The Oscar Project #24: An American in Paris (1951)

by Chris Marshall:

Seven years ago (in Oscar Project time), I made the comment that Going My Way was a kinda sorta musical in that Bing Crosby sang a couple of songs, but it still didn’t feel like what I think of as a musical; I said similar things about The Broadway Melody and The Great Ziegfeld as well. Well, 1951’s An American in Paris fits all the criteria of a “real musical.” In fact, there was almost nothing but songs and dance numbers.

When I think about dancers in the movies, Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire are always the first names I think of. Kelly’s Singin’ in the Rain is usually considered the greatest example of this genre, but An American in Paris was the one that won the big prize. From what I understand, it was quite revolutionary; people had really never seen anything like it before.

But did I like it? I’d be hard pressed to say that I did. I appreciated the dancing (and some of the singing), but most of the time it was difficult to figure out what the dance numbers had to do with anything. Then again, I suppose the plot in these movies will always be of secondary importance; Marshall McLuhan famously said “the medium is the message,” but here the music is the message. People don’t watch this kind of movie for the story.

There is some semblance of a plot, though, and it focuses on Gene Kelly as the titular American in Paris. He’s a struggling artist who catches the eye of a wealthy benefactor who wants to subsidize his work, but it turns out she has ulterior motives—she’s in love with him. Kelly, on the other hand, has fallen for a French dancer who, wouldn’t you know it, is the fiancée of one of Kelly’s good friends, though Kelly doesn’t know about this relationship until the end of the film.

Oh, and about the end of this film. When Kelly realizes the dancer and his friend will be married, some kind of huge interpretive dance/ballet scene begins, and it felt like it lasted about three hours. I guess the action was supposed to be taking place in Kelly’s mind; it looked very much like a film version of an LSD trip. It was totally divorced from reality.

What is happening here.

Not that that’s a bad thing in and of itself. I’m not always a fan of naturalism or realism, so these surrealistic touches are often nice. I just wish that they had maybe made it a little shorter, instead of being completely interminable. I can only take so much when it comes to hallucinogenic nightmares.

I mentioned this in my most recent interlude post, but An American in Paris was the first color film to win Best Picture since Gone with the Wind. In my opinion, this was its greatest strength; it looked fantastic. I believe this movie would have been extremely difficult to watch had it been in black and white.

There won’t be any other musicals to win Best Picture until Gigi in 1958, but there are a whole slew of them in the ten years after that. I sometimes feel like I’m being unjust toward the genre, much as I used to be toward the Western, so hopefully I’ll feel a greater affection for them after the 1960s are over. That, or I’ll be really sick of them. I suppose it could go either way.