Human Flower Project

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Dancing at La Madeleine

Is love guaranteed? If you’re in a streetside flower market in Paris with Gene Kelly, sans doute.

Gene Kelly makes a discovery at the flower market

“An American in Paris”  (1951)

Gene Kelly was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 23, 1912. By his teens he was working in a dance studio, then escaped to New York and later Hollywood, where he would make—with Vincent Minnelli—one of the strangest and finest musicals of all time: An American in Paris (1951). Okay, so it did thieve from Michael Powell’s wildly innovative The Red Shoes, made three years earlier. But Powell’s movie, revolutionary as it was, didn’t have George Gershwin’s music. And it didn’t have Gene Kelly.

Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance next to La Madeleine

in An American in Paris (1951)

Photo: Film and Fashion for the Oscars

We pay tribute especially for the role a flower (carnation?) plays throughout the film. For the young American painter it signifies the love that he can’t shake, that keeps turning up across the city. In one of many memorable scenes, our confused hero comes upon his heart’s desire on a mound of white flowers as he wanders through the old market next to La Madeleine church. (The market is still there today, though the flower sellers don’t wear broad brimmed bonnets and they seem dour and irritable, even for Paris, where irritation can be form of foreplay). Of course, in Gene Kelly’s Paris, the Madeleine is on a set in California. Finding again the bright red flower with the long stem, he touches it and it becomes his gamin ballerina, Leslie Caron.

From Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron’s long finale

An American in Paris

Speaking of red, we were intrigued to learn of Kelly’s leftist politics, a commitment that brought him to side with the Carpenters’ Union in its strike against the Hollywood studios and later to appear, along with John Huston and others, before the House Un-American Activities Committee. And we thought he was just a delicious, virile dancer!

Kelly died February 2, 1996. A biopic that aired on US public television said that after his achievements in the 1950s, he endured 40 years of disappointment as an actor and artist. But who ever would have known?  The “spring” Gene Kelly created on film—An American in Paris—has outlasted him and his disappointment, too.