Themes: Americans Abroad, Love Triangles, Life in the Arts
Main Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Georges Guetary, Nina Foch
Release Year: 1951
Country: US
Run Time: 113 minutes
Plot
Gene Kelly does his patented Pal Joey bit as Jerry Mulligan, an opportunistic American painter living in Paris' "starving artists" colony. He is discovered by wealthy Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), who becomes Jerry's patroness in more ways than one. Meanwhile, Jerry plays hookey on this setup by romancing waif-like Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron) -- who, unbeknownst to him, is the object of the affections of his close friend Henri (Georges Guetary), a popular nightclub performer. (The film was supposed to make Guetary into "the New Chevalier." It didn't.) The thinnish plot is held together by the superlative production numbers and by the recycling of several vintage George Gershwin tunes, including "I Got Rhythm," "'S Wonderful," and "Our Love Is Here to Stay." Highlights include Guetary's rendition of "Stairway to Paradise"; Oscar Levant's fantasy of conducting and performing Gershwin's "Concerto in F" (Levant also appears as every member of the orchestra); and the closing 17-minute "American in Paris" ballet, in which Kelly and Caron dance before lavish backgrounds based on the works of famed French artists. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
Review
Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris set a new standard for the subgenre known as the "songbook" musical. Since the dawn of sound, producers had been attracted to films built around the published output of composers as different as Johann Strauss (The Great Waltz, Waltzes From Vienna), Jerome Kern (Till the Clouds Roll By), Cole Porter (Night and Day), and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Words and Music). Mostly, the material was strung together, sometimes hooked around a fanciful pseudo-biography of the composer in question, and audiences grinned and bore the plot elements while delighting to the music. An American in Paris was freed of any need to embrace composer George Gershwin as an onscreen figure by virtue of the 1945 screen biography Rhapsody in Blue, in which Robert Alda had portrayed the composer. Rather, Minnelli, Gene Kelly, and screenwriter Alan Jay Lerner simply used the title and the substance of the title work as a jumping-off point for a screen fantasy that happened to utilize much of the major Gershwin song catalog (indeed, the 1992 laserdisc edition, with the unmixed music tracks on the alternate soundtrack, reveals dozens of Gershwin tunes buried in the underscore). Some of the inspiration for the film's 16-minute ballet finale came from the Red Shoes ballet sequence from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 The Red Shoes, while the presence of Leslie Caron, although logical to the plot, originated with some studio executive's notion that the Powell-Pressburger movie had been a hit "because the girl was 'foreign'." Whatever its inspirations and imitations, An American in Paris won seven Academy Awards and box-office success. The overall film (especially the non-musical elements) hasn't worn quite so well over the years, but it was a vital piece of cinema in its time, stretching the envelope of the level of sophistication that a major studio would pursue, and ripping that envelope to shreds with the climactic ballet sequence, which became the model for still more daring sequences in such Hollywood films as Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon and such European imitators as Black Tights and Kelly's own dance extravaganza, Invitation to the Dance. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Eugene Borden - George Mattieu; Martha Bamattre - Mathilde Mattieu; Mary Young - Old Woman Dancer; Madge Blake - Edna Mae Bestram (customer); Nan Boardman - Maid; Ann Codee - Therese; John Eldredge - Jack Jansen; Mary Jones - Old Lady Dancer; Jeanne Lafayette - Nun; Paul Maxey - John McDowd; Greg McClure - Artist; Noel Neill - American Girl; Anna Q. Nilsson - Kay Jansen; Hayden Rorke - Tommy Baldwin; Dick Wessel - Ben Macrow; Alex Romero; Don Quinn - Honeymooner; Andre Charisse - Dancing Partner; Art Dupuis - Driver; Alfred Paix - Postman; George Davis - Francois
The story of the film is interspersed with show-stopping dance numbers choreographed by Gene Kelly and set to Gershwin tunes. Songs and music include "I Got Rhythm," "I'll Build A Stairway to Paradise," "'S Wonderful," and "Our Love is Here to Stay". The climax is "The American in Paris" ballet, an 18 minute dance featuring Kelly and Caron set to Gershwin's An American in Paris. The ballet alone cost more than $500,000, a staggering sum at the time.
Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) is an exuberant American expatriate in Paris trying to make a reputation as a painter. His friend Adam (Oscar Levant) is a struggling concert pianist who is a long time associate of a French singer, Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary). A lonely society woman, Milo Roberts (Nina Foch) takes Jerry under her wing and supports him, but is interested in Jerry more than his art. Jerry remains oblivious to her feelings, and falls in love with Lise (Leslie Caron), a French girl he meets at a restaurant. Lise loves him as well, but she is already in a relationship with Henri, whom she feels indebted to for having saved her family during World War II.
At a raucous masked ball, with everyone in black-and-white costumes, Milo learns that Jerry is not interested in her, Jerry learns that Lise is in love with him, but is marrying Henri the next day, and Henri overhears their conversation. When Henri drives Lise away, Jerry daydreams about being with her all over Paris, his reverie broken by a car horn, the sound of Henri bringing Lise back to him.
Hayden Rorke, best known for playing Dr. Bellows on the TV series I Dream of Jeannie has a small part as a friend of Nina Foch's character.
Noel Neill, later to portray Lois Lane on the TV series The Adventures of Superman, has a small role as an American art student who tries to criticize Jerry Mulligan's paintings.
The film was shot in Hollywood, so it features some quirks in the occasional French dialogue. Notably, near the beginning of the I Got Rhythm number, one of the 'French' children Jerry, parle anglais à nous, which sounds rather curious, containing mistakes both in direct object placement and in respectful address. In the French soundtrack, which switches to the original sound for the duration of the songs, the à nous is masked through a plop sound, to make the sentence more palatable.
Hollywood movies set in France seldom used location shooting or native speakers. However, great care was sometimes put into reproducing Paris surroundings, as in An American in Paris or Irma La Douce. Many French Paris-set movies of this era avoided location work too, and sometimes the same art directors (Alexandre Trauner being the best known example) worked on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Gene Kelly received an Academy Honorary Award that year for "his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film." It was his only Oscar.
In 1993, An American in Paris was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
A stage version of the musical has been adapted by Ken Ludwig, and began previews at the Alley Theatre (Houston) on April 29, 2008, officially opening on May 18 through June 22. The production, directed by Alley artistic director Gregory Boyd with choreography by Randy Skinner, stars Harry Groener and Kerry O'Malley. The musical has many of the film's original songs, and also incorporates other Gershwin songs, such as "They All Laughed", "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" and "Love Walked In".[2][3]
