"He looked like a guy on your bowling team, only classier." So said Bob Fosse about Gene Kelly, one of the greatest American dancers to ever grace stage and screen. In the 2002 documentary Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer, originally produced as part of the "American Masters" series for PBS, viewers come to understand how Kelly, through his performances and choreography, helped to create a uniquely American style of dance.

This 87 minute production is a classy and fitting tribute to a man whom many credit with the greatest screen song and dance numbers in American cinema history. Thankfully and fittingly, much of the documentary is given over to scenes from Gene Kelly’s films. Some of his best numbers, like the well-known title number from 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, and the lesser-known number where he dances with a creaky floor board and a newspaper in the 1950 movie Summer Stock, are shown in their entirety. Others are shown in long excerpt.

The documentary details Kelly’s life and career chronologically, hitting lightly on his formative years in Pittsburgh, where he and his family ran two dance studios (one in Johnstown), and then turning to his years on Broadway. One of my favorite pieces of footage in the entire film is about a 10-15 second clip of a very young Kelly dancing on stage in "Pal Joey" – the only existing film of the Broadway musical that brought him to the attention of movie mavens Louis B. Mayer (of MGM) and David Selznick. The footage was taken by an amateur photographer with a handheld film camera he’d snuck into the theater. It’s in color but grainy, with heads bobbing about in the audience rows ahead, but it’s rightfully commented that Kelly’s exuberant energy and vitality is already evident as he lights up the stage. It gave me the feeling of watching a sparkler while waiting for the big fireworks to begin.

Moving Glimpses of the Real Kelly

Besides terrific film footage throughout, the documentary is held together with a variety of insightful and admiring comments from Kelly’s co-stars, family members, and current day film critics who have studied his work in depth. As in any documentary of this kind, some of the “talking heads” are better than others, but most of what’s said here is important in sketching Kelly’s portrait, and stitched together into a neat whole.

The production, which came out about six years Kelly’s death, is marked by a sense of real love for its subject, but not such abject awe over his talent that he’s painted unrealistically. The real Kelly comes across – his competitive streak, his ego, his perfectionism. He would drive younger and less experienced actors to work for hours in order to obtain the kind of dancing performance he thought they were capable of achieving.

One critic makes the sweeping comment that Debbie Reynolds “loathed” making Singin’ in the Rain because Gene worked the 19 year old so hard that her feet bled. Interestingly enough, however, Debbie Reynolds herself (who speaks several times in the documentary) never uses such extreme language. She does confess that the two hardest things she ever did in her life were childbirth and Singin’ in the Rain. And she admits that sometimes Gene made them do takes over and over (over 40 times in a row, leaping over the couch in "Good Mornin’!") until she was in tears. But she also says, in respectful and grateful tones that sound sincere, that her presence in the film business 52 years later is a credit to his amazing teaching.

Besides Reynolds, several of Gene’s leading ladies appear. These include Leslie Caron, the French teenage ballet dancer he managed to talk MGM into casting for American in Paris in 1951, and Cyd Charisse, another ballet dancer who made her Hollywood debut opposite Gene in a now-classic fantasy sequence from Singin’ in the Rain. The fact that two excellent ballet dancers found Hollywood careers through Kelly’s influence is not surprising, as Kelly sought to fuse together various genres of dance. Along with Caron, Charisse does a wonderful job of helping to contrast the dance styles of Kelly and Astaire, since she was privileged to work with both. Her comments on Astaire’s light, high-dancing elegance and Gene’s hard, lower-down-to-the-ground athletic style are born out in well-chosen clips, as well as her laughing comment that her husband always knew she’d been practicing with Kelly if she came home bruised.

Two-thirds or more of the documentary are given over to Kelly’s life and career up through the early 1950s. You could actually stop watching after the ultimate career-defining moment where Gene hung poised on the street lamp, his luminous face bathed in raindrops, and find that you’ve had a very satisfying viewing experience.

The final third can’t help but feel like something of a let-down, in that Kelly’s musical film career took a dramatic downturn following Singin' in the Rain. Partly it was the changing times. 1954’s “Brigadoon,” lovely in many respects, showed the effects of studios’ growing unwillingness to put budgets wholeheartedly into musicals. Gene had lobbied hard for the film to be shot at least partly on location, but MGM wouldn’t hear of it, giving the whole production a very "staged" look. They did let Kelly have more of his way creatively with 1956’s Invitation to the Dance, filmed in Europe, an innovative but huge critical and box-office flop. (I’m still waiting to see it...it’s very hard to find affordable or rentable copies of this film!)

Kelly continued to work throughout the next decades, often in dramatic acting roles. Those aren’t highlighted in this film, which focuses almost solely on his work in dance and choreography. A couple of minutes are given over to his work as the director of 1969’s Hello, Dolly! starring Barbra Streisand, which did not do well.

At the same time that his career began to unravel, his personal life did too, with his divorce from long-time wife Betsy Blair in 1957. He remarried Jeanne Coyne, who had been his assistant for many years and who had once been married to Kelly’s creative partner Stanley Donen. The documentary discusses his personal life in honesty but respectful tones. Betsy Blair, his first wife, comes across as remarkably loving as she speaks with such affection and understanding of Gene (whom she clearly never stopped loving) and of Donen and Coyne. Gene’s grown daughter also appears, and like her mother, speaks of her father with honesty, real affection and respect. She also shows insight into her father’s creative drive. Their contributions lend the whole proceedings a feeling of dignity and class.

It’s Very Clear...Gene’s Films Are Here to Stay

Although the final third of Anatomy of a Dancer is the saddest, I was glad it was included. It broadens the documentary into a full and very human biography, and it also raises viewer awareness that Kelly never stopped loving and promoting dance, long after he had to stop dancing himself. Fittingly, the final credits return to photo stills of the younger, athletic Kelly, and play out over the melting strains of Gershwin’s "Our Love is Here to Stay," my favorite Kelly singing number. It was a beautiful way to finish, and reminded me of how glad I am that his movies are here to stay. One can only hope that he was fully aware, before his death in 1996, of how much he had done to shape the direction of American dance on film, and that he had some inkling of how much joy he brought to so many of us who still love watching his movies even now.

~befus, 2007

Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer
directed by Robert Trachtenberg
2002

Kelly movies I’ve reviewed (so far!)...

On the Town(1949)
Take Me Out to the Ballgame(1949)

And a Kelly biography:
Gene Kelly: A Life of Dance and Dreams


Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day