Isn't It A Lovely Day to Be Singin' in the Rain: Astaire vs. Kelly and Why I Care

For years, ever since I had the somewhat dubious delight of renting and watching the entirety of  'An American in Paris', I have wondered something: why does Gene Kelly, a man known the world over as one of the finest dancers of his generation, not only not impress me, but annoy me? What is it about his movement that causes me to cringe? Why do I prefer to put on 'Swing Time' rather than 'On the Town'? Why, in short, do I prefer Fred Astaire?

I am not myself a dancer, but I can appreciate good dancing as much as any layman.  I enjoy the elegance of good choreography; as a drummer, I delight particularly in good tap.  And as a woman I appreciate a healthy display of male athleticism and ability.  Perhaps, I thought, my peculiar hang-up, my dislike of Kelly is the same as my inexplicable dislikes of Christian Bale, Montgomery Clift, and a number of other actors, male and female, who simply get on my nerves through no intrinsic fault of their own, through no lack of ability or talent.  We all have our types; perhaps Kelly is simply not mine.  

Then, I came to realize something from an offhand comment thrown out by a film studies professor I just happened to be listening to.  The key differences between Kelly and Astaire, two dancers often compared to each other, are quite simple: Kelly is more athletic, a more bound mover; he also either dances alone or with male partners.  Astaire either dances alone, or with female partners.  At first I thought, how very progressive of Kelly! And then it came to me, my reasons for disliking Kelly.  

It is not that he was progressive, but rather that his performances make dancing the prerogative of men.  Dancing in his hands (or feet) ceases to be the interplay of two bodies flowing in tandem with each other, of two people moving across the floor in synchronicity and understanding, and becomes an athletic performance, the artistic equivalent of a narcissist saying 'Look what I can do!' Even when he dances with women, he does not really dance with them; he dances around them.  They become objects for him to twirl about, not performers in their own right.  He cannot really abide to have a woman equal him in ability.  He never tapped with Anne Miller or Ginger Rogers, who quite frankly would dance him right off the stage.  Most of Mr. Kelly's female partners are either not allowed to equal him if they can, or seem hand-picked they really can't.  Debbie Reynolds in 'Singin' in the Rain' is very nice to look at, but her few dances with Kelly mostly consist of him moving around her.  Leslie Caron is likewise nice, and talented, eye-candy, but is again sidelined in favor of Kelly's overblown balletic histrionics.  Kelly seems much more at ease jumping over chairs with Donald O'Connor than he does putting his arm around Reynolds.  Women are not partners for Gene Kelly; they are props.  

When Astaire wants to dance with an object, he dances with a hat rack; when he dances with a woman, he actually dances with her.  Watch any one of his films with Ginger Rogers.  Each dance is meticulously constructed to prove just how compatible, and combative, these two people are.  'Night and Day' in 'The Gay Divorcee', one of the first true Astaire/Rogers numbers, was meant to, in Astaire's own words, be a substitute for sex; anyone watching the film comes away with the sense that they've just watched a love scene being enacted, in which lips never touch and clothes never come off.  Astaire and Rogers complement each other; their movements are meant to flow continuously together, they mirror one another on many occasions.  Ginger Rogers once famously said that she 'did everything Fred Astaire did, only backwards and in high heels'.  Astaire may always lead, but the focus is rarely on one performer or the other; the dance is not built to show off his physical prowess, but the synchronicity of a couple's movements.  On the occasions when Astaire dances alone, he does so less with a desire to 'show off' (he is never, in other words, proving to Rogers what he can do) and more with the desire to entertain: most of his solo dances take place on stage in front of an audience.  

In fact, if Astaire ever does begin to 'show off', he is usually put promptly in his place.  His tap in front of Rogers in 'Top Hat', where he sings and then dances to 'Isn't It A Lovely Day', begins as a solo performance.  He steps away from her, about to show what he can do.  But Rogers quickly joins him, doing everything he does (and often then some).  Finally, the couple come together and their dance is a joyous union.  Narcissism takes a back seat, even if it is sometimes present.

All of the dances in the Astaire/Rogers films serve in some way to advance the narrative, from the playful dancing of 'Isn't It A Lovely Day' to the more sombre performance in 'Swing Time' of 'Never Gonna Dance'.  They find, lose, and regain each other, all through dance.  Kelly's dances, by contrast, sometimes do not advance the narrative.  His predilection for extended 'dream' or balletic sequences in his films often stop the story flat (see 'An American in Paris', 'On the Town', and 'Singin' In The Rain' some time, if you don't believe me).  He often dances when he feels most alone, giving vent to his desires without the object of desire being present.  Astaire perpetually chases the desire; if Rogers (or Charisse, or Hayworth) is not present, has left him, he often chooses not to dance.   

There are always exceptions, of course, for both men: Astaire dances for, not with Rogers, to 'I Won't Dance'; Kelly and Caron dance together in 'An American in Paris'.  Astaire's later films betray a search for a 'new Ginger', with Fred pairing off with Cyd Charisse, Rita Hayworth, Joan Fontaine (!), Judy Garland, and even, God save us, Audrey Hepburn (in another of the long line of films in which Hepburn is paired romantically with a man old enough to be her father).  But I would argue that these films still establish what is so likable about Astaire as a performer: he must have a female partner.  A brilliant dancer in his own right, he is at his best with a woman of equal ability standing opposite.  

Astaire, then, in my opinion, keeps dancing sexual.  His elegant performances with Rogers are love scenes in themselves; no kiss is needed.  Kelly, by far the better looking male of the two, might as well be dancing in front of a mirror.  He is far more interested in making himself look good than he is in flowing with his female partners.  (Astaire, by the way, did not have a corner on the 'older man/younger woman' market: for sheer weirdness, watch an elder Kelly chase after Catherine Deneuve in 'The Young Girls of Rochefort').  Astaire appreciates the importance of the female counterpart.  Kelly might as well be dancing with that hatrack.   

    

 

We've come from "His Girl Friday" to "How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days"

One of the most pernicious fantasies in which modern filmgoes, critics, and theorist persist is the “look how far we’ve come” mentality. While I cannot deny that Hollywood’s portrayal of ethnic minorities has improved over the course of the century (though apparently Eddie Murphy can still play an owner of a Chinese restaurant with the same stereotyped ticks which Mickey Rooney affected in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”), when this mentality is applied to the portrayal of women it hits a serious snag. So by all means let us discuss how far we’ve come.

I have just completed watching Louis Feuillade’s eight-hour silent crime opus, “Les Vampires.” The chief criminal mastermind of the serial, shown throughout 1915 and 1916, was Irma Vep, whose cunning plots stayed always an inch (and often times miles) ahead of our intrepid, and rather boring, hero the newspaper reporter Philippe Guérande. Irma Vep, played by Musidora, is the right-hand woman to the Grand Vampire, the nominal head of the gang, but while Grand Vampires come and go (there are three of them), Irma Vep is forever. She wriggles in and out of each episode clad in black cat-suits and voluminous fur coats, captivating, immoral, and sharply intelligent. She is far more intriguing than say the “villainess” of a recent week’s number one movie who, like so many, doesn’t even have the decency to be human. A female villain today can be omnipotent only so long as she is safely circuits and switches not flesh and blood. “Les Vampires” perhaps is not a revolutionary feminist statement, but it was made five years before women could even vote in the US, and thirty years before that became a possibility in its native France. The advances made in the subsequent generations aren’t necessarily reflected on celluloid. By the time the final episode of “Les Vampires” was shown Musidora was a star, and she went on to write, direct, produce, and act in several features of her own.

Still Irma Vep was a villain and as such was not held to the same standards as the cinematic “good girls” of the same era. People like to make the point that the liberated woman was demonized in these early days of cinema and was always punished for her disregard for social norms. But then where does this place the “serial queens” of the early silent era. “The Hazards of Helen” was a long-running American serial which began a few years before “Les Vampires” reached screens. It’s heroine, Helen, repeatedly had to prove herself in a male dominated world, and her job as a railroad telegraph operator gave her plenty of opportunities to. She is intelligent, athletic and resourceful, and though she is rescued by a handsome hero from time to time (there were over a hundred episodes, they had to change up the formula occasionally), the vast majority of the episodes had her leaping from moving vehicles, or racing a motorcycle over a rising drawbridge. These days, as Arnold Schwarzenegger once said, women just get in the way of the action, they’re rarely asked to participate in it. The last act of an action movie has become the province of the hero, and no matter how active the heroine she is sidelined for the dénouement not wanting threaten the masculinity of the Adonis who will win her in the end. We like to think that it has always been that way, and that these days with action heroines like The Bride, Trinity, and Fox (“Kill Bill”, “The Matrix”, and “Wanted” for the uninitiated) things are getting better for our amazons, but back in 1934 when Hitchcock made his first version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much” it is Leslie Banks, the hero of the piece, who is taken out of commission in the final act, and Edna Best is the only one capable of saving her husband and daughter.

Hitchcock’s heroines, especially his early ones, have a resourcefulness and intelligence that you don’t often find in movies today. While James Stewart is confined to a wheelchair in “Rear Window” it is left to Grace Kelly to be the active half the relationship, climbing fire escapes and shadowing the villain. In “Shadow of a Doubt” it’s Theresa Wright’s young Charlie who has the brains to see her charming uncle for what he really is, and the heroine of “Notorious” goes into the lion’s den to spy, unlike the heroine of “Notorious Redux” AKA “Mission Impossible II” where the heroine goes into the lions den so that the men can spy using a microphone implanted on her body. In fact these days the importance of a female character lands more and more on her body. Hollywood seems to be reluctant to have a female lead, and only seems to give in when it is obvious that it is absolutely necessary for the character to be female… namely she needs to get pregnant at some point in the film (they tried once still keeping the character male, but Schwarzenegger’s “Junior” left a little to be desired). People accuse Hayes Code many times as being a measure used to keep women in their place, but I actually think it did more for women than people realize. It allowed them to be more than bodies, since their bodies became taboo it was their minds that made them desirable. Sure, Claudette Colbert’s legs are praised, but watching her in “Palm Beach Story” or “It Happened One Night” it’s her wit that makes her sexy. In Hayes Code era women often were able to seduce their men through dialogue, rather than anatomy, and far from silencing women it was a time when women’s voices were heard most strongly both on screen, and on the page. Perhaps later I’ll go into the female screenwriters in Hollywood during the 30s and 40s, but that's a whole other article in itself.

"On TV, “Sex and the City” was never as insulting as “Desperate Housewives,” which strikes me as catastrophically retrograde, but, almost sixty years after “All About Eve,” which also featured four major female roles, there is a deep sadness in the sight of Carrie and friends defining themselves not as Bette Davis, Anne Baxter, Celeste Holm, and Thelma Ritter did—by their talents, their hats, and the swordplay of their wits—but purely by their ability to snare and keep a man. Believe me, ladies, we’re not worth it.” – Anthony Lane