All Hail the Comic Muse

Mike Nadajewski and Kristi Frank in On the Razzle. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

This piece includes reviews of On the Razzle, Blithe Spirit and Village Wooing.

This summer the Shaw Festival has been bowing to the comic spirit. In addition to Shaw’s The Apple Cart and The Playboy of the Western World, which mix serious and humorous elements, the roster has included productions of four comedies from different eras: Marivaux’s The Game of Love and Chance (1730), performed outdoors in an improvised version – the only one of the quartet I didn’t get to; Shaw’s Village Wooing (1934), this season’s lunchtime one-act; Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (1941); and Tom Stoppard’s On the Razzle (1981). In truth, the last of these can claim connection to several periods. It began in 1835 as a one-act English play by John Oxenford called A Day Well Spent, which the Viennese playwright and actor Johann Nestroy adapted seven years later as Einen Jux will er sich machen (He’s Out for a Fling). Thornton Wilder reworked it for Broadway in 1938 as The Merchant of Yonkers – a failure, despite direction by the legendary Max Reinhardt – and then again in 1955 as The Matchmaker, which altered the story about shop clerks out on the town by inventing the assertive, charismatic title character (played by Ruth Gordon on Broadway) and reconfiguring the play around her. It was filmed the following year with Shirley Booth in the role and featuring three talented young performers early in their careers: Anthony Perkins, Shirley MacLaine and Robert Morse. In 1964 The Matchmaker became the musical Hello, Dolly!, which, of course, ran for years. On the Razzle is Stoppard’s rewrite of the Nestroy, not the Wilder, so there’s no Dolly Gallagher Levi dashing around in aid of the young lovers while manipulating her sour-faced client into marrying her rather than the widow he’s after or the fictitious millionairess she’s promised him.

Three Musicals: Threepenny Opera, Little Shop of Horrors, and The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk

Rosalie Craig and Rory Kinnear in The Threepenny Opera at London’s National Theatre. (Photo byRichard Hubert Smith)

There’s an exciting new production by Rufus Norris of The Threepenny Opera at London’s National Theatre, with Rory Kinnear, dashing and ironic and brilliant, as Bertolt Brecht’s anti-hero Captain Macheath ("Mack the Knife"), the audacious and unsettling gangster whose insatiable taste for the ladies is his downfall. The trademark supertitles are missing, but Norris knows his Brecht. The National’s current artistic director, he staged London Road there in 2011, a Brechtian musical based on interviews with the residents of a middle-class neighborhood where a serial killer has been dispatching prostitutes; it’s one of the most extraordinary evenings I’ve ever spent in a theatre. Norris made a film of it last year but it wasn’t released on this side of the Atlantic. He’s directed Threepenny as a mélange of carnival side-show, music hall entertainment and pantomime (in the English sense of the word). Vicki Mortimer’s set is a constantly revolving series of scaffolding and flats dressed with construction paper – the actors make their entrances by tearing through it. At the top of the first act, members of the ensemble enact a comic dumb-show version of Mack’s nefarious deeds behind a cut-out frame while the Balladeer (George Ikediashi, who shows up later with a Jamaican accent as the pastor who marries Mack and Polly Peachum, and then in drag at the whorehouse) sings the “Moritat,” a.k.a. “The Ballad of Mack the Knife.” The eight-member band, including music director David Shrubsole on piano and harmonium, appears in the midst of the action, and on some numbers Shrubsole, looking like a seedy undertaker in black with a top hat, accompanies Polly (Rosalie Craig) or Jenny (Sharon Small), cabaret style, on one of the ballads. For the “Army Song,” Mack and his pal Tiger Brown (Peter de Jersey), the chief police inspector, hold onto each other in terror, lit by a downstage special, while lanterns swing ominously back and forth upstage, and on the final verse bloody body bags drop down from the flies. (Paule Constable designed the expressionistic lighting.)

Wait and See: Fox’s Ghosted and ABC’s The Mayor

Adam Scott and Craig Robinson in Fox's Ghosted.

I think I like Ghosted –  though, to be honest, I’m not sure. Even though I’ve watched roughly 22 minutes of Fox’s new paranormal comedy, I have no idea if I’ve seen anything that will be representative of the kind of show that it will eventually become. It’s a dilemma that’s inherent to any attempt to critically evaluate the sort of serial storytelling that’s central to how television currently functions, and one that initially put me off shows that would later become favorites of mine, most notably Parks and Recreation. For a number of reasons, this problem seems particularly acute in the case of Tom Gormican and Kevin Etten’s sitcom version of The X-Files.

Holmes on the Case: Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart

Damien Atkins and ensemble in Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart. (Photo: Emily Cooper)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes tales have inspired two TV series, a series of fourteen beloved movies starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce that coincided almost exactly with the Second World War, and many other films through the years. Holmes’s theatrical history is a century and a quarter long. In 1899, only eight years after the most famous detective in the history of fiction first appeared in Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four, the actor William Gillette adapted Holmes as a vehicle for his own talents. His Sherlock Holmes, loosely adapted from “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “The Final Problem,” was an enormous hit that he performed about 1300 times. Gillette also played the most famous fictional detective in a 1916 silent movie that’s available on Prime. (Newly restored, it was screened at the 2015 Silent Film Festival in San Francisco.)

The first stage Holmes I saw was The Crucifer of Blood on Broadway, written and directed by Paul Giovanni, with Paxton Whitehead as Holmes. It was extremely enjoyable, and that’s a description I would happily extend to Sherlock Holmes and the Mystery of the Human Heart, the Holmes play in the current season at the Shaw Festival, where Whitehead was once artistic director. The Mystery of the Human Heart is the third Holmes produced at the Shaw since 1918, all three directed by Craig Hall and starring Damien Atkins as Holmes, Ric Reid as Watson and Claire Jullien as Holmes’s unassailable landlady, Mrs. Hudson. (I didn’t see either The Hound of the Baskervilles or Sherlock Holmes and the Raven’s Curse.)

Unadorned & Unaccompanied: Stephen Fearing's No Dress Rehearsal

Colin Linden, Stephen Fearing, and Tom Wilson, AKA Blackie & the Rodeo Kings

A few months ago I attended the Hamilton Music Awards. Blackie & the Rodeo Kings were headlining. I've seen BARK a few times before, and they're always an entertaining night out, filled with great music and a few laughs. The laughs generally come from wondering how early Tom Wilson will start swearing. This night he was pretty much under control, prowling around the right hand side of the stage like a wolf, with his low-slung Gibson guitar. That’s the one with all the autographs on it – Ralph Stanley, John Fogerty and Johnny Cash among them. It's interesting to note that of all the guitars on stage, this is the one that comes on and leaves with its owner. No stage stand for this baby. Colin Linden is on the left of the stage (stage right to you theatre people) wearing his ever-present fedora, and clearly enjoying himself. He bounces up and down as if on a pogo stick, contrasting Tom's horizontal movements across the stage. In the middle is Stephen Fearing, who basically stays put. The three Kings are backed by John Dymond on bass and this evening Tom Hambridge on drums. I have to put in a special word for Tom (award-winning producer of Buddy Guy), who did a tremendous job filling in for the usual drummer Gary Craig. From "Water or Gasoline" through "Stoned" and "49 Tons," with a brief look back to Willie's "White Line" and a generous sampling of the new (and critically acclaimed) Kings and Queens, they simply rocked the place. They’ll be featuring the Kings and Queens album later in March with a very special concert at Massey Hall (which I’ll tell you all about later). But right now I’d like to focus on the guy in the middle: the quiet one who ‘stays put.’

Romantic Comedy at the End of the Millennium: The Last, Brief Golden Age

James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan in The Shop Around the Corner (1940).  

Why is it so difficult for Hollywood to make decent romantic comedies in the twenty-first century? Every year brings a handful, but by my count there have been only five in the last decade worth looking at: Ghost Town and Vicky Cristina Barcelona in 2008, Letters to Juliet in 2010, Top Five in 2014 and – a special case – Joss Whedon’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (with a contemporary setting) in 2013. And you could put David Fincher's 2011 adaptation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on that list, too, since it’s a murder mystery that only gets solved (as Kevin Courrier argued convincingly on this website) when the two protagonists, a brilliant journalist with an analog background and an IT whiz, pool their intellectual resources (while becoming lovers). As Whedon’s movie reminds us, Much Ado is the granddaddy of modern American romantic comedy. It pioneered the structure – a hero and heroine begin as adversaries but, by passing a series of tests and proving they’re open to compromise and change, they gradually earn each other’s love – that Hollywood adopted in the 1930s and that proved hardy and resilient through the rest of the twentieth century. It was the ideal solution to the issues posed by Hollywood’s self-censorship code (the Production Code, known popularly as the Hays Code), which bore down on American filmmakers in 1934 and held sway for roughly the next twenty-five years. The romantic-comedy structure enabled writers and directors to make movies that were sexy and witty, even though the narratives were forced to banish actual sex. Audiences loved smart entertainments like It Happened One Night (the first of these), My Man Godfrey, The Awful Truth, My Favorite Wife, Easy Living, The Moon’s Our Home, Bringing Up Baby, The Shop Around the Corner, His Girl Friday and The Lady Eve. And they responded to the form itself, which was a dramatic metaphor for the process of falling in love.

Dolittle: Animal Magnetism

Robert Downey and Poly in Dolittle.

Dolittle received punitive reviews when it showed up on Prime last year, but I decided to check it out recently because I’ve always been partial to the material – the Hugh Lofting series of books, which came out between 1920 and 1948, were among my childhood favorites – and the thought of casting Robert Downey as the quirky Victorian veterinarian who can speak the languages of his patients sounded irresistible. Downey is the third cinematic Dolittle. Rex Harrison played him in the paralytic 1967 musical Doctor Dolittle, which is now remembered only for the Oscar-winning song “Talk to the Animals.” (The fact that it was nominated for Best Picture, apparently just because 20th Century-Fox had squandered so much money on it, now seems perplexing, but in his essential book Pictures at a Revolution Mark Harris makes sense of it, uses the 1967 competition for the award as an emblem for the shift from the old Hollywood to the new Hollywood.) Eddie Murphy was the star of the 1998 movie of the same name, which was lamely plotted but the director, Betty Thomas, cleverly used the animals as an out-of-control vaudeville show. The idea of the Murphy version is that, learning of the doctor’s gift, animals show up at all hours to secure treatment for their ills (psychological as well as physical); he can’t tune them out, they never shut up, and their non-stop cacophony is often hilarious. So are the voice actors, like Chris Rock, Norm McDonald, Albert Brooks, John Leguizamo, Reni Santoni, Paul Reubens, Gilbert Gottfried, and Garry Shandling and Julie Kavner as a pair of squabbling pigeons with sex problems. And Murphy is a good sport:  he allows himself to be upstaged by every animal in the picture. (A sequel came out in 2001.)

Convergences: Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis's Dallas 1963

Fifty years later and the assassination of President John Kennedy still hasn't been settled. Besides those who feel that there are questions remaining to be answered, people continuously reflect back to that November day as if they could change its outcome. Phil Dyess-Nugent suggested the other day in his sharply observed piece on JFK conspiracy films that our comfort zone gets severely rocked when a loner, a virtual nobody, can walk into history and completely alter it, as Lee Harvey Oswald most likely did. Yet the true mystery of the murder is that we can't resolve one simple question: How is it possible that our larger than life figures are never safe from the alienated souls who walk our city streets? Many of us found out on November 22, 1963 that they're not. These underground men and women who choose to change history by killing those who are making it go unnoticed, and they are lethal shadows we never see coming. Of course, political conspiracies do exist, but they operate more often in a chaotic world where plans are never so easily acted out. They emerge as much by accident as they do in the dark rooms where devious schemes get hatched. (Brian De Palma's 1981 conspiracy thriller Blow Out provides a perfect illustration of how happenstance undermines our ability to control and execute plans.) Nevertheless, Mark Lane, in his otherwise speculative JFK conspiracy book, Rush to Judgement, was correct in saying that the variables in the murder of JFK delve into the primal taboo of parricide, where the father is murdered and we need to seek closure. This desire for quick and easy resolution as a means to appease our guilt over this family crime can be just as applicable to those who insist there are shooters on the grassy knoll as it is to folks who exalt the Warren Commission's findings.

One lingering query that does still emerge out of the assassination – by those who believe Kennedy's death was part of a plot and also by those who didn't – is why did the murder happen in Dallas? Arthur Penn thought he answered it in his 1966 politically paranoid assassination thriller The Chase, which takes place in a corrupted Texas town (obviously standing in for Dallas) that's overrun by right-wing zealots and Klansmen and climaxes with a political murder. Film critic Pauline Kael, though, in seeing through the literal metaphor, dismissed that idea and panned the picture while saying, "Many people all over the world blame Texas for the assassination of Kennedy – as if the murder had boiled up out of the unconscious of the people there – and the film confirms this hysterical view." There's no doubt that The Chase, made three years after the Kennedy killing, wallows in delirium and self-hatred. Still, Texas scholars Bill Minutaglio and Steven L. Davis in their new book, Dallas 1963 (Grand Central Publishing), suggest that there might be good reasons why the murder of the President boiled up in Dallas, where a fermenting climate of violent right-wing extremism was consuming the city.

Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse: The Artist/Entertainer at his Peak

With The Adventures of Tintin and War Horse, both released this holiday season, the two creative (but not mutually exclusive) sides of director Steven Spielberg, the entertainer and artist, are on display on our movie screens. And though the films differ in quality, they’re both accomplishments that showcase him, once again, as one of the finest filmmaking talents in the world, if you weren't already aware of that fact. Many people aren't.

The two movies also share one thing in common, they’re both European stories that, as a positive sign of Hollywood’s recognition that foreigners make up a huge share of the overall box office, have not been Americanized in the slightest. Of course, being big budget, special effects extravaganzas, as only Hollywood could really afford to make, they are still in English. That’s the other economic reality. Hollywood still won’t take chances on subtitles fearing turning local audiences off of their movies.

I actually grew up with the adventures of Tintin, the young intrepid Belgian reporter, created by the Belgian artist Hergé (Georges Remi), over 23 comic books, as my grandparents (who moved there from Poland) and my mother, who was born there, were from that country. When I was young, reading them in their original French, my memories of the strip were that they contained exciting, exotic adventures, were populated by eccentric/amusing characters and were drawn with a simple but effective style. That last might seem too hard to duplicate on screen but Spielberg, utilizing performance capture animation, pulls it off flawlessly.

Performance capture animation requires photographing actors, particularly their facial and physical expressions, and then grafting them as animated figures on the screen making them look like actors playing the roles. (Motion capture is the process of photographing the whole person. The use of it for film is performance capture.) Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express (2004) was one such movie but it was a rather impersonal, cold project. The Adventures of Tintin is a warmer, personality driven effort and much more pleasing and entertaining as cinema. It’s a refreshingly different looking movie, too, an animated flick that looks like it’s been bred with a live action movie, adding up to something unique on screen. 

White Knight: The Batman

Zoë Kravitz as Catwoman and Robert Pattinson as Batman in The Batman. (Photo: Jonathan Olley/Warner Bros.)

In his 1957 architectonic study Anatomy of Criticism, structuralist Northrop Frye sketches a taxonomy of literary heroes. Those of the Mythic mode, he argues, are gods: they’re superior in kind to other characters and to their environment. They defy the laws of nature and possess divine gifts. Examples include Zeus, Bacchus, and Shiva. In a tragic narrative, they die. In a comic one, they rejoin the heavenly realm. (The Christian narrative is neither tragic, nor comic, but ironic: Christ is crucified, yet raised to the Father on the third day.)

The heroes of the Romantic mode are superior to others and their environment only by degree. Their actions are marvelous, but they themselves are human beings. In tragedy, their deaths are elegiac and tied to the decay of the created order (think Beowulf). In comedy, they ride off into a pastoral setting (e.g., the cowboy in a Western).

Following this schema, contemporary superheroes dwell in a gray area between the Mythic and Romantic modes. Some, like Superman, are gods – different from us in kind. Others, like the X-Men, are mortals but possess mutations that give them supernatural powers. And still more, like Iron Man, don’t have genetic enhancements so much as advanced technology, making them more Romantic than Mythic.

London Calling: Curtain Up in the UK

Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams, “In a Forest Dark and Deep”

Six plays in nine days proved to be a brilliant means of ignoring royal wedlock during a recent trip to England, while also fulfilling a longtime dream to immerse myself in London theater – or theatre, as the locals prefer. April was sunny in the often rainy city, enhanced by a sudden heatwave that felt more Mediterranean than Thames. But I enjoyed the resulting lush vegetation primarily en route to sit in darkened venues, watching four grim dramas, one partially comedic take on serious global tensions and a single farce.

When We're Older Things May Change: Janis Ian's "Society's Child" (1966)

In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech, declaring that children wouldn't "be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character." The Freedom Movement, which fought the early battles for desegregation in the South and voter registration for black Americans, was extending a call for a shared vision of interracial harmony. King, the political and spiritual leader of the civil rights struggle in the United States, called for the country to abandon the bitter legacy of slavery. King's speech, that hot day in August, hit like a bolt of lightning, and suddenly a vision of hope and possibility spread throughout the country. Critic Craig Werner persuasively describes that promise in his book A Change is Gonna Come: Music, Race & the Soul of America. "For people of all colours committed to racial justice, the Sixties were a time of hope," he writes. "You could hear it in the music: in the freedom songs that soared above and sunk within the hearts of marchers at Selma and Montgomery; in the gospel inflections of Sam Cooke's teenage love songs; in Motown's self-proclaimed soundtrack for 'young America'; in blue-eyed soul and English remakes of the Chicago blues; in Aretha Franklin's resounding call for respect; in Sly Stone's celebration of the everyday people and Jimi Hendrix's vision of an interracial tribe; in John Coltrane's celebration of a love supreme. For brief moments during the decade surrounding King's speech, many of us harboured real hopes that the racial nightmare might be coming to an end."

Movie Romances

Bill Murray and Rashida Jones in On the Rocks.

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This article contains reviews of On the Rocks, A Rainy Day in New York, My Octopus Teacher and Love and Monsters.

Rashida Jones is very likable as Laura, a young Manhattanite wife and mother, in the new Sofia Coppola picture, On the Rocks, and the quiet scenes that focus on her emotional responses to situations, when she’s the only person on camera, showcase not just her but also Coppola’s gift for collaborating with her actors to capture quicksilver moods. And there are some very funny bits, somewhat reminiscent of old Paul Mazursky movies, built around Jenny Slate, who plays Vanessa, a friend of Laura’s through their middle-school daughters. Vanessa, a divorcee, chatters on, entirely uncensored, about her love life while she and Laura are ushering their daughters to various activities; it’s as if she weren’t aware that she’s trumpeting her troubles (which mostly concern her recent discovery that the man she’s been sleeping with is married) to the world.

Our Waking Dreams: Movies in the Digital World (Hugo, The Artist, & The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo)

While watching the Academy Awards this year, I was struck by an ongoing motif that seemed to run throughout the evening. Often it was impacted in the periodic jokes of host Billy Crystal, but I could also detect it in the asides by various presenters. There was a constant reference to the early origins of cinema being made just when technology has dramatically transformed the art form – and continues to do so at warp speed. Not only could a viewer detect some concern over whether the technology would come to diminish the quality of the dramatic material, the nominated movies seemed to embody the very argument that was at the heart of the show.

When I was growing up the only way you could watch movies was when they opened in theatres. Movies on television were limited then and they were often burdened by commercials. The limited window of opportunity that theatres offered you to see the picture was partly what built your enthusiasm and anticipation in going to the movies. If the picture was really good, you feared that once it abandoned the movie house you might never get to experience it again. (Part of what got me interested in collecting movie soundtracks was so I could listen to the dramatic score and evoke my favourite scenes from the film.) It was also true that when you saw something really bad, you got worried it might disappear from your city before you had a chance to try it again to test your first reaction to it. 

Singer of Songs: Malik Bendjelloul's Searching for Sugar Man

Sixto Rodriguez in Searching for Sugar Man

In his 2002 documentary, Stone Reader, director Mark Moskowitz, a dedicated life-long reader of novels his entire life, goes on a quest to find Dow Mossman, the author of a 1972 novel, The Stones of Summer. The work had come to possess him in his adult years. (After trying to read it as a young man, Moskowitz gave up after a few pages. Coming back to it years later, he couldn't put it down.) In searching for Mossman, who had disappeared from the literary landscape during the Seventies with no follow-up novel, Moskowitz used the same intuitive impulses that first lead him as a boy to become such a voracious reader. With the zeal of a modern day Huck Finn, Moskowitz took off on his own American sojourn to find Dow Mossman (while simultaneously deducing the clues to his disappearance in the manner of Sherlock Holmes). Stone Reader is about how a writer's voice can come to inhabit us; and the lingering pleasure of the film is in how it reinforces our own private communion with literature.

Though Stone Reader is certainly a one-of-a-kind story, it may well have found its perfect soul-mate in Searching for Sugar Man (which is coming out on DVD this month). This Swedish/British co-production, directed by Malik Bendjelloul, is also about a quest for an artist who has become lost in time. But unlike Mossman, who never caught the larger reading public's imagination, Sixto Rodriguez, an American pop artist unacknowledged in his homeland, became a near legendary figure miles away in South Africa where he turned out to be as big as Elvis. The rousing aspect of the picture comes in seeing just how Rodriguez's music unwittingly becomes part of the spirit of a people fighting for social and political justice against apartheid. What's curious, however, is that Rodriguez's work isn't the most obvious form of political agit-prop to be embraced by a cause. Instead he writes delicately poetic and engagingly impressionistic songs of social realism; tunes which stoke the imagination rather than tear down walls. Searching for Sugar Man follows the efforts of two Cape Town fans, Stephen 'Sugar' Segerman and Craig Bartholomew Strydom, who try to find him in the post-apartheid years.

Pioneers Making History: Criterion's Release of Hitchcock's The 39 Steps & Chaplin's The Gold Rush

A few years ago, when I was working on my book Artificial Paradise, about the dark side of The Beatles' utopian dream, I was speaking to a friend who was a clerk in a Toronto music store. In the midst of our conversation about my work, he described to me his own experience hearing The Beatles' music. "The first album I really discovered was Revolver," he told me. "Then I went back to With The Beatles and later found Rubber Soul." What was jarring, of course, was that he began his quest with one of their later 1966 albums, arguably their best, before jumping back to their second record in 1963, a fiercely eclectic songbook primer of hard rock, balladry and R&B, before landing in 1965 on the band's most radical reinterpretation of American rhythm and blues and folk. What startled me most was his seemingly arbitrary dance through history. And it left me wondering how he could ever begin to make sense of it.

For me, I had heard those records as they were being released so the history was clear. I followed each new innovation as a daring, breathtaking leap into this future that was always in the process of being imagined. For him, being much younger, it was all about looking back. Therefore he had to create some new way to hear what that history was, maybe even figure out why it happened in the way it did, and perhaps discover his own way to understand why it mattered. What he did was create his own context for hearing the music, a means to escape the official history which had by then become received wisdom rather than fresh experience. By scrambling time, he made The Beatles music seem new again. He felt as if this great music had finally been freed from the pedigree of its own history.

Alfred Hitchcock directing The 39 Steps

Recently watching Alfred Hitchcock's cleverly entertaining and satisfying 1935 spy thriller The 39 Steps and Charlie Chaplin's comedic gem The Gold Rush (1925), newly re-released in sparkling remastered DVD prints by Criterion, I thought back on that conversation with the clerk. Like him with The Beatles, I didn't live through the era of Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin. Both artists were already legendary by the time I was old enough to even go to the movies. So how could I possibly experience their work as it was first seen by audiences? (A friend of mine once lamented that he regretted not being able to see Robert Altman's Nashville with fresh eyes. How could he, he complained, when he had already read all the many reviews that gave it a certain stature before he ever got to lay his own receptors on it?)  By the time I saw my first Hitchcock picture, he was already regarded as the Master of Suspense. Charlie Chaplin was firmly established as the personification of the Little Tramp, an iconic figure who was hanging on posters proudly in people's bedrooms. Their reputations seemed larger than the work they created.

An American in Paris, Sans Alan Jay Lerner

Robert Fairchild, Brandon Uranowitz and Max Von Essen in An American in Paris (All photos by Angela Sterling)

Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 movie musical An American in Paris is simultaneously breezy and lush. With its smart, sometimes cheeky Alan Jay Lerner script, its Gershwin score and the ebullient choreography by its star, Gene Kelly, it’s one of the highlights of the golden age of M-G-M musicals. Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, an American G.I. who sticks around Paris after the war to paint. He finds a patron, a wealthy émigré American socialite, Milo (Nina Foch), who wants to add him to her roster of bohemian lovers, but he falls in love with a shopgirl named Lise (Leslie Caron) whom he spots at a café. He courts her and wins her love, but just as he’s hampered by his attachment to Milo (he doesn’t reciprocate her sexual interest in him: these are still the days of the Hays Code), Lise also has other claims. She’s engaged to the affable music hall performer Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary), whom she doesn’t love but to whom she feels beholden, since he took care of her during the war when her parents, Resistance fighters, were captured by the Nazis. (Here Lerner reworks a plot strand from Casablanca.) To complicate matters further, Henri and Jerry have just become friends, through their mutual pal Adam (Oscar Levant), a struggling composer.