Josh Spiegel
The core idea of many film musicals is to tell an old-fashioned love story. These stories depict two people falling in love, one perhaps more quickly than the other, and then overcoming any obstacles in their way, all while communicating their feelings through song. In spite of some modern audiences acting repulsed at the idea of characters singing on screen, this is one of the tried and true ways that cinema can communicate to audiences, dating back to the earliest Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers musicals. This week marks the 75th anniversary of one of the greatest and most lauded movie musicals of all time, An American in Paris — the apotheosis of the American movie musical, a lush, colorful, vibrant celebration of love and dance. It’s also notable for its protagonist being equal measures charming and cruel, an antiheroic figure whose presence heavily inspired future, more revisionist musicals.
The incomparable Gene Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, a World War II veteran who lives in Paris and is trying to make his living as an artist. Though Jerry is talented, he’s scrabbling by with his friend and concert pianist Adam (Oscar Levant). One night, while selling his wares, Jerry meets Milo Roberts (Nina Foch), a wealthy American woman who’s as lonely as she is rich. She’s undeniably attracted to Jerry, and is so willing for him to reciprocate that she’s willing to buy his paintings with the potential for more. Though Jerry isn’t against taking her money, he’s immediately disdainful that Milo seems to want to buy his time and presence in her life. So he unsurprisingly finds himself drawn to Lise (Leslie Caron), a beautiful young woman who happens to be dating Jerry and Adam’s mutual friend Henri (Georges Guetary).
Jerry’s treatment of Milo is brazen and shocking, even within the confines of an MGM musical. That’s leaving aside the fact that Kelly was 39 at the time of the film’s release, whereas Foch was 27 and Caron just 20. The power of movies like An American in Paris is that they’re truly and purely love stories; we’re never really worried about whether Jerry can survive as a starving artist, because even at his lowest, he seems like he’s doing just fine. But Jerry’s selfish approach to women, and the film’s willingness to go along with it, allows the film to feel accidentally thornier and more challenging 75 years later.
The next film Kelly made (and co-directed), the peerless Singin’ in the Rain, is much more straightforward in its depiction of the two women in the life of movie star Don Lockwood. There, his co-star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) is clearly the villain, so if Don is a bit of a jerk to her (and he is), you can forgive it, thanks to her ruthlessness in ruining the life of Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds). Here, even if Milo’s way of getting Jerry to pay attention to her is a bit iffy, she’s a much kinder and more supportive figure and doesn’t deserve the treatment she gets. (In that way, it’s a little bit like how Jimmy Stewart’s lead character in Vertigo treats his friend Midge, and how heartbreaking it is to see her leave his life.)
The artistically talented leading man who doesn’t realize or care about how self-involved and vain he can be is a character type Kelly may have established for soaring musical romances;it would return in less starry-eyed musicals. Martin Scorsese’s 1977 musical New York, New York leans much harder into making clear that saxophonist Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro) is as musically adept as he is woefully incapable of being a decent husband to Francine (Liza Minnelli) or father to their child. There’s a good deal more nuance in this grittier film, also set in the aftermath of World War II and also depicting a vet struggling to balance his artistic goals with a personal life. Jimmy is a tougher, crueler man than Jerry ever is, but just as lacking in self-awareness.
And then there’s La La Land, the 2016 Damian Chazelle film that tries to mix and match elements of each of these earlier films. Like An American in Paris, La La Land is soaring and bright, a modern-day riff on the Freed era of movie musicals. Where New York, New York is visually more in line with 70s-style filmmaking, La La Land wants badly to make you think of the Technicolor musicals Kelly and other stars made in the 1940s and 1950s. But like New York, New York, its main couple (Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone) are, respectively, a self-involved jazz musician and an up-and-coming actress who each find professional success but are unable to make it work romantically.
The key difference is that An American in Paris works despite its core players not caring too much about Jerry being a jerk. Whatever is true of the Scorsese and Chazelle films, each of those movies are very aware that their leading men can be as dashing as they are selfish and self-defeating. An American in Paris set the template for a darker movie musical, leveraging bouncy musical standards with stories of artistic men who can’t control their emotions. Jerry gets his happy ending, whereas the other men don’t. They seem to grasp that they may not earn theirs, but Jerry gets to live happily ever after — even if he never quite deserves it.
“An American in Paris” is streaming on Hoopla and TCM, and is available for digital rental or purchase.
