An American In Paris (MGM) is a grand show—a 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 heiress (Nina Foch) who is determinedly sponsoring him. But the shopgirl feels a stronger commitment to the devoted music-hall idol (Georges Guetary) who sheltered her through a wartime childhood. As it must for all lovers, especially in Paris, love finds a way.
This fragile fable reaches its climax in a beguiling 17-minute ballet that recalls The Red Shoes' dance sequences but dwarfs them in scope, lushness and variety. Set to the Gershwin musical suite that gives the film its name, the ballet is a kaleidoscope of the city's landmarks and moods, shifting with the adventures of the hero in his pursuit of the girl. Dance patterns, costumes and scenery fuse handsomely to paint each scene in the style of a different French artist: Dufy, Utrillo, Renoir, Rousseau, Toulouse-Lautrec.
Throughout, the film breathes the buoyant spirit of Gene Kelly. In 1949's On the Town, in which he served as co-director and star, Kelly staked his claim as the most original talent in Hollywood musicomedy; the new picture makes his claim secure. As a dance designer-performer, he is equally adept in Hollywood's most ambitious ballet and in a delightfully informal number setting I Got Rhythm into the form of an English lesson for an adoring clump of French children.
But An American in Paris is a product of many talents and a triumph of teamwork. Actress Caron, a young (19) French ballet dancer discovered by Kelly, combines dancing skill with a fetching simplicity and the plump-cheeked freshness of a Renoir model. The script, by Alan Jay Lerner, bounces wittily along under the direction of Vincente Minnelli. The Gershwin score brims with a dozen of his works, some heard only in snatches, some unfamiliar, ranging from such standards as 'S Wonderful and Embraceable You to Piano Concerto in F, played by Gershwin's leading interpreter, Pianist Oscar Levant, who doubles as a dour comedian.
Three designers, including Broadway's Irene (The King and I) Sharaff, fill An American in Paris with costumes which, like the rest of the movie, score as high in imagination as in lavishness. Notable example: the costumes for a tumultuous Beaux Arts Ball, which would tempt most moviemakers into a rainbow splurge, are all black & white. The effect, striking in itself, is the perfect aperitif for the banquet of color that follows in the ballet.