Word: fred
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...oppositions abound. Fred was grace, Gene was energy. Fred was poise, Gene was power. Fred was ethereal, Gene was earthy. Fred was the Continental (he danced it too); Gene was all-American. Fred was top hat, white tie and tails, Gene was a baseball cap, T-shirt and jeans. (Can you imagine Astaire in a baseball cap? Can you imagine Kelly without one?) Fred would just materialize, a slim apparition who hardly noticed the impact he made; his attitude said, in a sidelong glance and sidewise murmur, "Ooh, is someone out there?" Gene came barreling toward you, arms outstretched...
...woman, she felt the imprint for days. Cyd Charisse, who danced with Kelly in "Singin? in the Rain" and, the next year, with Astaire in "The Band Wagon," says her husband always knew which dancer she?d been working with. "If I didn?t have a mark, it was Fred Astaire. And if I was black and blue, it was Gene Kelly." Not to say that both men didn?t work their leading ladies hard. Debbie Reynolds, co-starring with Kelly in "Singin? in the Rain," was rehearsed so relentlessly she suffered exactly the same ailment as Rogers had with...
...Their techniques were polar opposites as well. "Gene always liked to dance low," Charisse says, "and Fred always liked to dance high." Fred had an ethereal buoyancy, the ability to walk on air, and dance on it, and not make a big deal of it. Gene had gravity. His power would burrow up from the floor, through his powerful thighs, up to his strong, sloping shoulders; and he?d hit those tap steps hard, nailing them, pounding them into the floor so hard they almost left permanent depression marks in the wood. You saw the grinding work, as much...
...Fred, like his movies, was nowhere when not dancing. In his films? long dialogue scenes, the actor Astaire seemed both stiff and fluttery, feckless - not superhuman, as he did in the big numbers, but sub-par. Indeed, that?s one thing that made his dances stand out: they were so much more suavely realized than the rest of the enterprise, and Astaire came truly alive only when he was in them. Kelly, a believer in artistic integration, gave just as much attention to "the rest of the movie." He acted-danced with the same concentrated energy that he danced-acted...
...happens that Kelly and Astaire sang in movies as much as they danced. Both men showed the strain of natural dancers trying to hit the high notes in a form that didn?t automatically suit them. But Gene?s smoky tenor voice was more assured than Fred?s wispy tenor was. So why isn?t Kelly cherished as a singer? (There?s just one CD of Kelly songs, to Astaire?s dozen or so.) It could be that most of Fred?s tunes were written for him, while most of Kelly?s were oldies; and the new songs that Betty...