Gene Kelly

  • George Sidney – Anchors Aweigh (1945)

    1941-1950ClassicsGeorge SidneyMusicalUSA
    Anchors Aweigh (1945)
    Anchors Aweigh (1945)

    Quote:
    The movie was written by Natalie Marcin and Isobel Lennart and directed by George Sidney.It won the Academy Award for Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture. In 2001, Kevin Spacey purchased this Oscar statuette at a Butterfield & Butterfield auction and returned it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Anchors Aweigh was also nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role (Gene Kelly), Best Cinematography, Color (Robert Planck, Charles P. Boyle), Best Music, Song (for Jule Styne (music) and Sammy Cahn (lyrics) for “I Fall in Love Too Easily”), and Best Picture.Read More »

  • Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly – It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)

    Stanley Donen1951-1960ComedyGene KellyMusicalUSA

    Quote:
    Scripted by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) revisits On the Town (1949), but with a satirical, revisionist bite. In this send-up of musical and post-war optimism, the dreams of Army buddies Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd all fall apart, and their ten-year reunion is a “frost”; Dailey’s bitter song “Situation-wise” takes aim at the stultifying effect of the quintessentially 1950s life of an advertising executive. Even though the trio finally bonds over a disastrous TV appearance, Fair Weather takes further aim at television’s plastic insincerity and technical poverty. Read More »

  • Irving Rapper – Marjorie Morningstar (1958)

    1951-1960DramaIrving RapperRomanceUSA

    While working as a counselor at a summer camp, college-student Marjorie Morgenstern falls for 32-year-old Noel Airman, a would-be dramatist working at a nearby summer theater. Like Marjorie, he is an upper-middle-class New York Jew (born ‘Ehrman’), but has fallen away from his roots, and Marjorie’s parents object among other things to his lack of a suitable profession, such as medicine or law. Noel himself warns Marjorie repeatedly that she’s much too naive and conventional for him, but they nonetheless fall in love. As they pursue an on-again-off-again relationship, Marjorie completes her studies at Hunter College, and works to establish an acting career, while Noel first leaves the theater for a job with an advertising agency, but later completes a musical he’d started writing before he and Marjorie had first met.Read More »

  • Stanley Kramer – Inherit the Wind (1960)

    1951-1960ClassicsDramaStanley KramerUSA

    Synopsis:
    In the 1920s, Tennessee schoolteacher Bertram Cates (Dick York) is put on trial for violating the Butler Act, a state law that prohibits public school teachers from teaching evolution instead of creationism. Drawing intense national attention in the media with writer E. K. Hornbeck (Gene Kelly) reporting, two of the nation’s leading lawyers go head to head: Matthew Harrison Brady (Fredric March) for the prosecution, and Henry Drummond (Spencer Tracy) for the defense.Read More »

  • Vincente Minnelli – An American in Paris (1951)

    1951-1960ClassicsMusicalUSAVincente Minnelli

    Synopsis:
    Jerry Mulligan, a struggling American painter in Paris, is “discovered” by an influential heiress with an interest in more than Jerry’s art. Jerry in turn falls for Lise, a young French girl already engaged to a cabaret singer. Jerry jokes, sings and dances with his best friend, an acerbic would-be concert pianist, while romantic complications abound.Read More »

  • Robert Greenwald – Xanadu (1980)

    1971-1980CampComedyRobert GreenwaldUSA

    Synopsis:

    In Los Angeles, artist Sonny Malone reluctantly returns to his job at Airflow Records – his job to do poster-sized exact renderings of album covers for on-site promotions, the renderings to be as close to the originals as possible – as he could not make a living as a freelance artist, where he could truly use his artistic vision. On his first day back at Airflow, he gets sidetracked by the thoughts of a young woman who literally roller skates into him. What he is unaware of is that their initial encounter and subsequent encounters are not by accident as she, Kira, a muse, was awakened by his lamentations about his art, she sent to help him achieve his artistic vision. This day, Sonny also meets aging Danny McGuire, a former big band musician turned construction company owner, he who wants to return to his roots by owning a live music venue. Danny initially and Sonny also do not know that their meeting is not by accident as Sonny will soon discover that Kira was part of his past. Sonny and Danny achieving their dreams is threatened by Kira knowingly albeit unpurposefully having broken the rules.Read More »

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