An American In Paris (MGM) is a grand showa brilliant combination of Hollywood's opulence and technical wizardry with the kind of taste and creativeness that most high-budgeted musicals notoriously lack. The Technicolorful result is smart, dazzling, genuinely gay and romantic, and as hard to resist as its George Gershwin score.
The movie's boy-meets-girl story is simple, lighthearted and peopled with thoroughly likable characters. An ex-G.I. painter (Gene Kelly), happily roughing it on the Left Bank, picks up a charming shopgirl (Leslie Caron). They fall in love. He holds off a pleasantly wolf-girlish American...