1956 - INVITATION TO THE DANCE, Gene Kelly's ambitious dance film.

This film was released in 1956 but had been kicking around the studio since 1952 when it was filmed, MGM simply did not know what to do with it.  Gene Kelly was nothing if not ambitious when he persuaded MGM to let him make a dance film with essentially no conventional story and no dialog, only dancing.  Kelly had been influenced by Powell and Pressburger's The Red Shoes and probably their production of Tales Of Hoffman which was essentially a dance film with no dialog as well.  Kelly had been inserting extended dance sequences into Singing in the Rain and An American in Paris however he was taking on a lot with Invitation to the Dance. He was the director, choreographer and one of the lead dancers.

Filmed in England, Kelly attracted performers Tamara Toumanova, Igor Youskevitch, Diana Adams and Claire Sombert all ballet dancers who let's face it weren't going to draw a mainstream movie audience into the theater.  Also these dancers had to adapt to Kelly's athletic dance style which wasn't ballet.  Probably Darryl F. Zanuck at rival 20th Century Fox Studios said it best, "10 minutes of dance in a film is a hell of a long time for an audience to sit through." This film was 90 minutes long.

 

The film failed at the box office and with the critics who felt Kelly had overreached.  However I believe that a major reason for it's lack of success was that the musical genre Kelly had been a part of during the peak years at MGM had finally come to an end.  Audiences were just no longer interested in seeing film musicals.

 

The film is made up of three distinct set pieces, however the only one that is entertaining is Kelly's dance with animated cartoons courtesy of Hanna Barbara.  Even this sequence goes on to long.  There is a copy of the film complete on YouTube if you are interested, but probably 10 or 20 minutes of viewing this thing is enough.

The running time is  93 minutes.

1949 - ON THE TOWN, the famous MGM musical.

This was a ground breaking musical.  Gene Kelly had been pushing MGM to expand the boundaries of the musical and actually got the studio to agree to 2 weeks of filming in New York City.

On The Town was adapted from a Broadway musical featuring a Leonard Bernstein score.  In this film version the score barely survived with only 4 songs remaining.  The Jerome Robbins choreography was replaced by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's work,  well that's Hollywood.

Frankly the film was kind of an ordeal to sit through.  On The Town is about 10 minutes too long and has one dance number too many for my taste.  The on location photography, what there is of it was kind of nice.  But overall the film seems very silly, today's film scene has not been kind to old musicals particularly musicals with a lot of dancing in them.

 

98 minutes,  screenplay by Adolph Green and Betty Comden.

1969 - HELLO DOLLY is complete blandness on a very large budget.

There is something about seeing a studio spend a huge bundle of cash on a train wreck of a film and watch it go  completely wrong. In the case of Hello Dolly, it's not so much a disaster as an example of utter lack of imagination or inspiration being pushed on moviegoers as entertainment.
 

20th Century Fox had made so much money with The Sound of Music they thought they had found a potential gold mine with big budget musicals. Having purchased the screen rights to Hello Dolly they proceeded to hire some of the top musical talent in Hollywood. The director was Gene Kelly, the choreographer Michael Kidd, the cinematographer Harry Stradling, and the associate producer was Roger Edens, all top artists and technicians from the golden MGM musical tradition.

Barbara Streisand was only 27 years old and apparently neurotic as hell. This was only her second film and she was forced to carry the entire film. Miscast from the start and teamed with Walther Matthau an actor who hated her guts and couldn't stand to be on the set with her unless absolutely necessary, you could hardly blame her for driving everyone on the production crazy.

Gene Kelly should have seemed the logical choice to adapt this film, but a closer examination of Kelly's career showed that he was actually a co-director on his two greatest successes On The Town  and  Singing in the Rain.  Kelly clearly didn't care for the mediocre material he was dealing with. Michael Kidd had worked with Kelly at MGM and was a noted choreographer. He had the dancers leaping and almost flying around the sets but its all overkill to watch the musical numbers. The production group also had the mysterious Roger Edens, whose name turns up on a lot of MGM's great musicals as the associate producer. It should have been a can't miss reunion of the famous Freed Unit from MGM. The problem may have been that this group was probably a little past their prime.

Gene Kelly directs Hello Dolly

Fox spent lots and lots of money on sets and costumes and it's all on the screen. Probably the gigantic production would have sapped the energy and talent out of any production team.  The film's remembered today because a piece of it appears in the film Wall-E.

 

The only interesting thing on the DVD is the special feature showing Kelly directing the gigantic 4th of July parade number. Here you get an idea of the massive nature of the movie with hundreds and hundreds of extras performing on a huge set built on the Fox backlot.

This feature is only 7 minutes long but in some ways, a lot more entertaining than the actual film.

 148 minutes, Ernest Lehman produced and wrote this thing.