Welcome to the movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1951 MGM Studios musical, An American in Paris.

It was directed by Vincente Minnelli from an original screenplay by Broadway librettist and lyricist, Alan Jay Lerner.

The inspiration for the movie was George Gershwin's 1928 composition of the same name, and Gershwin's music provides the film's score.

An American in Paris stars Gene Kelly, who also choreographed the dance numbers, and Leslie Caron in her film debut.

The other feature players are Oscar Levant, French cabaret artist, Georges Guétary, and Nina Foch.

Jerry Mulligan is a veteran of the Second World War who decided to stay in France after the Allied victory and make a living as an artist selling paintings to tourists.

His best friend Adam Cook, who lives in the same apartment building, is a concert pianist who has yet to give a concert.

Adam is also friends with an older cabaret singer, Henri Baurel.

One morning Henri tells Adam about his fiance, Lise Bouvier, the young woman who became his ward while her parents worked for the resistance during the war.

Jerry briefly joins his two friends, before heading out to Montmartre, where he hopes to sell some of his work.

There, he attracts the attention of Milo Roberts, a wealthy woman who collects both art and artists.

She offers to buy two paintings and invites Jerry to her apartment to receive payment.

She also invites him to a party at the apartment that evening.

Jerry shows up, only to discover that Milo and he are the only guests, and he tells her he isn't interested in that sort of arrangement.

But Milo insists she is interested only in promoting Jerry's paintings through her many connections in the art world.

When Milo and Jerry later go to a nightclub to meet some of her friends, Jerry is smitten by a young woman sitting at a nearby table.

He pretends to know her, and even gets her to dance with him, but she puts him off.

Although Milo expresses her displeasure, Jerry continues to pursue this young woman, who finally agrees to go out with him.

They soon begin seeing each other regularly in the evenings.

What Jerry doesn't know, is the girl he's pursuing is his friend Henri Baurel's fiance, Lise Bouvier.

Even as she and Jerry begin to fall in love with each other.

An American in Paris began as a musical creation of composer and pianist, George Gershwin.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, on September 26th, 1898, Gershwin began playing piano at age 10.

At 15, he left school to become a Tin Pan Alley song plugger, performing songs in stores to help sell sheet music.

He soon began writing his own music, often with lyrics provided by his older brother, Ira, and within a few years, was writing music for Broadway.

His first major work for piano and orchestra, Rhapsody in Blue, premiered in 1924.

Four years later, he wrote the jazz inspired, An American in Paris, a tone poem for orchestra, after a visit to Paris during what the French called the "Années Folles", the "Mad Years", and Americans call the "Roaring Twenties".

An American in Paris is an example of program music, that is, it is written in such a way as to suggest a particular narrative.

Think of Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer's Apprentice, or Ferde Grofé's Grand Canyon Suite.

Gershwin later said, "My purpose here is to portray the impressions of an American visitor in Paris as he strolls about the city, listens to the various street noises, and absorbs the French atmosphere".

Gershwin included saxophones, celesta, and even four Parisian taxi-horns among the instruments that performed the piece.

As is often the case with program music, it is almost impossible for someone to listen to Gershwin's An American in Paris without it creating clear ideas and images in their mind.

This seems to have been the case with producer Arthur Freed, who ran the legendary Freed Unit that was responsible for most of the best known musicals produced by MGM Studios during the forties and fifties.

Freed approached Ira Gershwin to buy the rights to an American in Paris in 1948, since George Gershwin had died in 1937, but Ira would only sell the rights on condition that the resulting motion picture would feature only Gershwin numbers as its other songs.

Arthur Freed and Ira Gershwin made a deal during their weekly pool game, MGM would buy the rights, and Ira would write whatever new lyrics might be needed for the other Gershwin songs the film used.

The resulting movie is a delight for fans of both George Gershwin's unique music, and Ira Gershwin's clever lyrics.

It was the job of Alan Jay Lerner, a veteran Broadway librettist and lyricist, to turn George Gershwin's An American in Paris into a motion picture screenplay.

Lerner began with essentially a single idea.

His story had to be about an American in Paris.

Since Arthur Freed was a connoisseur of French impressionist art, Lerner made his hero an artist, and since the film was a musical, his friends were musicians.

The story involved the difficulties facing a young couple who meet and fall in love.

Lerner was particularly adept at dealing with the story's sexual themes, the sort of thing usually prohibited by the motion picture production code in force at the time.

What is keeping Jerry Mulligan and Lise Bouvier apart in the film, is each one's entanglement with a benefactor who's also a romantic partner.

Jerry is dependent on Milo's wealth and influence in the art world, while Lise is bound by gratitude and necessity to Henri, the man who took her in and protected her when she was a young girl.

Both Jerry and Lise are kept people, who cannot commit to each other because of the financial dependence on their benefactors.

Lerner's screenplay makes this clear without making the problem explicit.

Lerner began writing in December, 1949, and finished in a single 12 hour session on the night before his wedding to actress, Mary Olson, the third of his eight wives in March, 1950.

The film has two dream sequences played out to George Gershwin's music.

Adam Cook's dream of a concert, and Jerry Mulligan's dream of a romance in a highly stylized city of light.

In the first, Oscar Levant performs the Third Movement, Allegro Agitato, from George Gershwin's Piano Concerto in F Major.

In fact, he performs, and performs, and performs.

In an apparent tribute to Buster Keaton's concert in The Playhouse in 1921, in which Keaton was literally the whole show.

In Adam Cook's dream, he plays every role from concert pianist to conductor, to every member of the orchestra, as well as every member of the audience.

The 17 minute Dream Ballet to the music of An American in Paris at the end of the movie was not fully worked out until halfway through production, when Alan Jay Lerner sketched it out in three days.

Since the piece was written during the "Années Folles" of the twenties, Jerry's dream is of an iconic Paris of the past, complete with scenes inspired by the work of the impressionists.

The sets and costumes reference painters Raoul Dufy, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Maurice Utrillo, Henri Rousseau, and Henri Toulouse-Lautrec.

Vincente Minnelli and Gene Kelly wrote, in a memo to Arthur Freed, "The decor of the ballet will be its most distinguishing feature as to uniqueness and originality, for each individual scene will be done in the styles of different painters.

The ballets visually should reflect an artist's viewpoint, and both the scenery and the costumes should be done as they painted.

In essence, the entire ballet is a representation of a painter thinking about Paris."

MGM studio executives were initially reluctant to film and include the sequence in the movie, both because of its half-million dollar cost, and because any sort of ballet was believed to be box office poison.

But Arthur Freed appealed to L.B.

Mayer, a longtime studio head who was about to retire from MGM.

With his support, and incoming studio head Dore Schary's approval, the climactic Dream Ballet was included.

An American in Paris was a critical and popular success.

The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, and won six, as well as an honorary award for Gene Kelly for his accomplishments as an actor, singer, dancer, choreographer, and director.

An American in Paris was the third musical to win Best Picture, and only the second color motion picture to win the award, following MGM's Gone With The Wind in 1939.

Although later critics consider An American in Paris, a lesser film than two of its competitors for Best Picture, A Place in the Sun, and A Streetcar Named Desire, it is still considered a classic of its kind, ranking ninth in the American Film Institute's list of greatest movie musicals.

As a critic for the trade paper, Harrison's Report, wrote at the time of the movie's release, "An American in Paris is an excellent entertainment, a delight to the eye and ear, presented in a way that will give all types of audiences extreme pleasure."

Please join us again next time for another movie.

I'm Glenn Holland, goodnight.