A Film Canon

For this most part, this adaptation of the 1944 stage musical is little more than filmed theatre, sacrificing a potentially thrilling juxtaposition of New York City with Technicolour cinematography for a series of stagebound tableaux, accompanied by musical numbers that are not only inelegantly integrated into the narrative, but frequently explicitly announced. That said, this regressive, nostalgic quality represents a fairly shrewd anti-noir aesthetic, gathering and defusing the latter's motifs - including, at this stage, a proclivity for shooting on location - into the assurance that "it's best just to have a good time and not think about tomorrow". Similarly, the overt theatricality works best when it makes no pretensions to realism, clearest in the most decontextualised musical sequence - the final, danced synecdoche for the entire narrative ("A Day In New York - A Comedy In Three Acts"), whose most striking ingenuity lies in a choreography of colour that, with a little more refinement, will constitute America's answer to Powell and Pressburger. To this end, Kelly replaces Astaire's peculiarly cerebral use of tap - both as a conversation, and as an embodiment of the frenzied modernist metropolis - into a nexus between tap and ballet that divests him of any intellectual agency, and reduces him to a rag doll, or puppet; a state of benign, perpetual, cartoonish oblivion that quickly becomes grating (despite Leonard Bernstein's memorable, charismatic musical vehicles), and conflates frowning with ugliness, generating a violent, insidious (and implicitly anti-semitic) horror from the latter.