It's Always Fair Weather · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Three soldiers come down a dawn street in 1945 with garbage-can lids strapped to their feet. Municipal refuse turned into tap shoes. Kelly, Dailey and Kidd hit the pavement in unison, and for the length of the number the street belongs to them. Hold onto that shot. It is the last time in the picture the three of them move as one body.

Ten years on they keep the promise, meet for lunch, and cordially cannot stand each other. Here Donen and Kelly do the least likely thing with the widest frame Hollywood had yet built: they partition it. Two panels, three panels, each man sealed in his own, each singing his private dismay at the same time while “The Blue Danube” carries all of it. CinemaScope existed because television existed. This is a musical whose villain is a television show, using the anti-television format to stage three men in solitary confinement. The joke and the wound arrive together.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image, a person perceives a situation and acts, and the acting changes the situation; the cutting exists to keep that circuit closed. The musical is the purest version of it ever built. A man is unhappy, so he sings, and the street becomes his. Deleuze gave that its own name: the movement of world. The dancer stops being the one who moves and becomes the one who is moved, the world picking up the motion and handing it back. That is what happens when the lids go on. It is what happens in “I Like Myself,” where Kelly rolls down a street on skates in long unbroken takes, the camera retreating ahead of him, nothing cut away to disguise the effort. The numbers in this film are machines for transforming a world, and they work perfectly.

Everywhere between the numbers, the machine is dead. That is the concept Fair Weather exemplifies with almost diagrammatic clarity: the crisis of the action-image, the postwar moment when characters can still perceive their situation and can no longer do anything adequate about it. Deleuze usually tells that story through Italian neorealism, through people who walk and look and cannot act. This is the same break arriving inside the Freed unit, in Metrocolor, with an orchestra.

He listed the symptoms, and the film has them. A dispersive situation: several protagonists, weakly linked, no longer converging on one action. Ted in debt to gangsters and no longer charming, Doug drinking through a job he despises, Angie behind a hamburger counter in Schenectady, and a structure that is really their failure to cohere. (The excised Kidd solo leaves the middle frayed. An accident, but it reads as the thing itself.) A balade, the trip that transforms nothing: On the Town gave three sailors twenty-four hours in New York as a gift, and Fair Weather gives three soldiers a day in New York as a reckoning, shot on the MGM backlot rather than on location, so the city is a poster-flat memory of a city that is no longer available to them. And consciousness of clichés: a live human-interest program hijacks the reunion for content, Dolores Gray plays television's smiling front as pure predation, and Dailey's “Situation-Wise” is an advertising man drowning in his own jargon, the lyric's corporate boilerplate enacted as physical collapse at a cocktail party. Deleuze has a word for a body like that. The gest: a posture that makes a social relation visible without anyone stating it. Dailey going down in front of his colleagues is the entire white-collar bargain, performed.

Now back to the panels, because that is the invention.

For Deleuze the frame is a closed set, and montage is what rescues it: cutting relates the closed set to the Open, the larger whole that keeps changing. Fair Weather refuses the rescue. It moves montage off the timeline and into the frame, using mattes and optical work instead of cuts, so the relating never happens. Space is severed into affective fragments that sit next to each other without opening onto each other. What you get is an image you read across rather than follow through, a lectosign: it asks to be scanned and compared, not entered.

Set that against Bazin. His case for deep focus in the Wyler–Toland films was that holding several fates in one unbroken composition leaves the ambiguity of the real intact and lets you choose where to look. Fair Weather inherits the situation from The Best Years of Our Lives directly: returning servicemen, diverging fortunes, held in a single frame. It converts depth into width and then draws lines through it. Same refusal to cut, opposite result. Bazin's continuous world becomes three cells with the wall left in.

The technique has a father inside Kelly's own filmography. In Cover Girl he danced against a matted double of himself in one continuous frame, and won the argument. Fair Weather takes the matte and gives it to three men who each lose. Singin' in the Rain supplied the found-prop solo, umbrella and lamppost and puddle, that becomes the garbage lids, and supplied the plot too: a studio picture about a rival medium arriving to kill it, sound there, television here, both cut by Adrienne Fazan to a music-first rhythm. The Band Wagon lent two things, Kidd's penny-arcade shoeshine number, which taught street furniture how to be a partner, and Comden and Green's backstage sourness about the aging performer, which licensed a franker admission of failure. And Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Donen's previous Scope picture with Kidd, is where the two of them learned to drive athletic, tool-wielding bodies across the full lateral span of the wide frame. The skates and the trash lids are the barn-raising's answer to a spatial problem that had no other solution.

What it did to the form was not rewarded. Musicals had been self-critical before; this one broke the contract. The genre's founding promise is that feeling discharges into motion and motion changes your life. Fair Weather keeps the first half, cancels the second, and marks the cancellation formally, by putting the number's world-making power inside a panel that cannot reach the panel beside it. These men can transform a street. They cannot transform ten years. The picture lost money, ended the Kelly–Donen partnership, and arrived when the Freed unit had maybe four significant years left. Its reputation has climbed ever since, which is what tends to happen to a film that tells its audience something they were not ready to hear about the thing they came to enjoy. The divided wide frame, used structurally rather than as a gag, went on to become ordinary equipment.

Watch it again for the frame lines. Notice how seldom the three of them are permitted an undivided image, and what it costs each time they get one. Then decide about the ending, when they reconcile. Is that a cure? Or is it one more number, the last thing this form knows how to do, performed by men who have just found out it doesn't work off-stage?