Word: donenal
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...earlier film succeeds because Grant and Hepburn sparkle under Donen’s playful directing. Although he filmed in Paris alongside French New Wavers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1960s, Donen largely ignored the experimental techniques of his European colleagues and instead channeled his skills as an MGM musicals maestro into crafting a highly stylized and clever thriller scored by Henry Mancini and interlaced with a deadpan humor and snappy script. In one scene, as Grant’s character is forced atop the roof of a Parisian American Express building where he presumably will...
...video-store perennial, Robert Trachtenberg?s 85-min. bio-doc, narrated by Stanley Tucci, does a nice job of Gene-splicing: inter-cutting Kelly movie clips with comments from an unusually wide range of friends and savants. The friends (wife Betsy Blair, daughter Kerry, director Stanley Donen, actress Debbie Reynolds) are neither fawning nor vengeful. The experts (biographers Clive Hirschhorn and Stephen Silverman, critics Elvis Mitchell and Jeanine Basinger) are helpful, precise and affectionate. It turns out that even Peter Wollen, the most serious film theoretician in the English language - Lacan?s brain encased in Beckett?s skull - loves Kelly...
...Mayer was slow coming around too; Kelly didn?t become a star until he was loaned to Columbia for "Cover Girl," where he was paired with Rita Hayworth and, behind the scenes with an old Broadway pal (actually a young one, since he was 19 at the time), Stanley Donen. Off and on, mostly on, for the next decade, Kelly and Donen would shape their film?s dances, then their dances and direction. They co-directed "On the Town," "Singin? in the Rain" and "It?s Always Fair Weather." Their work together was, in Silverman?s words, "a magical combination...
...sure, on his dance numbers, Astaire supervised the camera movements - or, rather, non-movement. It sat obediently immobile, like an attentive member of the audience, cutting very rarely from long shot to medium shot. In a Kelly film (or Kelly-Donen, or Kelly-Minnelli), the camera was more than an observer in the musical drama; it was a participant, prowling and swooping to keep up with Gene, to dance with him. In film after film, Kelly and his team met the challenges of capturing dance on film. As Oretga describes it: "Putting the camera in the place where...
...Kelly had bad luck in midlife and later. Betsy left him; his second wife, Jeanne Coyne, whom he?d known since Pittsburgh (and who had previously been married to Donen), died young of leukemia; he lost his knack and clout in Hollywood; and the genre he loved disappeared. So I?d like to think that achieving the nonchalant masterpiece of "Singin? in the Rain" - a greatness that, for once in his career, never revealed whatever agony went into it - gave Kelly immediate and sustaining joy. At one of the many tributes he received late in his life, he said...