It's Always Fair Weather

Snapshot

It's Always Fair Weather is the last of the three musicals Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen co-directed for MGM — after On the Town (1949) and Singin' in the Rain (1952) — and by common consent the bitterest thing the Arthur Freed unit ever released. (Though this dossier's header follows the single-director convention, the film is properly a Kelly–Donen co-direction; the partnership dissolved during and after its making.) Betty Comden and Adolph Green built the screenplay around three GIs who part in 1945 swearing to meet again in ten years, and who reconvene in 1955 to find that they cordially cannot stand one another. Kelly plays Ted Riley, a fight promoter in debt to gangsters; Dan Dailey is Doug Hallerton, an advertising man drinking his way through a job he despises; Michael Kidd — the choreographer of Guys and Dolls and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, here acting — is Angie Valentine, who runs a hamburger stand in Schenectady. Cyd Charisse and Dolores Gray supply the women, and the plot's engine turns out to be television: a live human-interest program hijacks the reunion for content.

The result is a musical about disappointment, staged in CinemaScope by men who understood better than almost anyone how to make the form sing. It failed commercially, and its reputation has climbed steadily ever since.

Industry & production

The film emerged from the Freed unit at a moment of visible contraction. Comden and Green's first impulse, widely reported in accounts of the production, was a direct sequel to On the Town, returning to the three sailors a decade later; the original trio of Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin could not be reassembled, and the conceit was rebuilt around three soldiers and three new actors. What survived the transposition was the structural rhyme — an all-day New York picture, a triangle of male friendship, Comden and Green's rat-a-tat vernacular — and what changed was the temperature. On the Town's twenty-four hours are a gift; Fair Weather's are a reckoning.

Casting reflected both economy and Broadway raiding. Dan Dailey came from Fox's musical stock company; Dolores Gray was a stage star with a large, brassy instrument; Michael Kidd was hired to dance and act, an unusual promotion for a choreographer. Kidd's featured solo, generally identified in production histories as "Jack and the Space Giants," was cut before release — one of several excisions that thinned the film's middle and left Kidd underused in a role built for him.

Behind the camera the atmosphere was poor. Kelly and Donen, by their own later accounts and those of collaborators, were barely on speaking terms by the end of shooting, dividing sequences between them rather than working in the genuinely fused manner of Singin' in the Rain. It was their final collaboration. The picture also arrived as MGM's musical economics were failing: it did not recoup, and while precise ledger figures circulate in the literature, the safe and uncontested statement is that it was a financial disappointment for the studio at a moment when such disappointments were becoming decisive. Freed's unit had perhaps four significant years left.

Technology

Fair Weather is a CinemaScope film, shot on Eastman color negative and released under MGM's Metrocolor label, with stereophonic magnetic sound in equipped theatres. That combination is not incidental — it is arguably the film's subject in disguise. CinemaScope existed because television did, and this is a musical whose villain is a television program.

The anamorphic frame posed real problems for dance. Its width invited horizontal, friezelike staging — the "clothesline" arrangement that afflicted much early 'Scope — while its shallow depth of field and the lens's edge distortion penalized the deep, diagonal, camera-forward choreography Kelly had spent a decade perfecting. Kelly was on record as skeptical of the format. Fair Weather's response is the most inventive of the period: rather than fight the width, the filmmakers partition it, splitting the single anamorphic frame into two or three panels so that separate spaces and separate consciousnesses coexist across it. The device is used structurally, not as a gag, and it makes the technology legible as meaning — three men in one frame who cannot occupy one room.

Production was largely studio-bound, on soundstages and the MGM backlot's New York street, which is a pointed reversal of On the Town's celebrated location shooting. Where the earlier film had gone out into the real city, this one rebuilds Manhattan as a set, and the artificiality reads — whether by design or by budget — as part of the film's account of a New York that no longer exists for these men.

Technique

Cinematography

Robert Bronner photographed the film in a high-key MGM register that sits in productive tension with the material: the color is candy-bright, the lighting flattering, the world unhappy. The most discussed images are the split-frame compositions — the returning soldiers' farewell rendered as a triptych, and above all the reunion luncheon, where each man's private dismay is sung as a simultaneous interior monologue ("Why Are We Here?", carried on "The Blue Danube") with the three panels running at once. The joke and the wound land together: the widest frame Hollywood had yet built, used to show three men in solitary confinement.

Elsewhere Bronner and the directors favor sustained takes that let bodies do the work. Kelly's roller-skate solo, "I Like Myself," is staged along a street in long, mobile takes, the camera retreating before him; the pleasure is in the continuity, the visible absence of cutting to disguise effort.

Editing

Adrienne Fazan — who had cut An American in Paris and Singin' in the Rain — is credited, and her practice here is the Freed-unit orthodoxy: let a number play, cut on musical logic rather than shot-count. The split-screen passages required optical and matte work rather than cutting, effectively relocating montage from the timeline into the frame itself. The dramatic scenes, by contrast, are more conventionally assembled, and the film's known excisions (Kidd's solo among them) leave some connective tissue frayed — a common complaint in the picture's critical literature and a fair one.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The choreography is credited to Kelly and Donen, with Kidd on screen as a performer, and its governing idea is the found prop. The 1945 prologue's carousal sends the three men down a dawn street with garbage-can lids strapped to their feet, turning municipal refuse into tap shoes — a gag with a long vaudeville lineage that Kidd, Kelly and Dailey execute as a genuine ensemble trio, the last moment in the film when the three move as one body. Charisse's "Baby You Knock Me Out" colonizes a boxing gym, setting a ballerina among fighters and making the bag-work and skipping rope into rhythm section. Dailey's "Situation-Wise" is staged as a drunken collapse at an advertising cocktail party, the corporate jargon of the lyric enacted as physical disintegration. Gray's "Thanks a Lot But No Thanks" arranges tuxedoed suitors for comic dispatch, in the mode of the mid-fifties star-and-chorus showcase.

Cedric Gibbons — in the last stretch of his long tenure as MGM's supervising art director — and Arthur Lonergan are credited with the design, and the sets favor a slightly abstracted, poster-flat New York that suits the split-screen work.

Sound

The film uses standard studio playback practice: numbers pre-recorded, performed to playback on set. Charisse's singing voice is dubbed, as was routine in her MGM career. The stereophonic mix, where exhibited, spread dialogue and orchestra across the front channels — a directional capability the split-screen sequences exploit implicitly, since sound could locate a voice in its panel. Diegetically, the climactic television broadcast introduces a second, degraded sound world — announcer patter, applause, sponsor copy — against which the orchestral score sounds like memory.

Performance

Kelly, in his early forties, plays a man who has stopped being charming and knows it; the performance is more guarded and less solar than his earlier work, and it is arguably his most interesting straight acting in a musical. Dailey has the film's most exposed role and takes it seriously — "Situation-Wise" is played for laughs but scored for humiliation. Kidd, not a trained actor, is warm and unpolished, and the cutting of his solo robs the performance of its intended payoff. Charisse is used more as dramatic partner than as the abstract erotic figure of The Band Wagon, and Dolores Gray, in the sharpest comic performance, plays television's smiling front as pure predation.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The structure is a prologue-and-return: a 1945 celebration, a ten-year ellipsis, and a present-tense day in 1955 that runs roughly in real time toward the evening broadcast. This is a musical built on the comedy of reunion — the form of The Big Chill and its many descendants — but Comden and Green refuse the genre's usual consolation, which is that the old feeling is still there under the disappointment. Here it isn't, or not at first; the men's estrangement is presented as accurate rather than as a misunderstanding to be dissolved.

The dramatic mode is closer to satirical comedy than to romantic musical comedy. Its antagonist is not a rival suitor but an industry, and its crisis is public exposure rather than private misunderstanding. The reconciliation, when it comes, is earned by a brawl on live television — the men defending each other in front of a national audience — which is both a genuine catharsis and a joke about what it now takes to make American men feel something in unison.

Genre & cycle

The film belongs to the late integrated musical, the Freed unit's house form, and to the smaller cycle of self-critical musicals that includes The Band Wagon (1953) and, differently, A Star Is Born (1954): musicals about the difficulty of making musicals, or about performance as a survival strategy. It also belongs to the mid-fifties cycle of anti-advertising, anti-conformity entertainment that runs alongside Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955) and William Whyte's The Organization Man (1956), and to the postwar-veteran narrative descending from The Best Years of Our Lives (1946).

Its title is lifted from the old drinking-song refrain — "it's always fair weather when good fellows get together," from Richard Hovey's much-anthologized stein song — and the irony is the whole thesis.

Authorship & method

The Kelly–Donen partnership was already a genuine co-authorship rather than a division of labor, with Kelly driving choreography and performance and Donen increasingly the more inventive image-maker; here, with the two men estranged, the seams sometimes show, and the film reads as two temperaments — Kelly's sentimental toughness, Donen's cooler wit — pulling in different directions. That may account for some of its fascination.

Comden and Green wrote both screenplay and lyrics, and Fair Weather is the most acid script of their MGM career: the advertising jargon of "Situation-Wise" is a genuine piece of period satire, and the television material is written from inside the entertainment business's fear of it. André Previn composed the score and supplied the music for the songs — a significant assignment for a young musician who would go on to a major career in film and concert music, and one that distinguishes the film from the Freed unit's catalog pictures built out of pre-existing standards. Robert Bronner's photography, Adrienne Fazan's cutting and Cedric Gibbons's art direction complete a crew drawn almost entirely from the MGM machine's last generation. Contemporary accounts credit the picture with Academy Award nominations for its original story and screenplay and for its musical scoring; it won neither.

Movement / national cinema

This is late-classical Hollywood at the point of self-awareness — a studio product, made inside the vertically integrated system's final phase, that is explicitly about the collapse of the culture that produced it. The film has no avant-garde affiliation, but its frame-partitioning anticipates devices that European and American modernists would take up in the sixties, and its stature was raised considerably by French criticism, where Donen was championed as an auteur well before Anglo-American critics came around.

Era / period

1955 is a hinge year: Oklahoma! in Todd-AO, Guys and Dolls, Love Me or Leave Me, and rock and roll arriving in Blackboard Jungle. Television penetration was climbing steeply, the Paramount consent decrees had severed the studios from their theatres, and the musical's audience was fragmenting. Fair Weather registers all of this directly — its plot is literally about a movie-scale reunion being consumed by a television program — which is why it now reads as one of the most historically legible films of its year, and why it may have been unwelcome at the time. Audiences seeking the euphoria of Singin' in the Rain were handed a diagnosis instead.

Themes

Disillusion and the failure of the postwar promise; male friendship as something that requires maintenance and does not survive neglect; work as compromise, with advertising standing for all salaried self-betrayal; television and mass media as machines that manufacture sincerity and sell it back; the gap between the self one intended and the self one became. Against these, the film sets a modest counter-thesis — that self-respect is recoverable, sung without irony in "I Like Myself," a number in which a man on roller skates persuades himself he is worth something. The film's final position is not that the ten years were reversible but that the friendship can be chosen again, deliberately, by adults who now know exactly what each other is.

Reception, canon & influence

Contemporary reception was mixed and commercially poor. The film's tonal sourness was widely noted; reviewers who wanted another Kelly–Donen romp found the reunion unpleasant, and MGM's marketing could not resolve the contradiction between a jubilant title and a picture about wasted lives. The specifics of individual 1955 notices vary in the surviving record, and it is more accurate to say the film was received with puzzlement than with hostility.

Backward. The film draws on On the Town (structure, personnel, the day-in-New-York conceit), on the returning-veteran drama of The Best Years of Our Lives, on the backstage self-criticism of The Band Wagon, and on the vaudeville tradition of prop-dancing that produces the garbage-lid routine. Its satire is continuous with the postwar sociology of conformity, and its television material with Hollywood's institutional anxiety about the medium.

Forward. Its reappraisal began in earnest in the 1960s and 1970s, accelerated by auteurist criticism of Donen and by the nostalgia wave around That's Entertainment! (1974), and it is now routinely cited as the darkest and most modern of the classic MGM musicals. Three lines of influence are commonly drawn, and each is defensible. First, the split-screen: the film is one of the earliest sophisticated uses of intra-frame partition in widescreen narrative cinema, a device that became a signature of the late 1960s (Grand Prix, The Thomas Crown Affair, Woodstock) and has never left. Second, the media satire: its portrait of a live human-interest show as an instrument of exploitation belongs on the same shelf as A Face in the Crowd (1957) and, further downstream, Network (1976). Third, the reunion-of-disappointed-friends narrative, which The Big Chill (1983) and its progeny formalized into a genre of their own.

Within the musical, its most direct heir is Jacques Demy, whose Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967) explicitly summons the Kelly–Donen tradition — and Kelly himself — while retaining the melancholy; through Demy, the line reaches Scorsese's deliberately unhappy New York, New York (1977) and, later, the bittersweet-ending musicals of the 2010s. It's Always Fair Weather is the point at which the American musical first admitted, in its own idiom and at full budget, that the good fellows might not get together again.