OVP: Les Girls (1957)

Film: Les Girls (1957)
Stars: Gene Kelly, Kay Kendall, Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg
Director: George Cukor
Oscar History: 3 nominations/1 win (Best Costume Design*, Art Direction, Sound Mixing)
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 Mitzi Gaynor-click here to learn more about Ms. Gaynor (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We pick up with Mitzi Gaynor just over a week after her last film.  We've had some movies from the same year for a star in this series, but I don't think we ever had two films so close together as The Joker is Wild and Les Girls, which is our picture this week.  As a result, we don't have a lot to update you on with where Gaynor was in her career, though you have to give her credit for going from the diva behavior of Frank Sinatra to the psychotic perfectionism of Gene Kelly.  But the reason I picked this film for our penultimate Gaynor film is that it comes from MGM.  The bulk of Gaynor's career was alternating between Fox and Paramount, and while she made musicals for both studios, MGM is really the lot where the singers & hoofers went.  However, in the 1950's they were more obsessed with our March star Cyd Charisse than any other actresses, and quite frankly were about to be done with big-scale musicals.  Les Girls wasn't the last significant musical to come out of MGM (that would be Bells are Ringing three years later), but it was Gene Kelly's final musical for the studio.  So I wanted to see, with the clock ticking, if they had the right part for Gaynor, and what she'd look like in a musical the way only MGM could make them.

(Spoilers Ahead) Les Girls takes part in three acts, focusing on three different dancers in the film, all representing different countries: the American Joy (Gaynor), the British Sybil (Kendall), and the French Angele (Elg, who is really Finnish but her character is French).  Angele is suing Sybil for libel in court (the film seems to have weirdly been inspired by Rashomon in the way it delivers its story), stating that Sybil lied in her book about the three women.  We then flash back to first Sybil, then Angele, and finally the man that came between them their dancing costar-director Barry (Kelly) taking the stand to straighten things out.  The film ends with us realizing that it was Joy that Barry was in love with the whole time (Hollywood law dictates that Kelly go after the biggest name in the cast, after all), and all three women end up happily ever after...with Joy keeping an eye on her new husband, whom she suspects maybe had a little bit of romancing with the other two women to keep their stories straight.

The movie is weird for an MGM musical because it's the plot that actually dominates the tale, rather than the musical numbers.  There are a few lovely song-and-dance scenes (I loved the saucy "Ladies-in-Waiting" with the peekaboo costume design, and the ballet duet between Gaynor & Kelly was sublime), but it's actually the plot and the witty banter that keeps you there.  It's the rare movie where generally pretty much everyone upstages Gene Kelly, who is mostly just there to pitch woo and be a dance partner, as it's the women that steal the entire film.  Gaynor is great here-she's relegated with the least flamboyant character, but she gets a lot of snappy one-liners that generally made me cackle.  Elg and Kendall both get the better parts, though, and they tied at the Golden Globes (can you imagine that happening today-two actors from the same film tying for an award?!?) for Best Actress.  If I had to pick a favorite it'd probably be Kendall, who is delectable on the stand throwing bon mots at the judge; leave it to George Cukor to direct a musical with Gene Kelly and still make it all about his actresses.  While Elg is still alive and worked for decades on the stage (she was in the original cast of Nine on Broadway), Kendall (who was once married to Rex Harrison) died tragically young at the age of 32 from leukemia just two years after the release of Les Girls.

The film won three Academy Award nominations, each deserving but to different degrees.  Like I said above, the musical numbers are fine, if only 1-2 are really memorable, so I feel like the Sound citation is more because there was a lack of musicals in 1957 to throw this one toward.  The Art Direction and Costumes are sublime, though.  Orry-Kelly is clearly in heaven getting to parade the three beautiful leading actresses in an array of matching, carefully-constructed outfits, and the set design, particularly the girl's compact but believable apartment, is brimming with detail.  This movie competed with Funny Face in both those categories, so the OVP for this field is going to be hell, but I was utterly charmed by Les Girls and don't really understand why this isn't a more celebrated MGM musical.  Next week we will conclude our look at Mitzi Gaynor, and our first season of "Saturdays with the Stars" with a different film that won a trio of Oscar nominations & a trophy...on one enchanted evening.