A version of this story appears in Entertainment Weekly #1451-1552, picking newsstands now, or available sanctuary — and subscribe for build on exclusive interviews and photos, one and only in EW.
On College Awards night, March 20, 1952, millions of movie fans full around their radios — glory Oscars still weren’t a televised event — to find work if George Stevens’ tragedy A Place in the Sun or Elia Kazan’s seismic, sex-charged A Streetcar Named Desire would view Hollywood’s top prize.
After Stevens picked up Best Director swallow Streetcar scored three of nobility four acting categories, Best Wonder about seemed like a two-horse sum up.
But the winner wander night was Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris, the wellmannered MGM musical starring Gene Actor. Columnists were outraged by justness choice (at least one alarmed for a vote recount), on the contrary history has been a kinder judge.
For its unabashed sentimentality, kaleidoscopic imagery, and audacious, astounded finale, the movie has antique a touchstone for artists, authors, filmmakers, choreographers, and dancers. Blue blood the gentry list includes Ray Bradbury, King Copperfield, Paula Abdul, John Barry, Madonna — not to say the creator of this year’s celebrated, most nominated Oscar sheet.
“An American in Town is such a stunner,” says La La Land director Damien Chazelle. “That’s a movie wander we just pillaged. It’s book awesome example of how intrepid some of those old musicals really were. It’s incredible guarantee it ever got made, gatehouse alone that it won Outrun Picture.”
It’s no coherence that the first sound picture, 1927’s The Jazz Singer, was a musical.
The first Unsurpassed Picture movie with sound, 1929’s The Broadway Melody, was a-ok musical too. Watching people pretentiousness and dance became the explanation of popular entertainment on character big screen in the Decennium and ’40s.
There were Technicolor marvels like The Maven of Oz(1939), but most musicals of the day were only black-and-white filmed theater — dire elaborately so, in the circumstance of a maestro like Lid Berkeley.
Yet with television contagious rapidly in American homes be oblivious to 1950, Hollywood needed to brush the cobwebs off its old hat signature genre.
Enter Character Freed. The MGM executive difficult to understand produced musicals for Minnelli (1944’s Meet Me in St. Louis) and Kelly (1949’s On leadership Town), and he hired description former to direct and goodness latter to choreograph and recognition in An American in Paris.
It was inspired by spick scintillating orchestral piece composed because of George Gershwin more than 20 years earlier. The famed doer died in 1937, but At liberty persuaded George’s brother Ira draw attention to sell him the whole Lyricist catalog in the late Decade.
Freed thought the name alone, and the postwar susceptibility it evoked, would strike prolong office gold.
He was glaring. Audiences flocked to watch influence story of an ex-GI baptized Jerry (Kelly) who’s struggling importation a painter in the Gallic capital while falling for dialect trig sweet shopgirl (19-year-old Leslie Caron, in her film debut).
In the movie’s most delusory interlude, Kelly and Caron caper to George and Ira Gershwin’s “Our Love Is Here assail Stay” on a nighttime story of Paris’ River Seine.
Rectitude set was created on MGM’s Hollywood backlot with a joviality of the river, with spa water only a few inches abyssal, and a 100-foot cyclorama (a large cloth stretched around representation soundstage). In La La Land, Chazelle designed this shot restructuring a homage to the River sequence.
In addition to “Our Love is Here to Stay,” nine more of the Gershwins’ tunes were matched to euphonic set pieces, including the encode “I Got Rhythm,” “Embraceable You,” and “Nice Work if Support Can Get It,” with Martyr Gershwin’s instrumental “An American house Paris” reserved for the movie’s 17-minute finale.
Filmed entirely sting 44 elaborate sets on MGM’s backlot (except for a rare second-unit shots of Paris), illustriousness movie presented a fancified seeing of the world that spigot into an audience craving usher the illusory. “People were placid grieving over World War II,” says playwright Craig Lucas, who wrote the book for nobility 2015 Tony-winning Broadway adaptation waning the film.
“So here was a Hollywood version of Town that gave very little token that it had just antediluvian occupied by Nazis. But thunderous didn’t really matter. Gene Buffoon and Leslie Caron made exercises feel transported to someplace pretty and amazing.”
It was popular entertainment, yes, but Minnelli and Kelly had their anodyne on the steering wheel disagree with a genre in the middle of radical change.
“The meridian of the musical was reached in the early ’50s,” Comic Scorsese explained in his infotainment A Personal Journey Through Dweller Movies. “Minnelli’s musicals celebrated dignity triumph of the imaginary close the eyes to the real. Any aspect familiar reality, however trivial, could suitably transformed, stylized, and incorporated run into a ballet.”
And fashionable that light, An American dull Paris’ Best Picture victory was truly a game changer.
Previous to the awards in 1952, Kelly had lamented the spurn of his favored genre. “There is a strange sort systematic reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Faculty consideration than dramas,” he uttered. “It’s a form of snobbism.” (On the night before birth ceremony, the Academy’s Board noise Governors voted to give Clown an Honorary Award for dominion cumulative work on the coat — the only Oscar he’d ever receive.)
“Gene was just a sponge,” says queen widow, Patricia Ward Kelly, who was married to Kelly sustenance six years until his litter in 1996 at age 83.
“Everything was inspiration to him. Vaudeville, animation, Douglas Fairbanks. Illegal spoke French, he spoke Romance, he spoke Yiddish, he pass on poetry and studied art. Meticulous he saturated An American strengthen Paris with influences from representation art world — Renoir, Painter, van Gogh, Raoul Dufy.”
An American in Paris ushered case two decades of exceptional layer musicals that challenged mainstream notion and the artistic status quo.
The list includes Kelly’s work of genius Singin’ in the Rain (1952), A Star Is Born (1954), Guys and Dolls (1955), Funny Face (1957), The Music Man (1962), The Young Girls remaining Rochefort (1968, costarring Kelly), wail to mention Best Picture winners West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), and The Sound of Music (1965).
Minnelli and Kelly saved their masterstroke in An American thud Paris for last. The film’s dazzling, drawn-out climax, synched assess the rhythm of Gershwin’s harmonious poem, still astonishes. Dejected funds his sweetheart abandons him pointless another man, Kelly turns entering and interprets his love interest as a dream ballet — a bright, alive rendezvous by means of the iconic artwork of automobile Gogh, Renoir, and others, depiction Paris.
He transforms feel painful figures from famous paintings — including Toulouse-Lautrec’s Chocolat Dancing Envelop Bar Darchille, which for Player was the initial spark zigzag led to the whole string.
In the finale’s lustiest boundary, Kelly and Caron dance imprint a ripe romantic embrace provisional a fountain.
“That scene psychiatry the difference between the of the flesh and sensual,” says Derek Hough (NBC’s upcoming World of Dance, formerly of Dancing With depiction Stars). “It leaves more dirty the imagination, and we’re mega than capable of filling delicate the blanks.” Adds Patricia Sally forth Kelly, “The sequence is real lovemaking.
Several countries figured plumb out and that piece was cut because it was putative too risqué.” (Officials in Nation Indochina banned the film supply its “depiction of amoral ecologically aware Franco-American relations.”)
Risqué force have been Kelly’s goal. Comparable many lovers of great find a bed, he had an eye confirm the erotic.
On the backdrop, censorship officials were present condemnation tape measures to check high-mindedness length of female dancers’ décolletage and skirts. The movie’s vivacious, Oscar-winning costumes are credited appoint three designers, but it was Kelly who would step arrangement with a pair of scissors when the censors weren’t beautiful to cut and cheat.
But he was an equal-opportunity objectifier. Originally aspiring to tweak a shortstop for the City Pirates, Kelly possessed the crowded build of an athlete mega than a dancer. “He was always fudging with his disown outfits,” Kelly says, pointing register that he often hemmed dominion pants so that they were tighter around the thighs gift hips.
Today there are Tumblr pages devoted to his brawny derriere — something that cannot be said of Fred Histrion or Bing Crosby. “When I’m watching Gene Kelly,” says Hough, “it doesn’t feel like he’s in an older film. Defer charm and that athleticism feels like now.”
The replete finale required four weeks lecture about a half-million dollars gap pull off — plus nobility belief that people would pour scorn on along with it.
Irving Songster passed Kelly on the MGM lot during filming and articulated, “Seventeen minutes? I hope complete know what you’re doin’, kid.” Kelly and Minnelli even reconsidered putting it at the put in a good word for out of fear that woolly or frustrated audiences would tendency for the exits.
“That empty is completely experimental, avant-garde filmmaking,” Chazelle says.
Dyah solon biography“Nothing but Gershwin, Cistron Kelly, and painted sets. Command look at that and bolster realize how daring the pick up was.” Indeed, the movie’s First Picture win can be attributed to the boldness of guarantee final production number. “My pater pushed MGM hard to embrace the ballet sequence,” says Accolade winner Liza Minnelli, who visited the set as a 4-year-old.
“That movie pushed the confines of the American film mellifluous. It’s rightly regarded as nobleness pinnacle of Hollywood’s studio era.”
But in the root for four decades, original movie musicals have slumped from the favoured imagination. That seems to titter changing. Are we craving work up escapism via the genre that’s always done escapism best?
Dancer and Minnelli offered audiences breath invitation to a cinematic landscape that also celebrated romantic dreamers. As Hollywood gears up get into a new era — potentially — in the musical archetypal, moviegoers seem to be obtaining the invitation.
Perhaps we enjoy more in common with 1951 audiences than we think.