Creative partners since the early 1940s, Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly hadn’t actually made a film together for three years when It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), their final collaboration, came around. In the interim, they cemented themselves as artists with their own individual identities. Weather, then, a film about the dissolution of friendship borne of the passage of time, plays like the sorrowful denouement to one of Classical Hollywood’s most influential pairings.
Ted Riley (Kelly), Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angie Valentine (Michael Kidd) are all punch and promise on their return from Europe at the end of WW2, prancing into Tim’s bar, certain their post-war dreams will come true. But reality looms, just like the minor key of the film’s opening suite suggests. Doug deftly slips a gingham table cloth from under its setting while Ted’s carefully laid plan for marriage is pulled out from under him in a nearby phonebooth. As they did during the war, Doug and Angie accompany Ted, this time as he drowns his sorrows in booze. They get so drunk that, at the end of the night, all they can do is dance through the empty back streets of New York City in a river of devastation and delirium, turning trash can lids into tap shoes for their own depressed amusement. The whole world that was once at their feet is now merely underfoot.
This all happens within the film’s first five minutes, during which you can tell Weather looks a little different than the lavish musical productions on which MGM made its reputation. In fact, at this point MGM was starting to tighten its belt. The advent of television and the increasing power of the actor/producer threatened the studios’, particularly MGM’s, bottom line and their stranglehold on popular culture. Weather is one of the decade’s increasingly rare examples of a complete in-house production, a testament to Louis B. Mayer’s exceptional maintenance of power at MGM despite the industry’s changing tides.
Not even the grand scale offered by Cinemascope — one of Hollywood’s desperate attempts to claw back the grandeur of the theatrical experience — could hide Weather’s visible cheapness. Where Donen and Kelly’s first co-directorial outing, On the Town (1949), found ways to imbue its artificiality with a lushness exemplary of the late 1940s, Weather’s similarly city-bound setting only emphasizes the trappings of the studio backlot. But it’s in keeping with the film’s themes about repression in post-war America, of the dehumanization of man, and the escalation of capitalistic progress, that It’s Always Fair Weather imagines a New York City not of rich fantasy, but cheap mimicry.
Ted, Doug, and Angie vow to return to Tim’s bar in 10 years’ time to resume their friendship, a measure of their drunken optimism. Sure enough, each keeps their promise, though they find each other in, if not reduced then at least unanticipated, circumstances. They don’t try to pretend their lives are better than they actually are, but there’s a sense they’re holding back their feelings. Doug, the idealistic artist, is a soulless ad-man with a marriage on the rocks; Angie is a small-time restaurateur with delusions of grandeur and an oversized family; and Ted is a gambler, womanizer, and boxing manager, mere hours away from taking part in his first fixed bout. It’s a film of flimsy fronts in more ways than one, and all three members of this reunited trio quickly become disillusioned with each other and, secretly, themselves.
It’s Always Fair Weather is a decidedly downbeat film with a cynical and caustic tenor. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the film’s treatment of television. We learn that Doug is the ad-man responsible for the marketing campaign for a line of cleaning products, Klenzrite, that sponsors one of the leading nighttime television programs in the country, The Throb of New York. Donen and Kelly, along with screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, are ruthless in their depiction of the program’s host, Madeline Bradville (Dolores Gray), a deliciously delusional diva with an ill-defined drive for domination. But it’s the show’s cunning manipulation of local human interest stories for sickly sentimentality and unearned righteousness that actually earns the film’s sharpest condemnation. It’s a testament to Gray’s fabulous performance, all hip and exposed shoulder, that, despite at one point resembling, as close to literally as possible, the devil — complete with a bright, red gown and horned neckline — while singing a song about how material things don’t interest her, she maintains her grip on the audience’s adoration.
Madeline isn’t the only example of femininity, though Cyd Charisse’s Jackie Leighton, producer of The Throb of New York, can’t completely avoid some of the misogynistic trappings of other Donen/Kelly characterizations (Lina Lamont from Singin’ in the Rain comes to mind). As producer, Jackie is responsible for coordinating a happy televised reunion between Ted, Doug, and Angie. She’s hard-nosed and cold-blooded, a career girl dreamt up as only the 1950s seems capable. Ted makes sure he’s there to raise her temperature, whisking her to his boxing gym to throw her off her game.
It’s hard to imagine any person as ill-suited to acting as they are divinely suited to dance as Charisse. For her, dance is acting, and there are few performers as charming as her when she’s in full flight. Where Charisse bevels her leg as a measure of her character’s emotional repression, her open kicks and flicks during “Baby, You Knock Me Out” physicalize a liberated spirit and a change of heart. Here, an unadulterated fantasy of masculinity frees her from her repressive cage, and she becomes Cyd Charisse before our very eyes.
But It’s Always Fair Weather is most concerned with literalizing the psychotic break of the American mid-century. The shackles of progress have turned Ted, Doug, and Angie into soulless machines, given to drunkenness and reverie. Occasionally, Donen and Kelly stitch their separate storylines together in the frame itself, creating an imperfect seam between a trio that may be reunited but whose bond is likely beyond total repair. The airing of Throb of New York as the film’s finale is Tashlin-eqsue in its design and physicality. Ted, Doug, and Angie fight off the match-fixing mafia men looking to kill Ted in a cartoon-like bout of their own; flying objects are as effective as flying fists. It all culminates in a happy ending, though plenty remains to trouble its superficial presentation. In a repeat of the shot at the beginning of the film, when Ted, Doug, and Angie go their separate ways after the war, so do they part once again, incompatible as they once were. The attractive power of circumstance proves ineffective against the passage of time.
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