Cinema
An American in Paris
Vincente Minnelli · 1951
Synopsis
Paris, after the war. Jerry Mulligan, a former American soldier who stayed on, paints unsuccessfully in a garret on the Left Bank; his neighbour Adam Cook is a disillusioned American pianist. Milo Roberts, a wealthy American woman, buys two canvases from him on the pavement, offers him a studio and plans an exhibition. That same evening, in a Montparnasse club, he falls in love with Lise Bouvier, a perfume shop assistant, without knowing that she is engaged to Henri Baurel, a music-hall singer and friend of Adam, who took her under his protection when her parents were killed during the war.
Context
The seventeen-minute final ballet cost about half a million dollars, and the studio management hesitated to keep it. Each part borrows the manner of a painter linked to Paris, from Dufy, Renoir and Utrillo to Rousseau, Van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec, and some thirty painters worked for six weeks on the backdrops. The music is by a composer who had died fourteen years earlier, whose lyricist brother, Ira, was still alive.
Who it is for
A musical whose final section, a long ballet without words, can be watched independently of the rest.
Prizes and reception
Six Oscars at the ceremony of 20 March 1952, including Best Picture; it was released in France in the summer of 1952.
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