IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 35, Issue 887, 3 August 1956, Page 16

IT'S ALWAYS FAIR WEATHER

(M.G.M.-CinemaScope) NMOVED by the new look the American musical took on 10 or 15 years ago, many keen filmgoers stil] react to any enthusiasm for it with a letme hold you- between thumb and-fore-finger while I -look at you- cisdainfully sort of attitude. Personally, I think a good musical can be the best of screen entertainment, especially if it’s a little satirical, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and others notwithstanding, I prefer also the city setting with its rather agreeable undertone of disenchantment. It’s Always Fair Weather displays most of these qualities on the way to its inevitable end. Like On the Town, it begins with three servicemen hitting New Yorkthis time at the end of the war. Ted (Gene Kelly), Doug (Dan Dailey) and Angie (Michael Kidd) pub crawl and part, promising to meet again in 10 years. This opening has the right note: the setting has atmosphere and the dancing vigour. At the reunion the three find they haven’t much to say to one another, but a meeting with Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), who is as bitter about men as Ted is about women, involves them in a hectic evening which in one way or another changes all of them. In a musical so much depends on the treatment that this sketchy outline says little; but for a start Mr. Kelly is his usual endearing self-his meeting with Miss Charisse and his first parting is full of charm, and a roller skate ballet in the street is among the best of the dance numbers. Mr. Dailey also has one excellent solo, a drunken romp with some of his bosses in the advertising world, whose horrible jargon he parodies; and Mr. Kidd, so far known only as a choreographer (Seven Brides). makes a big impression as a most engaging actor and dancer. In the romantic lead Miss Charisse, unhappily, steps out only once in a short but original number in a boxers’ gymnasium, and, in fact, rather more dancing is Cone by another newcomer, Dolores Gray, the star of a big scene which delightfully satirises commercial television and includes the best song of the show, "Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks." The directors, Mr. Kelly and Stanley Donen (who also arranged the dances), give this the full treatment, and with an amusing ballet Miss Gray puts it across well. The film’s weakness, I think, is that it leans a little heavily on its storygood as it is when about its real business, its long passages of more or less straight narrative don’t always reflect the glow of the music and dancing. (It could be, of course, that these don’t glow quite brightly enough.) All the same, I think most peovle will find that as such films go It’s Always Fair Weather is a pretty superior production. It has, by the’ way, a special attraction for the film enthusiast in its use of the split screen and, more interestingly, a screen of variable size-both as devices to isolate a character.