MGM’s Stairway to Paradise

In the coming years, the talent roster put forth by MGM would balloon until it was almost laughably daunting. In addition to Garland and Minnelli, who first met on Meet Me in St. Louis and married soon thereafter, there were stars such as Gene Kelly, Cyd Charisse, Frank Sinatra, Lena Horne, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Leslie Caron; choreographers Robert Alton and Charles Walters; costume designer Irene Sharaff; vocal coach Kay Thompson; and screenwriter-lyricists Betty Comden and Adolph Green, who would also become two of the genre’s most influential screenwriters. It was a murderers’ row, and the output of the so-called Freed Unit only grew more daring and accomplished throughout the forties and into the early fifties, the era that constituted its creative peak. So aesthetically influential were these films that even those MGM musicals that weren’t Freed Unit products—such as the exceedingly delightful Debbie Reynolds vehicles I Love Melvin and Give a Girl a Break, both from 1953, after Dore Schary had taken over the studio from Mayer—seemed to contain their distinct tone, color, and wit, a testament to the notion, widely presumed then and still contested by some today, of studio as auteur. Give a Girl a Break especially offers up a bevy of uncommon pleasures, tapping into the pure, raw talent of choreographers Marge and Gower Champion and a young, nimble Bob Fosse, all of them appearing in rare starring roles.

Though the MGM musical offered its fair dose of melancholy—what would Meet in St. Louis or An American in Paris (1951) or Brigadoon (1954) be without the threat of failure and loss that looms over them?—it was all the better to accentuate the light bursting through the darkness. These films could have seemingly slight premises—three sailors on leave look for love in New York City; an American painter living on the G.I. Bill tries to make it in Paris; three up-and-coming stage talents vie for the same Broadway role—but they were never fluffy. This was by sheer force of the megawatt talent and charisma on-screen, but also because of the movies’ sophisticated self-reflexivity. The MGM musical dove, with full-body somersaults, into its own movieness. Entertainments like An American in Paris, The Pirate (1948), Summer Stock (1950), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Band Wagon (1953),and It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) were not just works of art—they were about art, centering on artists and performers; they foregrounded, with a mix of earnestness and reassuring self-deflation, the stoutheartedness it takes to put on a show, or to finish that canvas, or—in the case of the scene-for-scene jaw-dropper Singin’ in the Rain—to get that movie musical made, at whatever cost. Furthermore, these were films that tapped into the thrill of live performance without ever having to show any fidelity to reality. With performers like Garland, Kelly, O’Connor, and Charisse, one didn’t necessarily need complexly layered plots or even visual ingenuity, but with writers like Comden and Green and directors like Minnelli and Stanley Donen and Kelly himself—and with Technicolor processing and sound recording more advanced than in previous decades—MGM musicals didn’t often rest on their performers’ laurels.

Remember that bright, sunshiny day you woke up in bed next to your long-unrequited crush, proceeded to win the lottery, and had pancakes for dinner, chased by the most delicious hot fudge sundae of your life? That day didn’t have much on the joy of watching an MGM musical. Describing the infectiousness of the experience is difficult, perhaps impossible, but one way of getting at its otherworldly delight is to just take a look at the wide-open expression on Gene Kelly’s face when he’s performing. Whether swashbuckling for Garland’s devotion amid the self-aware theatrics of Minnelli’s The Pirate; silently romancing Caron within the dream ballet of An American in Paris, Minnelli’s elaborate homage to French painting; roller-skating on a crowded New York City street to the unabashedly egocentric “I Like Myself” in It’s Always Fair Weather; or, of course, joyously tapping his wet feet in spite of a rainstorm—and an alleged head cold—in Singin’ in the Rain, Kelly is the poster boy for the musical’s ability to smile, and make you smile, despite all challenges, to make you forget the limits and shackles of reality, not to mention the grueling effort it takes for such athleticism to seem so effortless.

Effortlessness was, of course, the name of the game for an industry that wanted to produce films whose seamless perfection made one forget about the well-oiled machine that created them. In the most basic description, the goal of the Hollywood movie is to appeal to consumers as easily as a perfectly made car right off the assembly line, and at no point in history was this truer than in the forties and fifties, but the MGM musical also was slyly pulling back the curtain a bit. These were not just images of all-American normality but movies that called attention to the impossibility of that normality: the inherent dual nature of these rosy-cheeked, white, middle-class people—they speak and they sing, they walk and they dance—reveals that all the world’s quite literally a stage.

Poignantly underlining the gap between the real and fantasy worlds is the historical fact that so many of the craftspeople and below-the-liners working on MGM musicals were openly gay. Writes queer theorist Matthew Tinkcom, “Especially in the Freed Unit, there was a kind of laissez-faire attitude toward there being queer employees. The Freed Unit was, in fact, a kind of place where queer talent could flourish.” It was a department that functioned as its own little world, not unlike the ideal of the movie musical itself, where everyday standards of masculinity don’t apply. Thanks to such artists as Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor—not to mention Fred Astaire, who would appear in such Freed musicals as The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) and The Band Wagon later in his career—physical delicacy could become an aspect of manhood, not its antithesis.

Gender somehow feels less fixed in MGM musicals than in other movies of the period, and not just because the men are less straitjacketed by “real” codes of masculinity. In many of these films, there is a pronounced tweaking of gender roles despite the movies’ reliance on boy-meets-girl frameworks: George Sidney’s pseudowestern The Harvey Girls (1946), starring Garland and Angela Lansbury, and with a story by Eleanore Griffin and William Rankin, mythologizes the Old West by focusing on female labor and camaraderie; The Pirate, with Garland and a short-shorts-flaunting Kelly, is a homoerotic buffet that explicitly pivots on female desire; Donen and Kelly’s On the Town (1949), which features Kelly, Sinatra, and Jules Munshin as randy sailors, redefines postwar masculinity by connecting it to balletic grace; and Donen’s wildly energetic Pacific Northwest backwoods romp Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) locates in its farcical tale of multiple marriage a heteronormativity so extreme it practically becomes parody.

Nowhere in the MGM musicals catalog do the marginalized become more central than in Freed and Minnelli’s first collaboration, 1943’s black-and-white Cabin in the Sky. In a break from the white, middle-class dreamworlds of most of these films, Cabin features an entirely African American cast in a spiritual melodrama of marriage, redemption, and the afterlife. Spry, raucous, and enrapturing, Cabin in the Sky is a rare big-studio showcase for talent otherwise largely invisible. At the same time, it’s also a reminder that not everyone got to equally partake of Hollywood’s bedazzling riches. Amid an astonishing cast headlined by Ethel Waters and Eddie “Rochester” Anderson and also featuring none other than Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, Lena Horne makes a dazzling impression as temptress Georgia Brown; it would be the only major Hollywood role for the former Cotton Club singer before her career was notoriously cut short by the dictates of a racist industry. Cabin in the Sky is full of such talent: that Horne, Waters, and Anderson didn’t end up making film after film for the studio, as Garland, Kelly, O’Connor, or Charisse did, is conspicuous yet sadly unsurprising. Even in the space- and time-shattering world of musicals, fantasy has its limits.

All musicals are in one way or another about utopias—and therefore their impossibility. MGM musicals are perhaps the genre’s most utopian, creating worlds of perfect color, light, and harmony that make you forget, for a couple of hours, that reality isn’t populated by people who communicate like songbirds, who move like weightless angels. Of all the films ever put out by Hollywood, they might be the most closely attuned to the artist’s imagination, as tributes to an almost Wildean aesthetic ideal. In The Pirate, Garland’s unhappily betrothed Manuela, who craves romance and adventure, insists, “Underneath this prim exterior, there are depths of emotion, romantic longings.” It’s a statement that could be made by virtually any character in any musical. These are hardly frivolous matters. The musical is for anyone who has ever longed for something or someone—that is to say, everyone. What is life without fantasy? To be firmly grounded, one must occasionally walk on air.

MGM Musicals from the Golden Age is available to stream on the Criterion Channel through the end of 2019. A few films included in the series—An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, The Harvey Girls, Meet Me in St. Louis, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers—leave the service at the end of November.