An American in Paris (1951)

MGM’s 1951 Technicolor extravaganza An American in Paris is generally acknowledged as a landmark in the history of the movie musical. I saw it years ago and it really didn’t work for me. It seemed to be trying too hard to be clever, trying too hard to be arty and just generally trying too hard. But that was years ago, my tastes have changed and it’s time for another look at this movie.

It won six Oscars but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad movie.

There’s certainly some serious talent involved. Gene Kelly doing the choreography. Vincente Minnelli, one of the great directors of musicals, in the director’s chair. John Alton doing the cinematography (or at least the cinematography for the sequence for which the film is remembered). Songs by George and Ira Gershwin. Costumes by Orry-Kelly. These are creative Big Guns.

Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) is a very unsuccessful American painter living in Paris. He finally sells two paintings, to wealthy widow Milo Roberts (Nina Foch). She decides she’s going to turn him into a successful painter. She has the money and the connections to do that. Jerry figures out that it’s going to be not so much a patron-artist relationship as a wealthy woman-gigolo relationship. He doesn’t like that idea.

On the other hand he’d like to become a rich successful artist. He agrees to an arrangement. At this point I think you have to do a bit of reading between the lines. This was the era of the Production Code. We’re asked to accept that nothing is actually going on between Jerry and Milo and that he’s not a kept man. But if this is the case then the plot makes no sense and Jerry’s behaviour makes no sense. Milo is not the kind of woman who would spend a fortune boosting the career of an unknown painter without demanding something in return. And Jerry behaves as if he despises himself for being in effect a male whore. It seems to me that this would have given the plot an actual point but since the movie was afraid to go there the movie ends up without an actual plot.

In the meantime Jerry has met cute French teenager Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron). They fall in love but she is engaged to marry crooner Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary). The usual romantic dramas will follow.

I’ve never been a Gene Kelly fan. He’s OK here. Jerry Mulligan is somewhat tortured for a lead character in a musical.

Leslie Caron has the right gamine look but I found her to be very insipid.

I still think it’s trying too hard to be clever and arty. I do now appreciate the way in which Minnelli and Kelly were trying to reinvent the movie musical. And I do appreciate the aesthetic. It looks so gloriously artificial. What I love in that there is some location shooting done in Paris but the whole movie still looks uncompromisingly artificial. I adore the way colour is used.

And then of course we get the very long fantasy ballet sequence on which the movie’s fame is largely based. Earlier we got a brief fantasy sequences in which musician Adam Cook (Oscar Levant) is transported into the world of his music. Now we get painter Jerry transported into the world of his paintings. It’s a visually dazzling sequence and it’s impossible not to admire its boldness.

But I just couldn’t get invested in the lead characters. The triangle between Henri, Jerry and Lise is uninteresting because Henri hardly exists as a character. The Jerry-Milo-Lise triangle could have been much more intriguing but because the movie doesn’t dare to suggest that there actually is a Jerry-Milo relationship the potential is never exploited. So the movie ends up having no actual romantic plot at all.

So the movie relies entirely on those two fantasy sequences. But their impact is lost because the characters are so undeveloped. The earlier sequence has more punch because Adam is trying to deal with the fact that as a musician he’s a failure. The later sequence should have been Jerry dealing with his struggle to become a real artist and to reconcile his art and his emotional life but the fact that Jerry is a painter is a plot point that is never really developed. Is he actually a talented painter or a talentless hack? We never find out. Could he become a real success an artist? We never find out. So that ballet sequence is just technical virtuosity for its own sake.

Vincente Minnelli was a superb director of melodrama but no matter how good a director might be it helps to have an actual script. What Alan Jay Lerner gives him seems more like a first draft of a screenplay. In fact it seems more like a few ideas jotted down on a notepad.

Visually this movie dazzles. But I found myself not caring what happened to any of the characters which meant I ended up not caring much about the movie. Recommended, solely for the visuals.