Gene Kelly’s appearance: the rug verses the scar. Why cover one and not the other?
My guess is that the scar suggests masculinity and virility; the hairpiece does not. It’s no secret that Gene Kelly was interested in — or some would argue, obsessed with — displaying conventional American masculinity both on- and offscreen. In fact, he devoted an entire television special to that notion called Dancing: A Man’s Game (1958) [video] in which he pairs himself with star athletes like Mickey Mantle and Sugar Ray Robinson to prove that dancing is not the property of women but “a man’s game.” I should point out, however, that on occasion, Kelly did attend star-studded events without the toupee. Here’s a picture of him sans rug with Grace Kelly at the Cannes Film Festival.
You’ve written fairly extensively about Singin’ in the Rain (1952), but there’s one shot in particularly that you love, can you tell us what it is? And why does it affect you every time?
Yeah, sure. Oddly, it’s a random shot, not part of a musical number and not all that remarkable. It falls about 70 minutes into Singin in the Rain, after the title number. Debbie Reynolds’s character is dubbing the song “Would You?” for Lina Lamont, Donald O’Connor’s character is conducting a full orchestra. Kelly’s character, Don Lockwood, watches the performance. He leans his upper body against a baby grand piano and stares adoringly at Reynolds’s Kathy Selden. Although the shot lasts only 3 seconds or so, the lighting is lovely against Kelly’s olive complexion and the use of shallow focus separates him from the orchestra in the background. And as I write on my blog, “At this point, I don’t think of Kelly’s hairpiece or that less-than-sexy jacket he’s sporting. It’s just me and Gene, with the latter looking affectionately at ME in the manner he’s looking at Kathy.”
Sure, it sounds ridiculous — and sometimes I cannot believe I have an entire essay in the public sphere — devoted to this one shot from the film, but it’s what viewers do with stars and star images: we project our desires/interests onto them; we allow them to act out aspects of life that are important to us. This is why there are tons of people currently devoting Tumblrs, Facebook pages, and Twitter statuses to Ryan Gosling, the male star of the moment (try Feminist Ryan Gosling on Tumblr if you haven’t already). It just so happens that my interest, strangely enough, lies in the qualities of a song-and-dance man who’s been dead for 15 years.
What’s your favourite Gene Kelly number?
Probably the “Broadway Melody number” from Singin’ in the Rain, specifically that section in which Cyd Charisse wears the sequined green flapper dress. I’ve a colleague who cannot stand “Broadway Melody” because, as he says every time we discuss it, the number completely stops the narrative momentum. I cannot disagree with that statement as the number is barely integrated into the film, like by 3 sentences. But I find that all that vivid color, the way Cyd Charisse’s femme fatale character toys with Kelly’s, the force with which he eventually pulls her to him, and all the sexiness that follows supersede the integration issue. For me anyway.
Musicals have changed since Gene Kelly’s day; it’s hard to think of Gene in Rocky Horror stilettos, for example. Could a Gene Kelly musical be successful today?
Ah, but I’d love to see that, Gene doing the Time Warp! Could one be released successfully today? No, I don’t think so; they’re too chaste. Well, they appear too chaste to the casual viewer even though some of the routines are highly erotic. I think, for instance, of Kelly and Cyd Charisse in “Broadway Melody” and the last section of the American in Paris (1951) ballet with all that phallic smoke shooting into the air and the way Kelly and Leslie Caron drape themselves all over each other and those unsuspecting statues. In other words, several of these dances symbolize foreplay and sex. When Hollywood’s censorship guidelines, which had banned any and all displays of sex, began to unravel in the late 1950s, films no longer needed to disguise the act in dance numbers — or by showing an erect tower like in Casablanca or a train entering a tunnel like in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest. They could show explicit representations. Well, if one convention of the dual-focus film musical — as Gene Kelly knew it anyway — was to disguise heterosexual unions within song-and-dance routines, then what’s left?
These are four more interview questions that didn’t make it into the BBC Radio 2 documentary on Gene Kelly. Previous questions/posts may be found here.
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Professor of film and Shakespeare. Advocate of social media. Lover of popular culture,