Big deal Special Edition issues of two Vincente Minnelli pictures arrive on DVD today. You think I'm not going to write about them?
Thing is, though, neither one--An American In Paris or Gigi--rank among my favorites.
I've always had a love/hate relationship with An American In Paris. The love, of course, comes from the final ballet sequence, 18 minutes of absolute perfection, a swirl of gorgeous design, precise movement and glorious color, all captured by Minnelli's swooning, swooping camera and masterful editing rhythms. I'm not going to get all Cahiers du Cinema here and claim that if you don't love this sequence, you can't truly love the art of film...but it's true.
Unfortunately, there's the rest of the movie. Many of the problems can be traced to Alan Jay Lerner's awful script. Gene Kelly plays--wait for it--an American in Paris, a GI who decided to stay after WWII. He's a frustrated artist whose only pleasure in life seems to come from his friendships with a cranky misanthrope played by Minnelli mainstay Oscar Levant and a cabaret performer played by charisma vacuum Georges Guetary.
Things really fall apart once the plot kicks in. Kelly meets a wealthy divorcee played by Nina Foch, who promises to advance his career if he will...well, as near as I can tell, if he will become her personal boy toy. They don't put it that way, of course--this is a Hollywood movie from 1951--but it's kinda sorta implied, but the movie won't quite own up to it.
Worse, Guetary confesses to Kelly his love for a "war orphan" he helped out financially, who is now blossoming into an attractive young woman. Attractive, yes--she's played by Leslie Caron--but if we follow the movie's timeline, still definitely underage, and the notion of Guetary's bland, middle-aged libertine macking on this tender young thing...Ugh. Again, the movie refuses to even acknowledge the dicey morality at play here.
Then, of course, Kelly falls for Caron. Our hero, then: Willing to whore himself out to advance his career, even as he's stealing away his best friend's jailbait girlfriend. Which would be great if the movie at any time called our protagonist out on his rampant douchebaggery. But it doesn't; in fact, it goes out of its way to show Kelly as an almost insufferably nice guy, planting kisses on old ladies and dancing with children. There's a huge disconnect between what Minnelli and Lerner want us to believe and what the evidence of their own story is showing us.
Even all that might not matter if the movie was better. But though it received great acclaim at the time (it was thought to be unusually "serious" for a musical, whatever that means), it doesn't hold up well at all. I'm a huge fan of Gene Kelly, but his incessant grin wears a little thin after awhile, and his showboating efforts to show what a great fella he is (did I mention dancing with children?) make you wish he'd go strangle a kitten or something, just to give him some sort of human failings. And Kelly's pretty much the whole show, cast-wise: Caron's a great dancer but she's given almost nothing else to do, Guetary is a non-entity and Levant...is an acquired taste.
Minnelli does very little to help matters, staging most of the song-and-dance numbers in cramped areas and shooting them indifferently. (There are exceptions, of course. Thank God for DVD technology, allowing us to skip to the good stuff right away.) Also, for a movie intended to be a tribute to the George Gershwin songbook, it makes some odd song choices. By Strauss and Tra-La-La may not be the worst things Gershwin ever wrote (after all, he churned out songs for an El Brendel movie), but they sure aren't the best, either. So many great songs aren't here--imagine if Kelly had a regret-filled solo to How Long Has This Been Going On?, and imagine how Minnelli might have filmed it, or Caron dancing to Someone To Watch Over Me. But if you're imagining that, you're already showing more verve than the filmmakers.
As for Gigi, well, it's chic, frou-frou whateverness has never been my sort of thing. The again, heartwarming family nostalgia isn't my cup of tea, either, but Minnelli's Meet Me In St. Louis is one of my favorite movies ever. And I acknowledge Gigi is well-made, expertly staged and shot, handsomely designed, tonally perfect--I just don't care much for it. Maybe Maurice Chevalier in full "Honh honh honh" mode just puts me off.
Regardless, will I be running out and buying these today? Um, let's just say I budgeted the money for them weeks ago...
