‘An American in Paris’ at 75 - A Parisian Dream in Motion
At the end of An American in Paris, the streets of Paris dissolve into paintings, the colors go wild, and for a full 17 minutes the movie quits explaining itself as the resolution of the film is communicated entirely through a dance routine set to the symphonic piece that inspired the film’s title. This sequence is the entire reason An American in Paris exists, and 75 years after MGM released the film, it remains the reason to see it.
An American in Paris opened 75 years ago today, on November 11, 1951, and became one of the most successful musicals in the studio’s history. Vincente Minnelli directed, Gene Kelly starred opposite Leslie Caron, and the music was George Gershwin’s, the great American composer of the 1920s. Building a movie around a single musician’s songbook is now a familiar practice, and the Gershwin catalog makes this one of the earliest famous examples of what we would now call a jukebox musical. The songs arrive on cue, “I Got Rhythm” and “S’Wonderful” among them, and they hold up beautifully.
Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli both came to the project at a peak. Kelly was already well-known as a dancer, actor, and choreographer, most notably at this point for Anchors Aweigh in 1945. He had already worked with Minnelli on the iconic “The Babbitt and the Bromide” sequence in Ziegfeld Follies in 1946 and on The Pirate in 1948, while Minnelli was coming off the success of the romantic comedy Father of the Bride in 1950 and its sequel, Father’s Little Dividend, earlier in 1951, but it was their collaboration here that brought both of them their greatest success yet. An American in Paris went on to win multiple Academy Awards, most notably including Best Motion Picture, along with the major technical categories and a special award for Kelly’s choreography of that closing ballet.
Kelly plays a struggling painter in Montparnasse, while Oscar Levant plays his friend, a piano student. Kelly seeks to break off a transactional relationship with a possessive rich woman, played by Nina Foch, who hopes to buy his affection, and follows his heart to a younger, more innocent Leslie Caron. It is a predictable tale of love won, lost, and won again, and it exists mostly to hang songs and dances on, because the problems with the film’s narrative have aged less gracefully than the music. The hero’s cultural entitlement and his overbearing approach to romance are common tropes of this particular period of American cinema, and a modern viewer may wince at how persistently he pursues a woman who has made clear she is spoken for. The film should not be excused for this, but neither do these common flaws of the era ruin the film’s remarkable cinematic achievements. Roger Ebert, writing in 1992 when the film was restored, put it best:
“The real reasons to see ‘An American in Paris’ are for the Kelly dance sequences, the closing ballet, the Gershwin songs, the bright locations, and a few moments of the ineffable, always curiously sad charm of Oscar Levant.”
That is a fair accounting, and Kelly was never more inventive than in the numbers staged in ordinary Parisian settings, where he turns props and locations into partners. Then comes the film’s climactic ballet, in which Kelly and Caron symbolize the entire story of their courtship without a word. It is lavish, ambitious, and strange, a painter’s dream rendered in movement and color, and it almost singlehandedly justifies the film’s entire reputation.
The influence has lasted. The jukebox musical remains a popular format as recently as the Mamma Mia! films, and you can still see the picture’s visual style in musicals as recent as 2016’s La La Land, which borrow heavily from its dream-like transitions from dance into fantasy. This is the mark of a flawless production: audiences may stop quoting the plot, but filmmakers will always keep stealing the style, which is no doubt why the Library of Congress selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1993.
Gene Kelly went on to do much more. The very next year he directed and starred in Singin’ in the Rain (1952), which is rightly considered perhaps the greatest movie musical of all time, and his career continued for decades afterward until his death in 1996 at the age of 83. Vincente Minnelli carried on a prolific career as well, most notably with Gigi in 1959, which also starred Leslie Caron and was perhaps Minnelli’s greatest cinematic accomplishment. He would eventually pass away in 1986, also at 83.
By my estimation, the secret to the film’s greatness is that it never pretends to be anything other than what it is. It knows that its story is thin and its songs are borrowed, and it trusts its dancers to do the rest. When Gene Kelly leaps across a Paris square, you do not ask whether the plot makes sense. You only watch, and you are delighted.
An American in Paris is available for purchase on Blu-ray as well as digitally, and 75 years to the day after its release, it remains well worth seeing as one of the greatest movie musicals in cinema history.