An American in Paris

Arthur Freed’s production is a musical built around a dead composer’s back catalogue. George Gershwin’s songs, most of them written for the stage in the twenties and thirties, are stitched by Alan Jay Lerner into a story about an American painter in Paris, and the whole thing is aimed at a closing ballet set to Gershwin’s orchestral piece of the same name. Vincente Minnelli directs as if the ballet were the point and the rest were the price of admission. That is roughly how it plays.

Gene Kelly’s Jerry Mulligan is an ex-GI who stayed on after the war to paint and cannot sell a canvas. Kelly dances on a café step with a crowd of French children, teaching them the words of “I Got Rhythm” and letting them shout the answers back, and we laughed out loud, because he is plainly enjoying the children more than the choreography. Later he dances on and around Oscar Levant’s piano for “Tra-La-La” and never once looks down to check where the lid is. Levant’s Adam Cook, a concert pianist who has never given a concert, gets the film’s best lines and delivers them as if he had just thought of them, which with Levant may have been the case.

Levant also gets the film’s funniest idea: a daydream in which he plays the Concerto in F as soloist, conductor, every member of the orchestra and the audience, and applauds himself. Georges Guétary, as the music-hall star Henri Baurel, climbs a staircase that lights up under his feet for “I’ll Build a Stairway to Paradise”, and Alfred Gilks shoots it head-on in gold and black so that the man and the set are equally the act. The numbers are fine. It is what lies between them that tried us.

The trouble is Jerry. He sees Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron) across a nightclub, talks his way to her table, wheedles her telephone number and then turns up at the perfume shop where she works until she agrees to meet him. Lerner writes this as ardour; we watched it as a man refusing to hear no, and we winced. This was Caron’s first film and it shows: she moves beautifully and speaks her lines as if reading them off Kelly’s forehead. The gap in years between them is plain on the screen, and the script does not so much as notice. Nina Foch’s Milo Roberts, the rich American who buys Jerry’s paintings and wants to fund a show, is the only adult in the love story, and the film uses her as an obstacle and then loses interest in her.

And yet the one quiet number moved us. Jerry and Lise on the bank of the Seine at night, a low wall, mist on the water, one lamp, and “Our Love Is Here to Stay” arranged by Conrad Salinger for strings kept so low you could talk over them. Kelly barely dances. He walks her along the wall, turns her once, and lets Gilks’s camera do the rest. For three minutes nobody is pushing.

Then the ballet. It runs a quarter of an hour or so, has no dialogue, and puts Kelly and Caron through a Paris rebuilt on the MGM lot in the manner of French painters: a Place de la Concorde with Dufy’s spidery fountains, a flower market out of Renoir, a Rousseau jungle, a fairground in which Kelly appears as Toulouse-Lautrec’s Chocolat. The costumes, credited to Irene Sharaff, Orry-Kelly and Walter Plunkett, go from black and white at the Beaux Arts ball straight into every colour the Technicolor process could hold. Adrienne Fazan cuts on the music and holds on the dancing, so that you see whole phrases from Kelly’s feet to his hands without interruption. We sat forward. It still stopped us, mostly because of a single held moment when the crowd clears and Kelly is left alone in a grey set with a red rose. What it means for the story we will not say.

Kelly made Singin’ in the Rain the following year, and that film has jokes where this one has taste, which is why it has aged better. An American in Paris is a beautiful object with a tiresome hero at its centre. Sit through him. The last quarter of an hour is why the film exists, and it is a U, so the children can see what a musical used to be allowed to attempt.