The plot of Vincente Minnelli's 1951 musical An American in Paris is on the dark side. Jerry Mulligan (Gene Kelly) is a so-so painter being sponsored by wealthy Milo Roberts (Nina Foch). Lise Bouvier (Leslie Caron, who at 19 was half Kelly's age) is engaged to Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary, in a role Maurice Chevalier turned down) because Baurel saved her family during the war. Jerry and Lise may love each other, but they can't act on it. Oscar Levant provides a few mordant chuckles as Jerry's neurotic friend (in real life, Levant was George Gershwin's neurotic friend), but the tale isn't a laugh riot.
By contrast, the music and dancing are sublime. The tunes are all by Gershwin, which was the sole condition his brother Ira set when producer Arthur Freed asked to name the film after George's 1928 mini-symphony. Executives considered it foolhardy to place the movie's tour de force - a wordless 17-minute ballet extravaganza - at the end of the movie, in a dream sequence after Jerry and Lise have parted company. But where else would a climactic number belong, a visual triumph danced against backdrops drawn from the paintings of Raoul Dufy, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and other masters?
This was the first film for Caron, a classical ballerina in France. When Kelly asked to see her, she had never heard of him, and met with him (she says on the new two-disc edition of An American in Paris) only "to be polite." Years later, when Freed asked her what movie she might like to make, she recalled Gigi, a 1944 novella by French author Colette that had been made into a non-musical French film in 1948. The subject was daring: a grandmother and great-aunt raising a young girl to be a high-class prostitute. But the success of a non-musical Broadway production of Gigi, starring an up-and-comer named Audrey Hepburn, persuaded the studio to get onside.
Cannily, Freed hired songwriters Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe and designer Cecil Beaton, who had all worked on the Broadway smash My Fair Lady. Not surprisingly, the resulting 1958 musical Gigi has strong echoes of that earlier hit: a tomboy (Caron) being turned into a lady (by Isabel Jeans and Hermione Gingold) while an older man (Louis Jourdan) hangs around, a host of glorious gowns, and a couple of songs that are spoken rather than sung. The honours go to Maurice Chevalier as the worldly wise narrator, who charms his way through I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore, Thank Heaven for Little Girls and a duet with Gingold, I Remember It Well, in which she patiently corrects his false recollections. The 50th-anniversary DVD includes the 1948 Gigi, but it's unrestored and has muddy sound.
If those classics don't sate the musical appetite, the B team stands ready: The Busby Berkeley Collection Volume 2, offering four black-and-white 1930s musicals with varying degrees of involvement by Berkeley, the master of flamboyant choreography. He directed the rousing finale of Varsity Show, with an overhead shot of hundreds of dancers forming into the insignias of American universities. Also here: Gold Diggers of 1937, Hollywood Hotel and Gold Diggers in Paris.
Moving on to a different kind of collection, Martini Movies is Sony's catch-all title for a series that includes the entertaining 1971 heist film $ (Dollars), with Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn. But it's anyone's guess what martinis and 1950s playboy-pad graphics have to do with the corruption drama The Garment Jungle (1957, a pro-union riposte to the anti-union On the Waterfront) or Peter Bogdanovich's strained comedy-drama Nickelodeon (1976, about the frantic making of silent films). Other series titles: The New Centurions (1972), Affair in Trinidad (1952) and Sidney Lumet's The Anderson Tapes (1971), with Sean Connery as an ex-con who doesn't know he is under constant surveillance while planning a hotel robbery. The bonus features have intriguing titles (How to Play the Leading Man) but are in fact bait-and-switch promos. Sony promises a later release of Our Man in Havana (with Alec Guinness) and Getting Straight (Elliott Gould, preferring tokes to martinis), so hurrah for that.
Also out this week is the masterly 1997 police-corruption drama L.A. Confidential, which starred largely unknown actors Russell Crowe and Guy Pearce alongside Kevin Spacey, Kim Basinger and James Cromwell. Director Curtis Hanson says on the new two-disc DVD that he chose Crowe and Pearce "because with unknowns the audience wouldn't know who they liked, who they didn't like, who would live, who would die." Included is a music-only track of Jerry Goldsmith's score and a surprisingly good pilot for an unrealized spinoff TV series starring Kiefer Sutherland.
And last, but not least: The Godfather (1972) looked fine on its last DVD release, and looks sharper still in The Godfather Collection: The Coppola Restoration. This five-disc set (four discs on Blu-ray) supplements Francis Ford Coppola's magnificent original film, the moodier and equally great The Godfather Part II and the flawed The Godfather Part III with all the bonus features from the earlier box set and several new ones. If you doubt The Godfather's abiding influence, consider the flurry of references to it in The Sopranos, The Simpsons, South Park, You've Got Mail and Analyze This, clips of which appear in the extras. A piece on the restoration of the original damaged negative is effectively a valentine to cinematographer Gordon Willis and the deep black tones and subtle touches he achieved. "There's only one way to print The Godfather," says film archivist Robert Harris, "and that is dark."
***
Extra! Extra!
Paul Brickman's Risky Business (1983) made a star of Tom Cruise and showed that films about teens and sexuality didn't all have to be Porky's. Cruise is left at home by his rich parents; calculating escort Rebecca De Mornay insinuates herself and her unsavoury pals into his life. Taking a day off from filming The Outsiders, Cruise turned up for his Risky Business audition sporting muscles, a tattoo, greased-back hair and a darkened tooth. Brickman suggested he return when he had lost the muscles. The 25th-anniversary DVD contains a later, decisive screen test with Cruise and De Mornay.
***
Extra! Extra! Extra!
Think of the indie road-trip romance The Go-Getter (2007) as When Ward Met Zooey. Zooey Deschanel plays the owner of a car that Lou Taylor Pucci steals to go searching for his lost half-brother. M. Ward is the film's composer. Director Martin Hynes suggested they collaborate on a song, and they went on to form the critically praised duo She & Him. The cutest bonus feature on the DVD is a game of 20 Questions Hynes plays with cast members (Judy Greer, Jena Malone) while they're driving and distracted. "Is it starchy?" "It's not starchy. I don't know." (Answer: corn.)