Gene Kelly: A Celebration - gebunden oder broschiert

Gene Kelly was the man who dragged Hollywood musicals into the second half of the twentieth century. If the first was represented by Fred and Ginger in top hat, white tie and tails, then the second was Gene splashing through the puddles of Singin' in the Rain. Kelly was the man who taught the mouse to dance in Anchors Aweigh and helped the French kids to sing Gershwin for An American in Paris; he was the man who danced his way from the Brooklyn docks to the top of the Empire State Building in On the 1'own; he was the man who clattered his way down the street attached to a dustbin-lid for It's Always Fair Weather. Kelly took dancing out of the ballrooms and boudoirs of the 1930s and set it alive on the streets of downtown Manhattan: as befitted the original Pal Joey, he brought a gritty kind of realism to what had always been a fantasy, and above all he liberated dance and dancers on screen at just the postwar moment when the American cinema itself was first corning to grips with the new filmgoers. It was Kelly of whom Fred Astaire said "he's just the best," Kelly whose influential Invitation to the Dance first brought popular ballet to the wide screen, and Kelly, who first understood that if the film musical was to survive in a tougher, more cynical climate after the war then it would have to have conviction, durability and universality. He was at the heart of the best of the genre. He was also of course an actor, choreographer and director, but it is as the first modern screen dancer that Kelly, the boy from the Irish streets of Pittsburgh, will always be remembered. In this lavishly illustrated critical celebration, the critics and biographers Sheridan Morley and Ruth Leon look back at a remarkable and influential career on both sides of the camera.