A classic I hadn’t seen, except for the eponymous song-and-dance number.
Such a beloved, honored movie—and I had trouble liking it very much. It seems to me that one can see the actors acting. That the joke of the silent movie star’s voice being too low-class is laid on too thick, and that her character is too cartoony, too broad—just as Debbie Reynold’s ingénue is too innocent and unassuming. In other words, the movie isn’t too complimentary to our intelligence, a feature of some ‘50’s movies. Gene Kelly—I know this is my limitation, not his—always seems to me to be more of an athlete than a dancer, and one who is dancing because he can, as if it’s his day job. As if he has to hold urgently on to his identity as a full-blooded male. Compare Astaire, whose skinniness, relative femininity, and his resembling a magical sprite of some kind he doesn’t try to escape, with the result that his lightness on his feet allows him to escape gravity, metaphorically speaking. The movie does at times have “what could possibly happen next?” quality, and adventurousness (that ballet sequence) that gives it at times an odd but admirable non-linearity of approach.
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