Mix and match

Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly at the Brattle

May 18, 2006 2:13:03 PM

AN AMERICAN IN PARIS: Kelly was a prole, an athlete, a two-fisted Irishman like Jimmy Cagney.

They were a study in contrasts — in personal styles, in modes of masculinity, in American musical-comedy legacies. Fred Astaire was a natural aristocrat, movie musicals’ closest equivalent to Cary Grant, and the films that made him famous, his magical collaborations with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, were mostly built on French-farce models — like the Gershwin stage musicals he’d performed with his sister Adele in the ’20s, before she abandoned her career to marry an English lord. He was astonishingly lithe, perhaps the most graceful man who ever walked — let alone danced — across a movie set, and though he remains a peerless romantic icon, he wore emotions lightly, with a trace of irony, even self-mockery. Compact Gene Kelly was a prole, an athlete, a two-fisted Irishman like Jimmy Cagney, and his style was rooted in vaudeville and the brash, crowing apple-pie musicals of George M. Cohan. He could play sailors (which Astaire did only once, in Follow the Fleet) and heels (which Astaire never did successfully); the Broadway show that bought his ticket to Hollywood, Rodgers & Hart’s Pal Joey, was the first musical comedy ever built around a 24-carat louse. He played more-likable protagonists in the movies, of course, but they sometimes had an edge, they were usually frankly sexual (like the heroes John Garfield played in straight pictures), and they always wore their hearts on their sleeves. The most daring Astaire number may be the “anti-dance” he performs with Rogers at the climax of the 1936 Swing Time, “Never Gonna Dance,” where they stylize romantic longing by pulling continually apart, fighting their bodies’ impulse to cling together. For Kelly it’s the “Alter Ego” number in Cover Girl (1944), where, frustrated in love, he battles his own demon (another Kelly) on a dark, deserted street until he finally blows a gasket and heaves a garbage can through a shop window.

You can see them juxtaposed in the Brattle Theatre’s marvelous week-long series “Shall We Dance?: Starring Fred Astaire & Gene Kelly,” which serves up a baker’s dozen of their movies. It includes three of the Astaire-Rogers musicals, Swing Time (May 24), my personal favorite, and, double-billed on May 21, the ineffable Top Hat and the lesser-known Shall We Dance, with its towering Gershwin score. Kelly dances with Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (May 23) and with the winningly bashful young Frank Sinatra — both men playing sailors — in On the Town and Anchors Aweigh (both May 20). Here are the three undisputed MGM musical classics of the early ’50s: Kelly as an émigré painter in An American in Paris (May 22), and the two hilarious Comden & Green–scripted backstage musicals, Singin’ in the Rain with Kelly as a movie star in a Hollywood weathering the transition from silents to talkies, and The Band Wagon with Astaire as a movie star making a theatrical comeback in a musical version of Faust that threatens to be a turkey (both May 19). The series also features one of the three films in which Kelly partnered Judy Garland, The Pirate (May 22), and one of the two Astaire made with Bing Crosby, Holiday Inn (May 23) — beloved for Crosby’s debut rendition of “White Christmas” but at its most dynamic in Astaire’s Fourth-of-July firecracker dance solo. And you can see Astaire dancing on the ceiling in the rather pallid Royal Wedding (May 24), though the highlight isn’t that gimmick-laden, widely anthologized clip but the number he executes in a gymnasium setting earlier in the picture.

TOP HAT: Astaire was a natural aristocrat, movie musicals’ closest equivalent to Cary Grant.

These films include so many treats that it’s impossible to list all of them, but here are a few that are not as famous as, say, the title number from Singin’ in the Rain or the “Cheek to Cheek” pas de deux from Top Hat (both of which have certainly earned their celebrity). In The Band Wagon, Astaire performs an epic number in a 42nd Street arcade, “Shine on Your Shoes,” that climaxes in a soaring tap duet with the man who shines his shoes, LeRoy Daniels. Kelly and the French music-hall personality Georges Guétary playfully embody the contrast in the title phrase An American in Paris when they sing the Gershwins’ “ ’S Wonderful” together on a Paris boulevard, ending in a call and response as they back away from each other, seemingly turning the whole city into a concert hall. Both movies bear the stamp of their director, Vincente Minnelli, who had a gift for leavening musical-comedy silliness — for whipping it up into a soufflé. (Only the pretentious 20-minute ballet in the final reel of An American in Paris, with its art-school emulations of famous French canvases, weighs it down.) Minnelli also directed The Pirate, which is based on an S.N. Behrman play and set, of all places, on a 19th-century Caribbean island. Although largely forgotten, it’s charming — for Kelly and Garland’s banter, for the witty Cole Porter lyrics (which in this case are superior to his music), for the “Be a Clown” number Kelly performs first with the gravity-defying Nicholas Brothers and then with Garland.

I’m not a fan of On the Town, which mutes the spirit of the exuberant 1944 stage show and eliminates all but two of the Leonard Bernstein tunes, substituting generic ones served up in-house by MGM staffers. But it goes down easier than the two-hour-and-20-minute Anchors Aweigh, which features Kathryn Grayson’s insufferable trilling, José Iturbi’s soulless piano playing, and an unfortunate (if famous) interlude where Kelly dances with cartoon characters. On the other hand, you shouldn’t miss Cover Girl. It’s far from perfect; it has a couple of unfortunate flashbacks to Tony Pastor’s at the turn of the century, with Rita Hayworth playing her own grandmother, a music-hall star. But Hayworth is immensely likable — not to mention stunningly beautiful — and her relaxed, earthbound style suits Kelly far better than it matched up with Astaire in the two movies they made together, You’ll Never Get Rich and You Were Never Lovelier. And despite its wobbly last act, which ends with an overconceptualized ballet number, Shall We Dance is lovely. Astaire and Rogers trade approaches — he’s supposed to be from the world of classical ballet, she from musical comedy — in a dance to “They All Laughed” that begins as parody and metamorphoses into blissful love play; later they perform on roller skates in “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” And Astaire pays tribute to the marvels of the machine age in “Slap That Bass,” which unfolds in the engine room of a transatlantic ship. Cover Girl’s supporting cast includes Phil Silvers and Eve Arden; Shall We Dance provides those essential second bananas of the Astaire-Rogers canon, dithering Edward Everett Horton and the sublimely prissy Eric Blore miming outraged propriety.

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