This film, made in 1951, has won six (!) Academy Awards (for best Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Music, Screenplay and Best Picture). Unbelievable! After discovering how great Singin’ in the Rain is (though it got no Oscars at all), I thought I have to check this one out, too.

Gene Kelly is Jerry Mulligan, a wanna-be artist who stayed in Paris after finishing art school. “If you can’t paint in Paris, you’d better give up and marry the boss’ daughter.” And what do you know, he gets discovered by a rich and influential woman (Nina Foch). What Jerry doesn’t realize is that she is really after him, not his art.

Meanwhile, he falls in love with a young French girl (Leslie Caron), who is engaged to be married to a popular French performer. It all sounds a bit complicated but it is actually a pretty average story… boy falls in love with girl who is promised to another while another girl falls in love with the first boy who won’t have her.

What is special about this film are, of course, the songs and the dancing. Gene Kelly is an amazing dancer and it is really fun to watch him! The sets are really well done, too. It is a creation of the perfect Paris, how everyone would like to see it: little street cafés, markets, lots of French children playing on the street and a lot of café au lait. It is charming!

I like An American in Paris but I prefer Singin’ in the Rain. The latter is, although only filmed one year later, a lot more modern. The story is more interesting, the music is (in my ears) better and the sets and special effects are amazing. In both films, they somehow manage to have a big dancing finale which is not part of the story. They are dream sequences which seem to go on for a very long time. They are absolutely beautiful but seem a bit unnecessary. Like the filmmakers only wanted to put in some more dancing.

One thing that actually bugged me about An American in Paris (and this is entirely personal) was the choice of Leslie Caron as Gene Kelly’s love interest. She is a good dancer but I don’t find her even remotely pretty. I didn’t believe that a handsome man like Gene Kelly would give up his career for this girl. (God, that sounds bitchy…but this is a Hollywood film and it’s not playing by the rules )

Tags: Academy Awards, An american in paris, Gene Kelly, Jerry Mulligan, Leslie Caron, Nina Foch, Oscar, Singin in the Rain

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 4:59 pm and is filed under American, Watched on DVD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.