Kismet - 1955

Kismet (1955), a lush and lavish musical, carries the tarnished reputation of being made by a director who hated the project, who disliked most of his cast, and couldn’t wait to get it over with, yet I think this truly lovely spectacle deserves a better legacy.  It succeeds despite the spite of its director, the poor box office showing, and the decades of dismissal by critics who, perhaps, were more than unduly influenced by director Vincente Minnelli’s disdain.

It was shot between May and July 1955 (a few additional retakes were done in early August by Stanley Donen), when Ann Blyth was 26 years old and pregnant with her second child.  It would be her last movie musical, and the one that truly allowed her to unleash her magnificent trained lyric soprano voice to its fullest advantage.  It gave her signature tunes to sing in concert for the rest of her life.

She started her film career in musicals at the age of 15 when Universal plunked her in four in a row “Mickey-and-Judy” type shows, only in this case it was Ann and Donald O’Connor.  They were light, teenage peppy, and a little goofy, a pleasant introduction for Ann to filmmaking and a pleasant introduction for the audience to this bright new talent.  (We’ll talk about them in a later post).  After her unexpected casting in Mildred Pierce when she was 16, Ann’s film career took a sharp turn for the dramatic, and it was some time before she had an opportunity to do a musical again.  She wanted to do drama; she wanted to do musicals.  She just didn’t want to do either exclusively.  Studios, however, wanted to “brand” their actors and seldom allowed a variety of challenges.

When Ann Blyth came to MGM, she hoped to finally have a go at some big-budget musicals for which that studio was famous, and though The Great Caruso, The Student Prince, and Rose Marie each gave her a whack at the famous Freed Unit at MGM, Kismet was the most fulfilling of the promise of her talent.  The Student Prince and Rose Marie, though colorful, were, by 1950s standards, pretty worn material and neither did that well at the box office.  Kismet, however, had just come off a very splashy and successful Broadway run, closing only a few weeks before this film went into production.  Its tunes were based mostly on the work of Aleksandr Borodin, and the song “Strangers in Paradise” was already a huge hit and had become solidly a part of the pop canon.

A magazine poll chose Ann and Gordon McRae for the leads in Oklahoma, but the female lead went to Shirley Jones, and with musicals on the decline, Kismet must have seemed like a great break.  It was a rollicking fable in the style of the tales of Scherazade, a world of Persian opulence and color, and vivid characters from all walks of life.

Ann plays Marsinah, the daughter of a poor street poet played by Howard Keel in a delightfully exuberant performance as a charming con man who must deal with the trappings of fate or “kismet” in which his fortunes rise and fall, and rise and fall, and rise, in the course of one day.

Sexy Dolores Gray plays Lalume, the bored wife of the Wazir, who is the chief of police in Bagdad.  She and Howard Keel team up to deal with the obstacles to their happiness and exploit the luck that happens their way.  They are two of a kind, and Miss Gray matches Mr. Keel’s sly opportunism, and street smarts.  Both throw themselves into their numbers with a very sexy silliness.

Sebastian Cabot is the evil Wazir.  I like him in this role.  He is the villain, but not the mustache-twirling kind.  His blasé self-interest is drôle and even his abject cruelty one can smile at because in his own snide way he's as over the top as Howard Keel—and Keel could find himself just as blissfully uncaring for all but his own purse as the Wazir, except he has a conscience and a daughter he loves.

Vic Damone plays the Caliph, the ruler of all this Mesopotamian menagerie, a young man who just came to the throne and is determined to be a fair and just ruler.  His chief charm, along with his boldly sensual singing voice, is his being helpless in a world of commoners.  He falls in love with Ann Blyth.  With a knowing sense of fun learned from her father, she teases Mr. Damone about his stiff manner and lack of a sense of humor.  He’s the Persian Mr. Darcy and she is the sensible and mocking ElizabethBennett of the Fertile Crescent.  I wish the movie could spend more time with their romance, but the story is really about Howard Keel.

Their scenes, courtly and romantic, shy and tempered by protocol, balance out the lusty abandon of the Dolores Gray and Howard Keel scenes.  The young folks, one poor and one magnificently rich and lord of all the land, are equal in their restrictions of behavior that society has placed on them.  The middle aged Miss Gray and Mr. Keel, scoundrels and scamps both, are free to indulge themselves in carefully choreographed lust, plan their scams, and monkey with other people’s lives.

Monty Woolley, as the Caliph’s servant and advisor, rounds out the cast.  I think my favorite moment is when he tells a whirling dervish, “Oh, STOP IT!”  This was Mr. Woolley’s last film.  He wears his turban, and of course his beard, well.

I love how the whirling dervish behind Howard Keel, while Keel is singing “Fate,” slows his spinning to correspond with the rhythm of the music.

I understand Barrie Chase is somewhere in the crowd as a dancer, but you’ll have to point her out to me, because I don’t see her.

The story, originally based on a play by Edward Knoblock from 1911, had gone through a few other film incarnations, including the most recent one in 1944 with Ronald Colman, JoyPage, and Marlene Dietrich.  We’ll have to talk about that one sometime.  The story transports well to the world of musical theatre, and on Broadway won a slew of Tonys, including for lead Alfred Drake.

Producer Arthur Freed tapped Vincente Minnelli to direct, dangling in front of him the carrot of allowing him to make the project that had long caught his eye, the life of artist Vincent van Gogh—and what became Lust forLife pulled Mr. Minnelli’s interest away, if there had been any to begin with, for Kismet.

According to biographer Emanuel Levy, Minnelli worked on the Kismet set design but left the staging of musical numbers to what was done on Broadway.  “Bored, restless, displeased with the cast, and already preoccupied with Lustfor Life, Minnelli paid more attention to the décor than to the performers, most of whom he disliked.”  He apparently directed most of his disdain toward Vic Damone, on whom he came down hard and humiliated through most of the shooting, episodes which Mr. Damone describes in his memoir, Singing Was the Easy Part.  Mike Mazurki, who plays the Wazir's underling, offered to punch Mr. Minnelli for him more than once.

Usually meticulous about camera composition, this time around he printed first or second takes in a rush to get through the job, and “the timetable was too tight to afford rehearsals with the actors, who were soon exhausted by the pace.”

The movie I think has been lost in the Technicolor fifties among an embarras de richesses of other big musicals, to the lore of Mr. Minnelli’s disinterest, and the tepid audience response when it was released.  Most classic film fans, however, know that many movies are eventually redeemed by time and taken to the hearts of the faithful upon reassessment.  Reassessing this one, here’s a few scenes to consider:

The “Strangers in Paradise” number.  Vic Damone has followed Ann to the walled garden of a small house.  She is trespassing, but he thinks she is the well-do young woman of the house and he falls in love with her.  He doesn’t tell her he’s the Caliph; he lets her think he is a gardener. 

He is dressed in colors making him a part of the garden—sand and bright green, and she is in yellow, like the flowers dotting the foreground in this scene.  He is the plant; she the flower.  They are both organic to the place, they belong here. 

Note the staging, how they stand in tableau in the arches, how they part, she slightly above him on steps as his adored one on a pedestal, with a peacock between them. 

Next, as the song, which is their courtship, progresses, they stand together with another peacock unfurling his magnificent white fan of tail feathers. 

Finally, they come together in a section of the garden with red flowers, the color of romance, when their passion culminates in a kiss and a promise.  Interestingly, they step back away from us to kiss.  I’m not sure if it was to get their full forms in view—as mentioned in other posts, CinemaScope did not work really well with close-ups, so it may have been to pull them apart from each other and us.  Minnelli makes CinemaScope work really well for this picture with gracefully framed shots.

Ann promises to meet Vic here at moonrise.  It’s a lovely scene, and my only fault with it is dissolving too quickly when we really want to linger on her watching him leave.  I think it's one of the most graceful and elegant scenes ever filmed in CinemaScope.

When the movie starts, the setting is just the opposite of this elegant world of romance.  Ann and Howard Keel awaken in a stable with no food and one piece of a blanket for her.  Their morning prayer is less reverent than it is desperate, and we hear Mr. Keel’s voice wearily asking that his daughter may eat today and wear shoes. 

Ann is hungry, but sprightly and full of hope, energy and gaiety.  Her voice is high and girlish; it drops when she is romanced by Mr. Damone to compliment the sudden sophistication that the pretty new yellow clothes have given her.

Before this scene, she steals an armload of oranges in the marketplace.  You may recognize the orange seller, played by Jameel Farah, AKA Jamie Farr, AKA Corporal Klinger on M*A*S*H.

Another scene, spectacular by any standards, is the “Night of My Nights” procession where Vic Damone, now not disguising that he is the Caliph, rides with his household staff back to the garden at nightfall where he hopes to reunite with Ann Blyth, reveal who he is, and take her for his bride.  The reflection of the procession in the water is stunning.

If this is Vincente Minnelli on a bad day, it’s pretty fabulous.

Through twists and turns in the plot, which I won’t go into detail, Howard Keel convinces the nasty Sebastian Cabot that he has magic powers, which he will work to Mr. Cabot’s advantage if Cabot bestows riches and a royal title on him (while Keel romances his wife, Dolores Gray, behind his back).  But Keel’s kismet changes from moment to moment, and he must go into hiding, dragging Ann from the garden where she is waiting for Vic Damone, making her miss her appointment with destiny.

Another terrific scene where, high on the walls of the Wazir’s palace, Ann, broken-hearted, sings “This is My Beloved” in an unconscious duet with Vic Damone, who sings from his palace, also brooding on the crescent moon sailing in the velvet sky, of his love for her.

A little suspense is added during Keel’s number “The Olive Tree”, as he tries to convince Ann that taking chances is what makes life worth living and that only a fool settles for just what’s in front of him—we see the royal procession, or the tail end of it, moving outside the stable. 

You want to say, “Turn around!  It’s Vic Damone!  He wants to marry you and you’re listening to Howard Keel singing about fools sitting beneath an olive tree!  Turn around!”  Too late.  They’re gone, and Ann thinks she will never see her love, the gardener, again.

Of course, she will, but not before an attempted murder, her father being threatened with execution, and her forced marriage to Sebastian Cabot.

It was a quite a 24 hours.

The movie is visually satisfying as a long drink in the desert, with judicious use of color that evokes an oil painting.  The base color is sand and ivory, and here and there, dotted with brilliant colors, but never overpowering.  The movie, with its fable storyline is purely a pop-up book, but visually is never garish.  Here a man’s turquoise-colored turban, a red fez, a woman’s green scarf, another woman draped in pink. 

When Howard Keel sings philosophically about fate, we see a man shoot past from the bottom of the screen with a gold band around his turban that catches our eye and we follow it to the top of the frame.  The oranges in the market place, the black leather armor of Sebastian Cabot’s guards.

The golden costume of Dolores Gray and her white and tan Afghan dogs who behave very well and appear to enjoy lounging with her. 

The red Asian acrobat costumes of the three prospective brides from Abbaboo, who spring like jack-in-a-box figures from a kind of enclosure and decide they do not like Bagdad, until two shirtless men in lime green pants dance to a little Persian jazz, and they join in a fury of Mesopotamian bebop. A couple moves look straight out of Guys and Dolls.  It’s all about color, and if there is any message, it’s that our eyes are captives to the beauty around us.  Director Minnelli distracts and entertains us the same way we distract a baby with a colorful rattle. He may have wanted to film a movie about Vincent Van Gogh, but Kismet is where we really see, and are made to feel, an appreciation for the subtle lift to the senses and to the heart by judicious use of color.

Which brings us to Ann’s most famous number, “Baubles, Bangles, and Beads,” a slow waltz-tune during which she changes from a ragged street urchin to desirable woman.  A bolt of yellow cloth is chucked across the screen and she catches it, like grabbing the brass ring. 

A bevy of marketplace salesladies hoist the cloth and dress Ann behind it in a flowing costume of the same color. 

Her hair, free from the dirty scarf she had worn, suddenly looks as if she’s been to the hairdresser.

Could she ever imagine, lip-synching that lovely tune to the playback of her lovely voice on the faux Persian soundstage, that she’d still be singing it in concert decades later? 

With filming over, Ann awaited the birth of her child at the end of the year and filled up the time with vocal training.  Working with singing teachers had long been part of her regimen away from the camera.  She even confessed of her hope one day of singing Puccini.  She would eventually perform in The King and I and The Sound of Music and all the really big musicals, but in a more challenging venue than a Hollywood set.  She performed them live on stage.  Down the road, we’ll discuss her long career in musical theatre.

Kismet, despite the tepid original reception, despite Vincente Minnelli’s disdain is a feast for the eyes, embroidered with rich and lovely music, and his cast was better than he knew. 

Have a look here at Laura's Miscellaneous Musings for Laura’s exciting experience watching Kismet at the TCM Festival with Ann Blyth in person to introduce the film.

And have a look here for a terrific post from Cameron Howard at TheBlonde at the Film blog on Kismet and some fabulous screen captures.

Come back next Thursday when we drop back ten years earlier, to 1945, and Ann’s fledging career shoots into orbit with…wait for it...Mildred Pierce.

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Damone, Vic.  Singing Was the Easy Part (NY: St. Martin's Press, 2009) pp. 154-157.

The Deseret News, June 30, 1954, syndicated article by Sheilah Graham, p A7.

Levy, Emanuel.  Vincente Minnelli – Hollywood’s Dark Dreamer (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2009), p. 267.

The Southeast Missourian, August 8, 1955, syndicated article by Erskine Johnson, p. 4.

UPDATE:  This series on Ann Blyth is now a book - ANN BLYTH: ACTRESS. SINGER. STAR. -

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The audio book for Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is now for sale on Audible.com, and on Amazon and iTunes.

Also in paperback and eBook from Amazon, CreateSpace, and my Etsy shop: LynchTwinsPublishing.

 "Lynch’s book is organized and well-written – and has plenty of amusing observations – but when it comes to describing Blyth’s movies, Lynch’s writing sparkles." - Ruth Kerr, Silver Screenings

"Jacqueline T. Lynch creates a poignant and thoroughly-researched mosaic of memories of a fine, upstanding human being who also happens to be a legendary entertainer." - Deborah Thomas, Java's Journey

"One of the great strengths of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is that Lynch not only gives an excellent overview of Blyth's career -- she offers detailed analyses of each of Blyth's roles -- but she puts them in the context of the larger issues of the day."- Amanda Garrett, Old Hollywood Films

"Jacqueline's book will hopefully cause many more people to take a look at this multitalented woman whose career encompassed just about every possible aspect of 20th Century entertainment." - Laura Grieve, Laura's Miscellaneous Musings''

"Jacqueline T. Lynch’s Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. is an extremely well researched undertaking that is a must for all Blyth fans." - Annette Bochenek, Hometowns to Hollywood

Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. 
by Jacqueline T. Lynch

The first book on the career of actress Ann Blyth. Multitalented and remarkably versatile, Blyth began on radio as a child, appeared on Broadway at the age of twelve in Lillian Hellman's Watch on the Rhine, and enjoyed a long and diverse career in films, theatre, television, and concerts. A sensitive dramatic actress, the youngest at the time to be nominated for her role in Mildred Pierce (1945), she also displayed a gift for comedy, and was especially endeared to fans for her expressive and exquisite lyric soprano, which was showcased in many film and stage musicals. Still a popular guest at film festivals, lovely Ms. Blyth remains a treasure of the Hollywood's golden age.

The eBook and paperback are available from Amazon and CreateSpace, which is the printer.  You can also order it from my Etsy shop. It is also available at the Broadside Bookshop, 247 Main Street, Northampton, Massachusetts.

If you wish a signed copy, then email me at JacquelineTLynch@gmail.com and I'll get back to you with the details.

It's Always Fair Weather - 1955

It’s Always Fair Weather (1955) paints a post-war world in Technicolor and CinemaScope—a combination of a quaint painted postcard and an image of modern life so large it threatens to consume us. This movie, like the era it portrays, has been forgotten in some circles, but Gene Kelly has unwittingly left a very special documentary about this era in the unlikely form of musical comedy. It’s not the valentine that Singin’ in the Rain (1952) was to the 1920s; the 1950s of It’s Always Fair Weather has less parody and more chagrin, even bitterness. I would submit that as a work reflecting its era this is a movie of greater value than Kelly’s more successful films.

This post is a contribution to the Gene Kelly Blogathon sponsored by the Classic Movie Blog Association. Have a look here for a list of other participating blogs.

Three returning vets played by Gene Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd return to the states in 1945 and have one last (several) drinks together before parting company and heading back to civilian life. They pledge eternal friendship, and promise to meet in this bar in ten years’ time. Before they split up, they dance with garbage can lids on their feet.

There’s a lot of “incidentals” to this movie that make it special. First, the film was supposed to be a sequel to On the Town (1949), which Kelly made with Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin as three happy-go-lucky sailors on shore leave. Sinatra turned down It’s Always Fair Weather, and Gene Kelly and his creative partner Stanley Donen decided to change the premise of a reunion between the three sailors to different characters, this time soldiers who face not just the challenges of civilian life, but their own apparent failures at meeting those challenges.

Betty Comden and Adolph Green, the clever team who gave us On the Town crafted the script and lyrics for It’s Always Fair Weather. Music was by André Previn. So far, so good, but other incidentals turned the making of this film into what Donen called an atmosphere that “was really horrendous. We had to struggle from beginning to end. I can only say it was an absolute one hundred percent nightmare.” (Gene Kelly- A Life of Dance and Dreams by Alvin Yudkoff, Back Stage Books, NY, 1999, p. 234).

Kelly has been acknowledged by many partners and co-workers over the years as a difficult taskmaster as a director and choreographer. He and co-director Donen clashed a great deal over this film, and their relationship permanently deteriorated, probably not helped by Kelly’s romantic relationship with Donen’s ex-wife Jeanne Coyne. A couple of years later, Kelly divorced Betsy Blair, and eventually married Jeanne.

Though Gene Kelly is sometimes accused of being a camera hog, one must note that the two other men that he picked to round out the trio of buddies in this film were top-notch dancers. Kelly knew and appreciated talent. Dan Dailey and Michael Kidd were able to handle anything Kelly could dish out. It’s especially gratifying to even see Michael Kidd dance on film, since he didn’t make too many movies, and was known for his stage work both as a dancer and choreographer. He won five Tony Awards as a choreographer for Broadway, and we owe to him, among other spectacular screen moments, that vigorous ballet of woodsmen in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954).

Another lucky “incidental” for us is the appearance of Dolores Gray, who like Michael Kidd is known more for her stage work than movies. Here she’s a hoot as the self-involved TV host diva, a kind of Miss Piggy with better legs. She gets a great number “Thanks, But No Thanks” which she dances with chorus boys who ply her with jewels and such. She turns them down, brushing them off with disdain, with gunshots, with a detonator plunger removing her Romeos with a burst of TNT, and finally, by pulling a lever and dropping a cluster of chorus boys through a trap door in the stage. It’s a jazzy number with clever lyrics.

Add to this a voiceover by the great June Foray as an animated character in a TV soap commercial, and you have a movie that preserves talent for the ages.

Even Pope Pius XII gets a cameo.

Back to the boys. The years fly by us in a montage of dates and newsreel images. Dan Dailey, once an aspiring artist, has become an advertising man for a big agency. He is disillusioned and dyspeptic, and his marriage is on the rocks. Michael Kidd runs the Cordon Bleu, a grander name than usual for what is just a roadside eatery. His real success is his growing family. Gene is a gambler, a fight manager, and a hustler on the make for his next big break, but always broke.

They reunite with disappointment. They are strangers now, and can barely stand each other. This sudden revulsion could be thrown around as a comic tool, but is used in this movie with great poignancy and allows us to see into the lives of these men. Their disappointment in each other is matched by their disappointment in themselves and what they’ve done, or haven’t done, with their lives since the optimistic days of their Army discharge. They are unhappy with themselves, looking in the mirror at what frauds they’ve become.

Cyd Charisse is the program director for Dolores Gray’s TV show, “Midnight with Madeline”, a kind of “reality” variety show where one segment of the program is devoted to spotlighting man on the street “hard luck” stories and audience participation. When their guest sucker for the evening is scrapped, Miss Charisse comes up with the plan to use the three Army buddies on the show instead. She takes charge of Gene Kelly, keeping him occupied until she can get him to the studio to be surprised, and embarrassed, on live TV that evening. Another executive babysits Dan Dailey, and Dolores Gray entertains Michael Kidd.

The chief challenge in making this movie, and possibly its chief triumph, is working in CinemaScope, but apparently the budget was cut for this movie under production head Dore Schary. Kelly and Donen had to be especially careful in how to use the monstrous widescreen technology in a movie that essentially takes place in tight interiors. Close-ups, as well, could be really pretty ugly in CinemaScope. We mentioned here in This Happy Feeling  (1958) how awkward the widescreen setups can be.

Kelly and Donen successfully manipulate the unwieldy CinemaScope with some clever shots. We see the men in the restaurant thinking privately to themselves how much they dislike each other, to the tune of “The Blue Danube” waltz. Each gets a normal-sized close-up pasted together to avoid the distorted facial close-ups normally rendered in a CinemaScope shot. Two main locations, the gym and the TV studio-ballroom are larger spaces that accommodate CinemaScope well. In most situations we see the screen filled with a lot of people in the background, which keeps the central figure, usually a dancer, from looking diminished and insignificant in the huge spaces of widescreen.

Cyd Charisse gets only one number here (her singing dubbed), the energetic “Baby, You Knock Me Out” done with boxers in the gym.

Gene Kelly’s big solo number is the now iconic roller skate routine so masterfully done. We have to admire, again, his marvelous athleticism and creativity.

I particularly admire Dan Dailey’s number, “Situation-wise” which mocks the corporation mentality that pre-dates Jack Lemmon’s famous “Kubilek-wise” in The Apartment (1960). Dailey, who we last saw here in Meet Me in Las Vegas (1956) had the ability, greater than the formidable Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, to act. He could be sensitive, deep, and all in the simplest of movements and facial expressions. He had a clear face, for want of a better term, that reminds me of Gary Cooper. Not that they resembled each other, but that each man was able to convey his deepest emotions transparently on his face with no affectations. Dana Andrews was like that, too. It’s as if they find a serene spot in the emotional turmoil and just let it be.

The “Situation-wise” number allows Dailey to act while he sings and dances, having had too much to drink at a cocktail party at his boss’s home as he faces his failings and self-disgust. It is a very inventive dance as well, because as he gets more out of control, he uses objects from the elegant living room as props. It all looks very natural and spontaneous. Often in Astaire or Kelly dance sequences, we see them placed in a situation where we anticipate what props are going to be used—a hat rack, a broom, etc., because they are as much on display as the dancer. There is a foreshadowing of what’s to come. But here, Dailey’s raucous slide into drunken mental breakdown is such that we don’t know what’s going to happen next as he snatches apparently improvisational props from around the living room. It is both heartbreaking and really funny at the same time. Look for the brief “Jerry Lewis-wise” lyric where he slaps his hands on his head and spasmodically struts like Jerry Lewis’s screen nerd character.


All three men reach their nadir, and their ultimate triumph, when they are dragged on stage to be feted and humiliated by Dolores Gray. Michael Kidd, who unfortunately we don’t get to see that much of in this movie, refuses her consolation gifts of a washing machine and shoes for his children because he is proud, and decides that his roadside diner is nothing of which to be ashamed. Dan Dailey likewise finds dignity in humility and wryly acknowledges that this moment on live TV is a “truly fitting climax to ten years of self-degradation.”

Gene Kelly goes a step further, mocking himself on camera, “I’m a bum. Boys, don’t be like me, be clean, use Klenzrite.”

We have our happy ending of sorts when the mobsters who are chasing Gene Kelly get their comeuppance on live TV in a spectacular brawl with a lot of bodies tossed on collapsing tables. The three buddies bond in fisticuffs defeating the bad guys, and when they at last part again, there is some satisfaction in their lives and their renewed friendship.

The final shot is another fine use of CinemaScope, the men walking off in different directions on the wet streets. The nighttime New York City skyline fills the widescreen nicely.

Even at the time it was made, It’s Always Fair Weather was recognized for capturing a slice of real life not usually noticed in musical comedies. New York Times critic Bosley Crowther pronounced the film to be, “Howling with derision at such recognizable idiocies of TV as singing and slobbering commercials, audience participation shows, give-away plugs for mundane products and the wise-talking agency boys.” He called it “continuously entertaining” and “a winning show.”

It was winning, and would be one of the last times Gene Kelly helmed a major vehicle of this genre. Musicals were on the wane, stories about WWII GIs were fading into the past, and perhaps the only thing that marched into the lasting future was the note of cynicism felt by the characters of this movie. That was prescient.

A few more fun incidentals: Oily TV announcer Frank Nelson—you may not know the name but the voice is unmistakable from a bushel full of TV guest spots. He delivers a commercial for H2O cola, possibly the first diet soda, also prescient.

Madge Blake, used as a prop in the party scene by Dan Dailey, whose frilly, befuddled “clubwoman” screen persona lent itself to TV supporting roles, including a hysterical stretch as Larry Mondello’s mother on Leave It to Beaver.

Phil Arnold, who is one of the boxers known as Butch, singing in his deep bass voice to Cyd in the gym. Another long career of roles without screen credit but whose face and voice is part of our shared TV memories.

A new DVD release of It’s Always Fair Weather contains some numbers that were relegated to the cutting room floor, which is always appreciated by fans, but just what’s here in the final cut is still plenty.

Have a look at the CMBA website for more posts celebrating the career of Gene Kelly and please visit the other blogs participating in the Gene Kelly Blogathon.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.