Academy Award winning Best Picture of 1951 opens with a Technicolor travelogue of Paris. We’re introduced to penniless but happy-go-lucky Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly, who stars, dances and sings, and choreographed the dancing). Jerry is an ex-GI who settled in the West Bank following World War II to paint. “Back home everyone said I didn’t have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.”

Jerry’s friend Adam (Oscar Levant) is a down and out composer. Adam is friends with dapper song and dance man named Henri (Georges Guetary), who shows Adam a photo of his fiancée, Lise Bouvier (19-year-old Leslie Caron in her screen debut). As Henri tries to describe Lise, images of her dance across a mirror, and the five aspects of her personality are conveyed by different dance styles, costumes and colors.

Meanwhile, Jerry encounters Milo (Nina Foch), heiress to a suntan oil empire. She hopes to win Jerry’s affections by sponsoring him in the art world, but the righteous artist refuses to be bought and kept. She persuades him to let her help his career, but at the Café Flaubert, Jerry spots the beautiful Lise. Not realizing she’s engaged to Henri, he makes ass out of himself in an attempt to woo her.

Jerry persists, showing up at her job in a perfume store and making her laugh. In the second best sequence in the film, they arrive on the banks of the Seine, singing and swaying to “Our Love Is Here To Stay” under the mist, expressing their attraction to each other through song. They later realize they’re keeping relationships secret from each other and go their separate ways, before a picture perfect Hollywood ending.

Directed by Vincente Minnelli, written by Alan Jay Lerner and scored with the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin – including some of their compositions from the ’20s and ’30s – An American In Paris is a musical, but the song and dance numbers actually relate to the story and are used to advance it. This culminates in a highly imaginative 13-minute finale, which ranks as one of the longest uninterrupted dance sequences ever put on film.

This is considered one of the best musicals of the ’50s, perhaps not one of the best ever, because it suffers when the charismatic Gene Kelly is off screen. Oscar Levant and Georges Guetary just do not earn their lunch money. Lerner – the Broadway lyricist who would write My Fair Lady and Camelot with composer Frederick Loewe – does a pretty good job with the script, infusing the boy-meets-girl story with some droll wit.

I enjoy musicals as much as most women enjoy sci-fi. Both genres leave reality behind for fantasy, which one gender seems to accept, while the other has to leave the room. I was still blown away by the finale of An American In Paris. No dialogue is heard for nearly the final 20 minutes of the movie. Instead, we transition into a dreamscape where the story is interpreted through music and dance. And it works magnificently.

Jerry chases Lise – the French girl of his dreams – through a dream interpretation of Paris as brought to life by his favorite painters: Manet, Renoir, Utrillo, Van Gogh, Rousseau and Dufy. There’s modern dance, tap and ballet, Gershwin’s music is thunderous and amazing throughout and it’s all shot in Technicolor, which brings to mind a painting far more vividly than any color process in the last forty years of movies has been able to.

What an ending. I probably watched it four times before returning this to Greencine. Gene Kelly & Leslie Caron maintain a nice chemistry, and Gershwin’s symphonic music is a major highlight. With the exception of the opening travelogue, the film was shot entirely on MGM soundstages in Culver City. It won six Academy Awards – including Best Picture over A Streetcar Named Desire – but neither Minnelli or his cast were awarded statues for their work.