Gene Kelly

Gene Kelly: The Camera Learned to Dance

Late in the run of *Pal Joey*, Van Johnson would come back into the dark theatre and find "just a single lamp burning. Under it, a figure was dancing … Gene." The man alone on that stage had an economics degree from the University of Pittsburgh, had quit law school after two months, and as a boy had fought the neighbourhood kids who called him a sissy for taking dance lessons. What he wanted, until his teens, was to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates. What he got instead was the job of teaching a camera how to move.

Pittsburgh, Economics, and Fistfights

Eugene Curran Kelly was born on 23 August 1912 in the East Liberty neighbourhood of Pittsburgh, into an Irish-American family — his father, James Patrick Joseph Kelly, born in Peterborough, Ontario; his maternal grandfather an emigrant from Derry. His mother put him and his brother James into dance class at eight, an experience he resisted with his fists; he did not go back to it until he was fifteen. He finished Peabody High at sixteen, enrolled at Penn State, and dropped out after the 1929 crash to help the family. An economics degree from Pittsburgh followed in 1933, then two months of law school. Meanwhile the Kellys had opened their own dance studios — Squirrel Hill in 1932, Johnstown in 1933 — and Gene taught in them. His training was deliberately promiscuous: tap from the African-American dancers Robert Dotson and Frank Harrington, ballet from Kotchetovsky, Spanish dance from Rita Hayworth's uncle Angel Cansino.

Broadway

He danced in Cole Porter's *Leave It to Me!* in 1938, and in *The Time of Your Life* (1939) performed his own choreography on a Broadway stage for the first time. Then came *Pal Joey* in 1940, and the role of Joey Evans made him a star. He married the actress Betsy Blair in October 1941, signed with David O. Selznick, who promptly sold half the contract to MGM, and went west.

MGM, and the Mop

His debut opposite Judy Garland in *For Me and My Gal* (1942) left him "appalled at the sight of myself blown up 20 times." In *Thousands Cheer* (1943) he choreographed a mock love duet with a mop. In *Cover Girl* (1944), on loan to Columbia, he danced with his own reflection. In *Anchors Aweigh* (1945) he danced with Jerry Mouse — animation supervised by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera — and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. The critic Manny Farber, who had dismissed him, publicly reversed: "Kelly is the most exciting dancer to appear in Hollywood movies." Inducted into the Navy in November 1944 as a lieutenant junior grade, he spent the war in the Photographic Section in Washington writing and directing documentaries — an accident of assignment that changed his career.

On the Town, and an American in Paris

*On the Town* (1949), co-directed with Stanley Donen, took the musical out of the soundstage and into the streets of New York. *An American in Paris* (1951) won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, introduced the nineteen-year-old Leslie Caron, and closed with a seventeen-minute dream ballet, the most expensive production number yet filmed. In 1952 the Academy gave Kelly an honorary award "in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film." That same year came *Singin' in the Rain*, again with Donen: the title solo, "Moses Supposes" with Donald O'Connor, the "Broadway Melody" finale with Cyd Charisse. It was received more coolly than *An American in Paris* and has spent the seventy years since overtaking it.

Dance for the Common Man

Kelly's project had a slogan: dance for the common man. He refused white tie. Blair described the effect — "A sailor suit or his white socks and loafers, or the T-shirts on his muscular torso, gave everyone the feeling that he was a regular guy, and perhaps they, too, could express love and joy by dancing in the street." He was explicit about the contrast with Fred Astaire: "I used to envy his cool, aristocratic style, so intimate and contained. Fred wears top hat and tails to the Manor born — I put them on and look like a truck driver." He traced the difference to sport: "There's a strong link between sports and dancing, and my own dancing springs from my early days as an athlete." He declined to name his own style, calling it a hybrid of modern, classical and American folk dance. In 1958 he made *Dancing: A Man's Game* for NBC's *Omnibus*, restaging the movements of Mickey Mantle, Sugar Ray Robinson and Bob Cousy as choreography — the clearest statement of his thesis he ever put on film.

After the Musical Died

*Invitation to the Dance* (1956), his solo directing debut and his attempt to sell modern ballet to a mass audience, was mauled by delays and flopped, though it took the Golden Bear at Berlin. He left MGM in 1957. He directed *Flower Drum Song* on Broadway in 1958, and in 1960 became the first American invited to create a ballet for the Paris Opéra — *Pas de Dieux*, set to Gershwin — which made him a Chevalier of the Légion d'honneur. He acted in *Inherit the Wind*, directed Walter Matthau to a hit in *A Guide for the Married Man* (1967) and Matthau and Streisand in *Hello, Dolly!* (1969), which took three Oscars from seven nominations. In *That's Entertainment, Part II* (1976) he danced with Astaire for the last time; it was Astaire's last public dance, at seventy-six.

Why Gene Is Called a Genius

The gift is physical and spatial rather than intellectual, and the honest case says so. What separates Kelly from every other great dancer of the studio era is that he treated dance as a camera problem. He set the thesis out himself in 1951: if the camera is to contribute to dance at all, it must give "each spectator an undistorted and altogether similar view of dancer and background." Keep the whole figure in frame, keep the background fluid, make the camera a partner rather than a spectator — executing that meant solving movement, staging, lens and cutting at once. He was among the first to use split screen, double exposure and live action combined with animation, and he is credited with almost single-handedly making ballet commercially acceptable to film audiences. The dance historian Beth Genné put it best: with Donen and Minnelli, Kelly "fundamentally affected the way movies are made and the way we look at them. And he did it with a dancer's eye and from a dancer's perspective."

The counter-case matters. This is craft, athleticism and an extraordinary work ethic, not a theory of anything, and by his own account he borrowed the style wholesale. The great films were dense collaborations — Donen co-directed the two best. Outside the musical his record is uneven: *Gigot* recut and sunk, *The Cheyenne Social Club* and *Xanadu* failures. And his campaign to masculinise dance carried a nasty edge, including public remarks that a man who "dances effeminately … dances badly" — salesmanship as much as aesthetics, and it has aged badly. The defensible claim is completeness rather than transcendence: one man doing six jobs at once, well enough that the seams never show.

Legacy

He took the Kennedy Center Honors in 1982, the American Film Institute's life achievement award in 1985, the Screen Actors Guild's in 1989, the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton in 1994 and an honorary César in 1996. Two strokes disabled him, and he died in Beverly Hills on 2 February 1996. The AFI later ranked him fifteenth among the greatest male legends of classic Hollywood. In 2013 his signature song was voted the nation's favourite dance moment.

Achievements

• National Medal of Arts
• Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children's Animated Program — 1967
• Knight of the Legion of Honour
• Educated at University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania State University and Peabody High School
• Worked as film actor, singer and film director