OVP: It's Always Fair Weather (1955)

Film: It's Always Fair Weather (1955)
Stars: Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, Cyd Charisse, Dolores Gray, Michael Kidd
Directors: Gene Kelly & Stanley Donen
Oscar History: 2 nominations (Best Story and Screenplay, Best Scoring)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Cyd Charisse-click here to learn more about Ms. Charisse (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

You may have guessed this from exploring my blog, but I have a really good memory for movie references, and for remembering what I read about particular films.  In 1999, Entertainment Weekly put out a list of the "100 Greatest Movies of All Time," a list I'm still working on (but am likely to finish sometime in 2019), and unlike a lot of other EW product in the years since, it's a genuinely strong list of pictures (there's no Breakfast Club or Dazed and Confused to appear hip-and-now).  In the Singin in the Rain piece in the magazine, there's a laundry list of other great Classic Hollywood musicals that they considered before going with the cliched choice for their Top 10.  The movies listed were Meet Me in St. Louis, On the Town, An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, and Silk Stockings, all of which I'd at least heard of when I bought the magazine at age 15, but they also name-checked It's Always Fair Weather, the most obscure film in the sentence and that mystery has stuck with me in the years since.  It's a very small, odd thing to remember almost twenty years after I purchased it, but I wanted to make sure that the last of the films on that list that I had ever seen was the least known It's Always Fair Weather, and thanks to Cyd Charisse Month (she's in two of the other films, one of which we'll get to next week and one of which we've already hit), I got to do just that.  Twenty years after I first read the title of that film, I finally saw It's Always Fair Weather.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie's central premise surrounds three men: Ted (Kelly), Doug (Dailey), and Angie (Kidd) who were infantrymen serving together during World War II.  At the end of the war, they realize that they must move on and start the lives they dreamed of in the bunker, but are afraid of life without these two buddies to have their backs.  They make a pact to meet together ten years later, at the same bar they always went to, and then go on with their merry lives.  They do, in fact, come back together ten years later at the bar, but things are not the same.  None of the men has achieved his personal dreams, and they feel like strangers to each other.

This is where the film takes some really interesting turns, because it leans into the pessimism of these men having lost their youthful vigor and also that they genuinely are an unlikely group of friends, and time should probably tear them apart.  This is in an era before movies like Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret had inserted darker or more somber musicals into the lexicon, and as a result it is likely why the film was a box office dud when it first came out (MGM also royally screwed up the film's release schedule), and many cite the film as the prime example of how MGM couldn't make a profit any longer off of musicals and would instead have to move on to films like Ben-Hur, Goldfinger, and Doctor Zhivago to pay the bills.  While it's unfair to call it the last great "dance musical" as some do with Silk Stockings still to come (not to mention MGM's last significant musical Gigi three years and nine Oscars to come), It's Always Fair Weather was definitely the beginning of the end for the Classic Hollywood musical.

Which is a pity, because this is a great movie.  It takes a while to get its rhythm, and it's never entirely clear that the Kelly/Charisse romance is worth the squeeze (the film would easily function without her, and she was probably just included to stop the film from being a sausage fest), but there are some truly splendid moments in It's Always Fair Weather.  The wonderful number where the guys are complaining in their heads about their companions is funny but melancholy, and the dancing is sublime, though it's clear from number to number that Gene Kelly's style was competing with the more modern trappings of Michael Kidd, making his film debut.  Best of all is Kelly doing a musical number that has to be seen to be believed in "I Like Myself."  Kelly somehow manages to sail across the MGM lot in a pair of rudimentary roller skates, tapping and dancing without missing a beat in a scene that sure looks like it was shot in one take.  It's just jaw-dropping, even more so than the famed Donald O'Connor scene in I Love Melvin which Kelly is clearly stealing from here, and even if the rest of the movie wasn't as good as it was, this alone would be worth watching the flick.

Charisse is, well, unnecessary though she's fine here.  She gets one great dancing number in a boxing gym; her million-dollar legs (literally-they were insured by MGM for reportedly $5 million) have rarely been on such dynamic display, but the rest of the film she's fun, but ancillary to the plot.  The writers make her a busy businesswoman who has a photographic memory (used to intimidate Kelly but totally unnecessary as the movie progresses), and doesn't even really dance with Kelly in a major number.  As a result, this won't be changing my opinion on Charisse as a "great dancer, okay actress," but it made me fall even more for the MGM musical.  The film received a pair of Oscar nominations, for Best Scoring and Original Screenplay, and it's hard to begrudge either even though neither is a home run (the screenplay too sentimental, the score lacking one big, memorable number).  That said, I'm happy that EW made me aware of such a movie twenty years ago-it was worth the wait.