An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli, 1951) (Patreon)

It's going to be an interesting month! To be honest, I don't have a lot of experience with the classic Hollywood musicals. And the ones I've always known and liked have been the Busby Berkeley films, with their (mostly) dancerly anonymity and geometric focus. By contrast, it's pretty evident that Minnelli, working with the Freed Unit at MGM, favored star vehicles, with dynamic performers like Gene Kelly front and center.

As a cinematic formalist, I find that a film like An American in Paris, pleasurable as it is, poses certain problems in terms of analysis. Much like the stunt-based action films that they so resemble, these musicals are much more about what the director doesn't do than what he or she does. Sometimes, physical performers like Buster Keaton and Jackie Chan became directors themselves, since they came to understand what sorts of pacing, framing, and editing were best suited to showcasing their derring-do. And of course, Kelly himself became a co-director (with the great Stanley Donen) on a number of his best loved films, including Singin' in the Rain.

So it's going to take me some time to really grasp what is unique about Minnelli as a filmmaker. In American in Paris, he's got two peerless dancers (Kelly and Leslie Caron), a fairly solid vocalist (Georges Guétary) and a class-A musician (Oscar Levant), and, um, the songs of George and Ira Gershwin. This is clearly a case of the director needing to simply stay out of the way. But did he?

There are some moments of distinct visual flair in this film, particularly the dance-style-as-personality montage introducing Caron's Lise, and the fantasy sequence near the end, in which Jerry (Kelly) visualizes his joy and heartbreak as an extended, wordless jazz / ballet number. In these cases, editing does its part to express the overall aesthetic thrust of these sequences. But staging and set design are much more important. In this respect, coming to Minnelli after diving into the Archers is instructive, since The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffmann also emphasize visual design but could not be realized without fades, cuts, and superimpositions.

As scholars such as Richard Dyer and Tom Gunning would remind us, musicals are a genre defined by the cinema of attractions. Narrative is generally a mere pretext for getting the viewer from one song-and-dance number to the next. A theoretical understanding has developed around this idea, that musicals have much in common with the avant-garde. But based on An American in Paris, I'm skeptical. It's not just that the narrative here was dull and, to an extent, misogynist. (Nina Foch's middle-aged heiress Milo is discarded with nary a second thought.) Rather, it felt like I was going trick-or-treating, just moving from house to house and receiving candy. That can be fun for a minute, but we all need something more nourishing.

Also, I realize Caron was a dancer, not an actress. But throughout the film she exhibited all the charisma of a kidnapping victim in a proof-of-life video. And fixing that is presumably the director's job.