Happy 100th Anniversary, Gene Kelly!

Happy 100th Anniversary, Gene Kelly!

Gene Kelly (23 August 1912 - 2 February 1996)

-"I took it as it came and it happened to be very nice." -Gene Kelly on his film career

Gene Kelly’s body of work still thrives and still thrills. With films that also include 'An American in Paris', 'Summer Stock', 'On the Town' and 'Brigadoon', Kelly revived the movie musical and redefined dance on screen, bringing with him an inspired sensibility and an original vitality. His choreography and his performances were relaxed but compelling, innovative but highly accessible and, ultimately, magical. He endeared himself to audiences and had a profound, eternal impact on the craft. Among the most beloved stars of Hollywood’s golden age, Kelly’s career remains one of the most surprising.

Solely responsible for creating a new approach to film musicals as performer, as choreographer and as director Kelly’s story has never been fully told. A creative genius fueled by single-mindedness, a volatile temper and narcissism, his need for perfection was uncompromising. A lasting influence in the worlds of film and dance, his first major film success came at the age of thirty and a short ten years later, he had made his final hit film. Kelly fought to expand the concept and reach of motion picture musicals, always keenly aware that he was beginning his film career well past his prime as a dancer. By the mid-1950s, Kelly found himself at loose ends the genre he helped master now over a victim of changing musical tastes and economic restrictions. 'Gene Kelly: Anatomy of a Dancer' offers a far more incisive view of the graceful and charming, beloved entertainer than that which the world has come to know.

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in "For Me & My Gal" (1942) directed by Busby Berkeley

Ironically, Kelly was put under contract at Selznick International by Mayer’s son-in-law David O. Selznick, who had no interest in producing musicals and thought Kelly could exist purely as a dramatic actor. With no roles forthcoming, Kelly was loaned out to MGM to co-star with Judy Garland in 'For Me and My Gal'. The film was a hit and Selznick subsequently sold the actor and his contract to MGM.

Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth in "Cover Girl" (1944) directed by Charles Vidor

A series of mediocre roles followed and it was not until Kelly was loaned out to Columbia for 1944’s 'Cover Girl', with Rita Hayworth, that he became firmly established as a star.

His landmark “alter ego” sequence, in which he partnered with himself, brought film dance to a new level of special effects. With Stanley Donen as his assistant, Kelly created a sense of the psychological and integrated story telling never before seen in a Hollywood musical. Realizing what they had, MGM refused to ever loan him out again, ruining Kelly’s opportunity to star in the film versions of 'Guys and Dolls', 'Pal Joey' and even 'Sunset Boulevard'. Back with producer Arthur Freed at MGM, Kelly continued his innovative approach to material by placing himself in a cartoon environment to dance with Jerry the Mouse in 'Anchor’s Aweigh' yet another musical first.

Gene Kelly with wife Betsy Blair and daughter Kerry

During his marriage to the actress Betsy Blair, Kelly was radicalized and the couple became well known for their liberal politics. In 1947, when the Carpenters Union went on strike and the Hollywood studios were looking for an intermediary to intervene on their behalf, Kelly was chosen much to everyone’s surprise. He traveled back and forth from Culver City to union headquarters in Chicago for two months, mediating a strike that was costing the studios dearly. When a settlement was finally reached, Kelly was shocked to learn that the studios felt it was unfair and that they had been cheated by his siding with the strikers. Naively and genuinely trying to help and unaware of unstated expectations, underhanded tactics, and slush funds Kelly’s efforts only resulted in further exacerbating his relationship with Louis B. Mayer.

Gene Kelly and June Allyson as D'Artagnan and Constance in "The Three Musketeers" (1948) directed by George Sidney

Finally, Kelly and Stanley Donen were assigned their own film to co-direct 1949’s 'On the Town'. In just five days of shooting selected sequences, they opened up the genre as no one had ever done before, creating another first a musical film shot on location. Followed by his two masterworks, 'An American in Paris', with its 17-minute ballet sequence, and 'Singin’ in the Rain', Kelly achieved icon status at the age of forty. In 1951, he was awarded a special Oscar for 'An American in Paris' for his “extreme versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, but specifically for his brilliant achievement in the art of choreography.”

With Kelly’s own marriage to Betsy Blair in dissolution, both couples divorced and Kelly eventually married Jeanne Coyne in 1960. Small roles and directing jobs followed. Professional highlights included the Broadway musical “Flower Drum Song” and an original ballet he created for the Paris Opera. In the late 1950s, the television show OMNIBUS invited Kelly to create a documentary about the relationship between dance and athletics 'Dancing: A Man’s Game' is considered one of the classic treasures from television’s golden age.

Yet, the potency of Kelly’s gifts, his remarkable achievements in dance and choreography and the creativity and charisma with which he exploded in a handful of films continues to endure and to inform. Gene Kelly’s final filmed words are from 1994’s That’s Entertainment III quoting Irving Berlin, he remarked: “The song has ended, but the melody lingers on.” Source: www.pbs.org

Gene Kelly with his third wife Patricia Ward Kelly

"One of the things that Gene discussed frequently was how he wished to be remembered. It was vital to him. He realized that he was known for being up on the screen and, particularly, for an iconic moment up on a lamppost. But what he really wanted was to be known for creating that scene and many others. He had worked assiduously to create a particularly American style of dance and to change the look of dance on film. He had opted not to return to Broadway as originally planned and, instead, decided to stay in Hollywood to “lick” the use of the camera in filming dance.

Gene Kelly and Judy Garland in "The Pirate" (1948) directed by Vincente Minnelli

For him, the camera was a “one-eyed monster,” that gave the viewer no peripheral vision and reduced a three-dimensional art form—dance—to the two dimensions of cinema. He was determined to find ways to fool the eye—to make the figures appear less flat using color and light (as in the ballet in 'An American in Paris'); with the kinetic energy of large, bold movement toward the camera (the "Singin’ in the Rain" number); and in blending live action and animation (dancing with Jerry the Mouse in 'Anchors Aweigh').

Because so much of Gene's innovative work has been adapted and incorporated by contemporary directors, choreographers, cinematographers, and dancers through the years, the fact that it was so revolutionary and ahead of its time is often lost on younger generations. Gene would be very pleased to know that so much of what he contributed is being picked up and re-worked and re-envisioned by so many young people. That is what he wanted. He didn’t want people to mimic what he did; he wanted them to take the seed and go beyond. What he would appreciate this year in celebration of his centenary would be for people to acknowledge that it was he who made the original mark". © 2012 Patricia Ward Kelly Source: www.biography.com


Song: Loreen - Euphoria


I was genuinely heartened to see how much of a lasting impact Kelly had had when I watched a documentary titled "Singin' in the Rain: Raining on a New Generation," which came attached to the sixtieth anniversary DVD of "Singin'." The documentary featured interviews with current stars like actors from the TV show "Glee," film directors Rob Marshall and Adam Shankman, and others, all effusively praising "Singin' in the Rain" and its dancing and how much we still owe Kelly today.

Kristen Stewart ("On The Road" at TIFF), Kirsten Dunst & Marion Davies

Scan of Kristen Stewart and Garrett Hedlund for the film "On The Road" (2012)


Kristen Stewart - On The Road Trailer #2; Before IFC Films launches a domestic trailer, after picking up Walter Salles‘ adaptation of Jack Kerouac‘s classic novel On The Road at Cannes, an international look has been released for the drama. The film stars Garrett Hedlund, Sam Riley and Kristen Stewart, along with the supporting cast of Amy Adams, Kirsten Dunst, Viggo Mortensen, Alice Braga, Elizabeth Moss.

Kristen Stewart plays Marylou in "On The Road" (2012)

Kristen Stewart has yet to make a public appearance since news broke in late July that she cheated on boyfriend Robert Pattinson with director Rupert Sanders, but that could be changing soon! Kristen will be traveling to the Toronto International Film Festival in September to promote her latest film, On The Road. TIFF recently announced that there would be a special presentation screening of the film during the festival, with the date of the screening to be announced on August 21. A source confirms with HollywoodLife.com, “Kristen will be there.” The festival will run from Sept. 6 through 16. Source: hollywoodlife.com

Kirsten Dunst kissing Sam Riley in "On The Road" (2012) directed by Walter Salles

Kirsten Dunst plays actress Marion Davies in "The Cat's Meow" (2001) directed by Peter Bogdanovich: a semi-true story of the Hollywood murder that occurred at a star-studded gathering aboard William Randolph Hearst's yacht in 1924.

Kirsten Dunst is completely satisfying. Dunst has the maturity to play the 27-year-old Davies, and she resembles her, too. She has the right coloring, and she has a similarly sneaky-looking mouth. Most important, she captures the actress' warmth. Davies is one of those rare Hollywood figures whom absolutely everyone liked. Scour books and magazines looking for a bad word about her and you'll come up empty-handed.

Dunst helps audiences understand why. Source: www.sfgate.com

Portrait of Marion Davies in 1936. Marion was “blonde, vivacious, full of generous laughter and warmth —and like Carole Lombard— one of the most beautiful women to ever grace an elegant party or a movie set.”

Dick Powell and Marion Davies in "Hearts Divided" (1936) directed by Frank Borzage

Best known as newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst’s girlfriend, Marion Davies was "the love of his life,” in spite of the fact that he never divorced his wife, Millicent, to marry her. Instead, Hearst and Davies lived together at San Simeon, Hearst’s legendary California estate and at her 100 room beach front Santa Monica mansion, which Hearst built for Miss Davies in 1926. It was officially christened as “Ocean House,” a Georgian style structure, which boasted 37 fireplaces.

“THE CAT’S MEOW” reveals an angry and jealously outraged Hearst caught up in a “mistaken identity murder.” Allegedly, Hearst shot and killed Hollywood producer, ‘THOMAS HARPER INCE,’ thinking he was getting his revenge on screen legend ‘CHARLIE CHAPLIN,’ whom he believed to be Marion’s secret lover. According to the late ORSON WELLES, the murder took place on Hearst’s yacht, ‘THE ONEIDA’. Super star comedian and director, Charlie Chaplin was also invited on board, as he had been a friend to both Hearst and Marion ever since his first great successes five years before. However, as time passed, it became obvious to Hearst that Chaplin’s interest in Marion was more than just platonic friendship.

Soon Marion would be the bait, “The Oneida,” the trap and Hearst “the vengeful spurned lover.” But, it all fell apart. Hearst mistook Ince for Chaplin and shot him in the back of the head. Hearst columnist, LOUELLA PARSONS, was also on board “The Oneida” that night and witnessed the murder. To buy her silence, Hearst is believed to have granted her a lifetime contract with ‘Hearst Newspapers’. The official story on Ince’s death is that he died from “bleeding ulcers.” The cause of death was never investigated by the police.

Marion Davies was still denying that Thomas Ince was murdered when years later she and her husband, HORACE BROWN, retreated to their Gloucester County, Virginia estate from the “wilds of Beverly Hills.” Marion was 54 when Hearst died and the two had been together 34 years. Hearst, the owner of “The New York American” and “The San Francisco Examiner” and sixty other publications, including “Cosmopolitan” magazine, was one of the most “powerful forces in American journalism.”

ORSON WELLES parodied, emulated and infuriated Hearst in his classic 1941 motion picture, CITIZEN KANE, and Hearst did everything in his power to destroy Welles’s career and reputation—by not running advertisements for the film in the Hearst newspapers across America and the rest of the world. Hearst did “not care what Welles thought of him,” but his bitterness derived mostly from Welle’s portrayal of Marion as the “drunken-untalented” Susan Alexander, Kane’s wife, in the film. In reality, Susan Alexander, the fictional character of the picture—had nothing in common with the “extremely gifted and talented Marion Douras Davies.”

Marion Davies was “one of the most charismatic screen personalities of her generation”. Something about Marion’s “comings and goings” appeared in “glowing headlines” almost weekly—sometimes daily—in Hearst newspapers from Maine to California—a fact not lost on Orson Welles and co-writer Herman Mankiewicz, when it came time for them to write the screenplay for “Citizen Kane,” originally entitled, “American.” Marion married ‘Gloucester’s favorite native son’—Horace Brown—in Las Vegas in 1951. He was, like Hearst, instantly smitten with her. Physically, at least, Horace could have passed for Hearst, himself. He looked like Hearst when in his fifties. Friends often did a “double-take” when they saw Horace for the first time; he so strongly resembled William Randolph Hearst.

Marion captivated Horace, just as she had captivated W.R. Hearst thirty-five years earlier when Hearst first saw Marion at “The Ziegfield Follies” in New York in 1917. Hearst, like Horace Brown, fell instantly in love. Marion told Horace that when she met Hearst, “W.R. always bought two seats to see her show. One for himself. And, one for his hat.” Like Hearst before him, Horace was “obsessed with Marion.” Horace adored her. Source: www.spywise.net

Jake Gyllenhaal - End Of Watch Trailer #2

Academy Award® nominee Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña star in the action thriller End of Watch as young Los Angeles police officers Taylor and Zavala as they patrol the city's meanest streets of south central Los Angeles. The film creates a riveting portrait of the city's most dangerous corners, the cops who risk their lives there every day, and the price they and their families are forced to pay. In theaters September 21.

Dick Powell, remembered by Christopher Knopf (Zane Grey Theatre)

Actor Dick Powell - Zane Grey Theatre Press Photo

Dick Powell came in with that characteristic smile and jaunty walk, asking how things were going, just wanting to say hello. Then his arms were around Aaron’s and my shoulders. We were his boys, and anything we said we could do we could do. Ten minutes later when Powell returned to the set, Kaiser and Four Star were partners, the show on the air. The work at Four Star was constant. Not only Trackdown, but soon most of the other shows coming through in the late 1950’s. Zane Grey Theater was my favorite. For good reason.

As an anthology and with Dick Powell’s magnetism, stars were drawn to the show most other studios couldn’t attract. I’d written a script for it, Interrogation, developed specifically for Powell himself. It was a psychological drama, set in the Mexican-American war, the breaking of a heroic figure without either threat or use of torture. I was on to my favorite theme again, courage vs cowardice. I was obsessed with the theme, clearly still trying to work out things for myself. Dick refused the part and said we’d never get a star to play it.

We got Academy Award nominee Robert Ryan. “I know what you’re asking of me,” Ryan told me. “I’ll give it to you.” Powell could have buried the show out of pique. He didn’t. He took full page ads in the trades recommending it for award consideration. It won the Writers Guild Award that year for Best Written Half Hour Anthology Drama. Throughout Powell’s career he’d had unparalleled success.

He was television’s top male star, president of its leading, most productive independent production company, and a millionaire several times over. What he felt he had never had, what he wanted desperately, more than even producing or directing movies, was personal critical acclaim, not for the work of others, but for himself. This show could, and would, get it for him. Returning full time to the lot, he moved virtually all else aside to see that it did so. He was its executive producer, its soul, and nothing happened on it he didn’t know about. “If my aunt in Little Rock doesn’t understand it, it doesn’t go on my show,” he’d say. Except he couldn’t make it stick, and that is what made the two years on The Dick Powell Show among the most rewarding I experienced.

Basically Powell was a simple man, politically conservative, steeped in traditional values. And there he sat, facing impassioned, young, mostly Jewish writers, wanting to deal with confounding themes. I’ve heard that Powell never met a man he couldn’t forgive. The Dick Powell Show was into its second year, and working on it now with Stan Kallis reenergized me. The show got ratings and envy. And then we got wind of something that made none of it worthwhile. We heard Dick was sick. There were a lot of rumors as to what it was, but the one word, cancer, kept coming up. If Powell was sick, you couldn’t prove it by him.

Dick Powell and June Allyson on the cover of Hollywood Studio Magazine (November 1982)

He’d reunited with his estranged wife, June Allyson, had sailed off with her on his yacht during the summer, and now was returned. He looked great, and acted it, and fought you tooth and nail in those meetings, testing your will, yielding to it as usual if he felt your own sincere devotion to your project. He was dying. He knew it and we didn’t and he never told us nor gave us the slightest indication of it, nor a single moment’s sense that he was hiding that hideous truth, that within several months he’d be gone. And then he was. January 2, 1963.

Singer, actor, producer, director, sailor, pilot, born in Mountain View, Arkansas, he was fifty-eight years old. The pall that set over Four Star was palpable. And over me a near disaster. As for Four Star, at the time of Dick Powell’s death it had a dozen shows on the air, give or take one. Two years later it had two. A year after that just one, The Big Valley, which played on ABC for four seasons. -"Will the Real Me Please Stand Up" (2010) by Christopher Knopf

Jake Gyllenhaal and Gwyneth Paltrow - "End of Watch" Screening at Hamptons

Jake Gyllenhaal with Gwyneth Paltrow attending "End of Watch" Screening at Hamptons (East Hampton, NY), on August 19, 2012

Dick Powell ("The Words Are In My Heart")

Dick Powell video - a musical video featuring pictures of Dick Powell and his co-stars: Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley ("Murder, My Sweet"), Linda Darnell ("It happened tomorrow"), Lucille Ball ("Meet the People"), Lizabeth Scott ("Pitfall"), Evelyn Keyes, Nina Foch ("Mrs. Mike", "Johnny O'Clock"), Gloria Grahame ("The Bad & The Beautiful"), Rhonda Fleming ("Cry Danger"), Madeleine Carroll ("On The Avenue"), Ellen Drew ("Christmas in July", "Johnny O'Clock"), Debbie Reynolds ("Susan Slept Here"), Priscilla Lane, Lola Lane ("Cowboy from Brooklyn", "Varsity Saw"), Micheline Cheirel, Nina Vale ("Cornered"), Signe Hasso ("To the Ends of the Earth"), Peggy Dow "("You Never Can Tell"), Ginger Rogers ("Twenty Million Sweethearts"), Marion Davies ("Hearts Divided"), Olivia de Havilland ("Hard to Get"), Jane Greer ("Station West"), Mary Martin ("Happy Go Lucky", "Star Spangled Rhythm"), Ann Sheridan, Gale Page ("Naughty but Nice"), Ruby Keeler ("Flirtation Walk", "Dames", "Colleen"), Ann Dvorak ("Thanks A Million"), Glenda Farrell ("Golddiggers of 1937"), Patricia Ellis ("The King's Vacation"), Dorothy Lamour ("Riding High"), and his wives Joan Blondell and June Allyson.

Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler in "Footlight Parade" (1933) directed by Lloyd Bacon

Songs performed by Dick Powell: "I Can Dream, Can't I?", "Lonely Lane", "Ah The Moon Is Here", "The Words Are In My Heart", "Down Sunshine Lane" and "Beauty Must Be Loved".

Johnny O'Clock (1947) directed by Robert Rossen (Full Movie)

In her book "Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister: My Lively Life In and Out of Hollywood", co-star Evelyn Keyes wrote about her experiences on the film: "...Rossen was rewriting as we went along, handing out new pages seconds before we did almost every scene." Regarding a scene she had with supporting actor Lee J. Cobb, Keyes said that "although he was quite helpful and worked hard with me on it, he then tried to steal it from me by chewing on a cigar and noisily spitting out pieces of it over my lines." Source: www.tcm.com


Johnny O'Clock, directed by Robert Rossen in 1947

JOHNNY O’CLOCK: This erotically offbeat noir gave Dick Powell his most vividly hard-boiled role since his re-invention as tough guy Philip Marlowe three years earlier in Dmytryk’s “Murder My Sweet.” As the darkly suave proprietor of an illegal gambling den, Johnny walks a deadly tightrope between doom and redemption. A nearly forgotten gem of sizzling noir brilliance, beautifully photographed by the legendary Burnett Guffey. Also in the top-notch cast: Evelyn Keyes, Lee J. Cobb, Thomas Gomez and Ellen Drew. Written and Directed by Robert Rossen. Source: roxie.com