I recently saw Summer Stock (1950) starring Judy Garland and Gene Kelly and was reminded once again that he was one of Hollywood’s best song & dance men in the movies. Although he never dominated Hollywood the way other major stars did, there was always something about Gene Kelly. Likeable. Fresh-faced. Charm. Game: he seemed game for anything in his roles, like nothing could stop his irrepressible spirit.
The movie Summer Stock is not considered a great film. In fact it is said he did it as a favor for Judy Garland. Gene Kelly was in 37 movies and among those films, he was listed as the choreographer in 23 of them. He also directed 11 films including On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain (Co-director with Stanley Donen), Hello, Dolly! and The Cheyenne Social Club. Of course he is most widely known and recognized for Singin’ in the Rain, a bold and joyous display of dancing and singing talent also starring Donald O’Connor and a fresh new face, Debbie Reynolds. The movie is part of Hollywood legend and appears on many highlight reels of Golden Hollywood.
It’s also impressive that he was the star or co-star in many classics including For Me and My Gal, Anchors Aweigh, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, On the Town, An American in Paris, Marjorie Morningstar, Inherit the Wind and the That’s Entertainment franchise.
I remember reading a profile in a magazine years ago; although I have run countless Google searches, the article has not come up. It was just one of those one-page stories, “In Appreciation,” idolizing his impact on dance style and American masculinity. What I remember about that article was the author writing that Fred Astaire danced for the women but Gene Kelly danced for the men, or something to that effect. But it seems so true. Where Astaire was fluent and graceful and elegant to watch, Kelly was muscular and physical but lithe in his dance routines. It was movement and strength and athleticism and captivating all at once. Women adored Astaire; men wanted to dance like Kelly.
So what was it about Gene Kelly that sets him apart, that so many male movie-goers liked him too? I mentioned his charm. He seems genuine if a bit naïve in the beginning of many of his roles but his quiet confidence kicks in and he figures it out, just like his dance routines. We feel we are watching an actor figure out his character and his role as he is performing his steps. As each dance routine is completed he gets closer to the truth of the movie. Of course we could say this about all actors and dancers. But Gene just put it all together in the right package.
Perhaps that is because he also was a Director later in his career; so he already had these skills, knowing how to put a scene together, how to make it work or as Gene might say, “make it click!” After all, he was a craftsman who broke down his acting and his dancing into segments. He would work on one segment then another in rehearsal and during this process and a lot of changes, the role or routine would mature and grow until he had it perfect. That was Gene Kelly.
And he was all-American in looks, build and attitude. You had to like him. In a film there wasn’t anything he couldn’t do, or so it seemed.
Gene Kelly was born in 1912 in Pittsburgh, the third of five children in an Irish Catholic family. He was considered the smartest among them and because of that, his mother was always pointing him toward law school. His mom started a dance school and pushed the five siblings to practice dance. By 1932, they changed the name of the school to the Gene Kelly Studio of Dance. As an athlete, he dreamed of playing shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates and also played football, hockey and was a very good tennis player.
It was while he was still only a teen working at the family dance studio that Gene Kelly discovered his love of directing and choreography. He was a natural at it and loved developing new dance routines and staging productions.
Early influences on Gene in 1930 included Dancing Dotson, who was wholly original in his dancing; Frank Harrington, a gifted tap dancer who “taught Gene several new steps and routines”; and perhaps his earliest influence was George M. Cohan whom he saw at only seven years old in a production of Little Nellie Kelly. Gene was “struck by his cockiness, vitality and the way he tapped across and dominated the stage.”
He graduated in 1933 from the University of Pittsburgh with an Economics degree and was admitted to the University of Pittsburgh Law School. But during a lecture on torts, he realized “I didn’t want to be a lawyer or a businessman or head the Chamber of Commerce or be President. I just wanted to dance and create dances,” according to Gene Kelly: A Biography by Clive Hirschhorn. Again, he was always one of the smartest students in his college class and his grades were excellent even though he was balancing side jobs and helping his mom run the dance studio.
On August 5, 1938 he arrived in New York City to scout out opportunities on Broadway. Soon after Cole Porter spotted him at an audition and invited him to sing and dance in his first Broadway show, Leave It to Me (1938). He did a song with an unknown Mary Martin.
His second play was in 1939’s One for the Money which closed after 132 performances. But he was beginning to move up, eager to make his mark. And during that show, he met Katherine Cornell who was quickly won over by his work ethic. He then talked himself into and auditioned for the part of Harry the Hoofer in The Time of Your Life. The significance of that role and performance is that he rearranged the choreography for his character – and audiences took note of the difference; suddenly the show was becoming a hit.
According to Hirschhorn, Gene changed his dance style to reflect the part he was playing. “I realized that there was no character – whether a sailor or a truck driver or a gangster – that couldn’t be interpreted through dancing, if one found the correct choreographic language…it may seem obvious now, but at the time, it was an important discovery for me.”
Then came Pal Joey. George Abbott, Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were aware of Kelly but also nervous about having him for the lead role since he was not yet a famous name to lead the show. But after auditioning all the available New York talent, they made him their Pal Joey. And that was the big break he needed. Gene Kelly opened the show in 1940 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater in NYC and after the orchestra’s overture, the curtain rose and there stood Gene Kelly, alone in the spotlight, opening the show with a number called, “Chicago” (not the Sinatra song). His first starring role was a huge success.
As Hirschhorn wrote in his biography, “In Pal Joey, Gene learned how to manipulate an audience while playing a dramatic role, how to make them respond to him in just the way he wanted…interpreting the character through dance. What was coming across was absolutely new, and audiences liked it.”
David O. Selznick saw Pal Joey and quickly offered Kelly a seven year contract to begin in 1941 and Gene Kelly was on his way to Hollywood. As that was happening, he married Betsy Blair, a performer he had met from Cole Porter’s Panama Hattie. His first film was For Me and My Gal (1942) directed by Busby Berkeley and starring Judy Garland. It made him a star.
Kelly began realizing that the movies played a lot differently than on the Broadway stage. The stage is three-dimensional but a film of course is only two-dimensional. Where theater patrons might react to a kick forward and lean back in their seats, in the movies the very same move would result in no reaction at all. So he began to devise dance routines that had more action moving toward the camera. He realized the camera cannot move at the same speed as the dancer or it would not record the movement. He experimented with props like perhaps a telephone pole; since it was stationary, now the camera recorded the scale and speed of the movement. According to Hirschhorn, Kelly told him, “In order to feel the full kinetic impact of a number, the dancers must move towards the camera” and not just across the stage.
He learned that close-ups of the dancer do not work since the body also needs to be seen. But if the camera pulls back too far, the dancer looks small against the set or background. He also began to experiment with the use of color to enhance perspective and drama to showcase the kinetic energy of the dancers.
According to his Wikipedia biography, Gene Kelly was quoted as saying, “I don’t have a name for my style of dancing. It’s certainly hybrid. I’ve borrowed from the modern dance, from the classical and certainly from the American folk dance – tap dancing, jitterbugging. But I have tried to develop a style which is indigenous to the environment in which I was reared.” His biographer, Hirschhorn, wrote of “his uniquely hybrid style of dancing (a synthesis of old forms and new styles).” He adds, “Gene is not an ideal classical dancer. He does not have the proper training. His technique is not good enough. But in dancing that calls for a freer, less restricted technique than classical roles – and I’m talking about the stage – he could have been outstanding.”
According to Wikipedia, Kelly’s athleticism gave his moves a distinctive, broad muscular quality, and this was a deliberate choice on his part, as he explained: “There’s a strong link between sports and dancing, and my own dancing springs from my early days as an athlete.”
In Gene Kelly, a Life of Dance and Dreams, the biographer Alvin Yudkoff quoted Kelly as saying, “It was only in On the Town that we tried something entirely new in the musical film. Live people get off a real ship in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We did a lot of quick cutting – we’d be on the top of Radio City and then on the bottom – we’d cut from Mullberry Street to Third Avenue – and so the dissolve went out of style. This was one of the things that changed the history of musicals more than anything.” On the Town is a movie about three sailors on leave in NYC for 24 hours and “instead of alienating his male audiences…he made them identify with him and won them over by the virility of his dancing.” The film also starred Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin as the two other sailors.
His film career really got going with movies he did in the years between 1945 and 1952. Anchors Aweigh, On the Town, An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain were huge hits in Hollywood and solidified Kelly as a leading man. He was also Co-Director along with Stanley Donen in On the Town and Singin’ in the Rain.
According to Yudkoff, Singin’ in the Rain is hailed as the “single most memorable dance number on film,,,since the dawn of motion pictures.”
In Summer Stock, Kelly created a dance routine where he used a newspaper to make sounds (crumpling, tearing up an edge of the paper) to provide a rhythm and then added a squeaky floorboard in the barn to create a second series of sounds he could dance around. It sounds bizarre but it is amazing to watch him create this routine. He alone is on stage and yet, you cannot take your eyes off of him for the entire five minutes and two seconds of film time. That’s brave. Here’s the clip: Summer Stock – Gene Kelly (newspaper) – YouTube
I have my favorites. Of course, Singin’ in the Rain. Summer Stock is not a great film but Kelly is perfect in the film and for the film with his character’s “no quit” attitude in the face of the movie’s ongoing crises.
And then there are films that you don’t know why, but you cannot forget them. One is What a Way to Go! (1964), a Shirley MacLaine comedy that depends on a host of male stars to portray her many and various husbands, all of whom die trying to please her. I probably saw this movie two or three times when I was a teenager back when it was released to TV audiences. Gene’s part is short as are most of the other stars including Paul Newman, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin and Dick Van Dyke as the husbands who die during the slapstick comedy.
Of course there is the innovation that he helped foster as movie musicals tried to survive or reinvent themselves to different generations of film-goers. The quick cut edits in On the Town. The ballet scene in An American in Paris. The complicated filming of Kelly dancing with an animated Jerry the Mouse (with advice from Walt Disney himself) in Anchors Aweigh.
According to Wikipedia’s Gene Kelly filmography, “Kelly received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his performance in Anchors Aweigh and won an Honorary Academy Award for his work in An American in Paris. He was voted the 15th most popular film actor on the American Film Institute’s millennium list, while Singin’ in the Rain was voted the most popular movie musical of all time.
He also won the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1985, received the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 1981 as well as many other prestigious awards.
Then there are the eleven films he directed. Hello Dolly! as a big Hollywood musical was a dying breed in 1969 as many audiences wanted more grit and reality in their movies. The counterculture directors such as Martin Scorsese, Dennis Hopper, Stanley Kubrick and many others were bringing a street reality to the screen and many young movie goers were not interested in Barbra Streisand as Dolly Levi. Still, Kelly coaxed the performances he needed from his two stars who could not stand each other on the set: Streisand and Walter Matthau.
And in 1970, he got to direct two of his friends, also Hollywood legends, in The Cheyenne Social Club: James Stewart and Henry Fonda.
You look back at the films of the 1940s and 1950s and Gene Kelly was in many of the most successful of that era. What he did is amazing. He arrived in NYC and soon became a Broadway star in Pal Joey. He then gets an offer from MGM and according to Wiki, “his many innovations transformed the Hollywood musical, and he is credited with almost single-handedly making the ballet form commercially acceptable to film audiences.”
But it’s more than that. Put all the above together, and he just had it. He was a Hollywood legend, one of a kind. The kind we won’t see again.
Chris Ebel
8/10/22
Photo: MGM File Photo