when the background music swells and the hero or heroine takes a breath to project a melody into his or her significant other’s face. But we put up with it for decades, pleasurably, as a rendering, on film, of stage magic. Song and dance go back to the very beginnings of theatrical performance. The Greek tragedies were partly chanted; Shakespeare thinks nothing of interjecting a song. By assembling in a theatre, we license the performers to do whatever they can to entertain us: sing, dance, juggle, cavort. The live presence of performers makes theatre a social event, in which the gala dress of the audience echoes the costumes onstage. But the cinema, once past the primitive phase when a stationary camera filmed a stage action, complete with proscenium arch and footlights, became more interior—a kind of seen novel, consumed in a private darkness and ever more skillfully imitating, with its camerawork, the shifts of consciousness. As the movie audiences forgot the live performances of vaudeville, travelling opera companies, and small-town theatricals, and the upright piano lost its pride of place in the American home, the conventions of musical comedy seemed ever more incongruous. These conventions were always somewhat incongruous; the majority of musicals concerned show business, whose professionals would naturally demonstrate singing and dancing skills and might plausibly use them to enact their private lives. But actors and actresses make up a tiny fraction of humanity, and backstage is a narrow world. It wore thin. Real people don’t sing and dance, and it is a rare musical—“On the Town,” “Oklahoma!” “West Side Story”—that convinces us they do.
Also, noting the particular foreign resistance to Hollywood musicals, one might speculate that there was something specifically American about these films—a brassy optimism and a galvanizing work ethic. From the muscularity of the performers to the dizzily wheeling multitudes of choral dancers and swimmers, the atmosphere is cheerfully industrial. The style of the images may be insouciant—Look, Ma, I’m tap-dancing!—but their message is power, American power, the power released from Everyman by the emancipations of democracy. In this factory of American self-celebration, Kelly, who rose from the assembly line to the managerial level of choreographer and director, was ideally electric yet chaste. The musicals were about sex, but sex puritanically streamlined. They demonstrated to their public how to make love in the old sense of the phrase, as when William Dean Howells writes, in “Venetian Life,” of an “idle maiden” who “balanced herself half over the balcony-rail in perusal of the people under her, and I suspect made love at that distance, and in that constrained position, to some one in the crowd.” Making love is finding the way to the fadeout kiss, not what comes after it. To the question “How can I get a guy/girl?” the Hollywood musicals answered, “Dance with/sing to him/her.” Again and again, after their spoken spats, they musically melt, Rogers and Astaire, Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, Kelly and whoever, into each other’s arms. Around 1955, they begin to melt away. The profitable movie musicals to follow will tend to feature Elvis Presley. The tune changed—rock and roll (its very name gutsy and lewd) made the elaborate sublimations of the musical comedy seem arcane, if not silly. Another language had become academic. Few spoke the language when it was a live one with more fluency than Gene Kelly, and none more thrillingly embodied American élan. ♦
