Invitation to the Dance (MGM, 1953, released 1956)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film my husband Charles, a friend and I watched last night was Invitation to the Dance, an oddball musical from Gene Kelly at MGM in 1953, though it was not released (except for a special screening at the Edinburgh Film Festival at which Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret were in attendance) until 1956. It was made during a period in which Gene Kelly was living in Europe as a tax exile, intending to take advantage of a loophole in British immigration law that a non-citizen could work in the U.K. for up to 186 days in a year – and the days did not need to be consecutive – but if he went so much as one day over he would have to pay taxes on his income both in Britain and America. Kelly’s idea for the film was to work with top-notch ballet stars and make a film that would be what Sergei Eisenstein had called “a sound film” rather than a talkie: a movie that would tell its story through images combined with synchronized music and sound effects,.but no dialogue. The original plan was to have three ballet sequences and one in which Kelly and guest stars would dance to popular songs, and originally Kelly was going to appear only in the pop-song sequence (titled “Dance Me a Song”), but MGM’s condition for green-lighting the project was that Kelly appear in all the sequences, and in the end the pop-song sequence was dropped anyway. I first heard of this film in The World of Entertainment, Hugh Fordin’s 1975 biography of MGM musical producer Arthur Freed, and this book went into so much detail about the trials and tribulations of this movie in general and the “Dance Me a Song” sequence in particular that it was not until I actually saw the film that I realized the pop-song sequence was not in the released film.

What was in the film was three stories told entirely in the dance language of ballet. The first was “Circus,” a Petrouchka-like story in which a circus clown (Gene Kelly) has an unrequited crush on a woman in the troupe (Claire Sombert, wearing an all-in-one gold lamé jumpsuit that practically becomes a character in itself), only she just has eyes for the handsome, hunky tightrope walker (Igor Yousekevitch). Along the way we get to see several scenes showing other circus performers and the audiences for them, before we finally cut back to the clown, who attempts to tightrope-walk himself to impress the woman – but, unsurprisingly, he ultimately falls to his death. The music for the “Circus” sequence was composed by Jacques Ibert, a specialist in light-classical music for ballet, and he arrived in Britain to work on the score just after he’d suffered a personal tragedy: his sister, also a well-known musician, had mysteriously disappeared. Later her body was found at the foot of a flight of stairs in the boarded-up home she and Ibert had shared. Fortunately for the film, Ibert took a stiff-upper-lip attitude to his tragic loss, writing MGM musical director Lela Simone, “There is only one thing for me to do and that is to work, Furthermore, I have a contract I must fulfill.” While it might have made more sense for Kelly and the production crew to use Stravinsky’s Petrouchka for the score (especially since, as a product of pre-Revolutionary Russia, it was in the public domain), Ibert turned in a quite remarkable piece that works well enough in context.

The film’s second sequence was called “Ring Around the Rosy” and was based on Reigen, a notorious play by German author Arthur Schnitzler, whose elaborate tales of marital infidelity were the basis of movies as different as Cecil B. DeMille’s The Affairs of Anatol (1920) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Reigen deals with a bracelet that is passed around to various people, all of whom are engaged in unauthorized sexual relationships. Schnitzler wrote the play in 1897 and it was privately performed in 1900, but it wasn’t until 1920 in Berlin that it saw its first public performance – and it was savagely attacked by critics who pointed out that Schnitzier was Jewish and accused him of moral degeneracy. Schnitzler’s play was already turned into a French movie, La Ronde, in 1950, with German expatriate Max Ophuls directing, when Gene Kelly grabbed hold of it. In Schnitzler’s play the bracelet is passed from a prostitute to a suldier, who gives it to a parlor maid, who gives it to a young gentleman, who gives it to a married woman, who gives it to her husband, who gives it to his own extra-relational “little miss,” who gives it to a poet, who gives it to an actress, who gives it to a count, who gives it to the same prostitute who had it in the opening.

In Kelly’s only slightly more decorous version, the bracelet starts out as a gift from a husband (David Poltenghi) to his wife (Daphne Dale), who gives it to an artist (Igor Yousekvitch again), who gives it to his model (Claude Bessy – that’s right, a woman named Claude), who gives it to a “sharpie” (Tommy Rall), who gives it to a femme fatale (Belita, the marvelous skating actress who starred in the 1946 film noir Suspense), who gives it to a nightclub croooner (Irving Davies), who gives it to the hat-check girl at the club where he works (Diana Adams), who gives it to a Marine (Gene Kelly), who gives it to a mysterious “girl on the stairs” (Tamara Toumanova), who gives it back to the husband. The ballet was originally scored by British composer Malcolm Arnold, and most dance sequences are filmed to a live or recorded piano accompaniment. The orchestral version is added in post-production on a recording stage, in which the conductor watches the film on a large screen and cues his or her beats to it, but when Arnold’s score was first rehearsed by conductor John Hollingsworth, he compared it to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. “It soon became apparent … that Arnold’s score was not in tune with what Kelly had photographed,” Fordin wrote in his Freed biography. So Kelly commissioned a new score from American pianist and composer André Previn, who not only wrote the piece as a concertante work for piano and orchestra but played the piano part himself and is even seen in the movie as “The Composer At the Piano.” Previn’s task was the nightmarish one of composing a musical score to fit a film sequence that could not be changed at all.

The third sequence was “Sinbad the Sailor,” set to the final movement of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s tone poem Scheherazade very heavily rewritten by arranger Johnny Green (who had previously done the same thing for George Gershwin’s An American in Paris to fit the big Kelly ballet that ends the film of that name). The sequence was an extension of an experiment Kelly had previously done in the 1944 film Anchors Aweigh, in which he had appeared as a live-action performer in what was otherwise a cartoon sequence featuring MGM’s animated stars, Tom and Jerry. For this film Kelly brought on the same people who had created the Tom and Jerry cartoons, producer Fred Quimby and directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (who, when MGM closed down its cartoon division in 1957, launched a highly successful and profitable independent studio producing films for TV). What they came up with was an elaborate Orientalist farce featuring Sinbad (Kelly), Scheherazade (Carol Haney), and a boy genie (David Kasday), along with two scimitar-wielding palace guards who partner Kelly and give him a hard time throughout the sequence. (It’s interesting that two of the three sequences in Invitation to the Dance both feature Kelly in the same starched white sailor’s uniforms he previously wore in Anchors Aweigh and On the Town.)

Invitation to the Dance sat fallow on MGM’s shelves for three years while the “suits” at the company’s American home base tried to figure out what to do with it. They rather gingerly opened it in April 1956 at the Plaza Theatre, the usual showcase for MGM films since U.S. antitrust litigation had forced the big studios to sell off their theatre chains a decade earlier, and not surprisingly it bombed at the box office. Seen today, Invitation to the Dance dazzles with its sheer inventiveness, and among other things it shows that Gene Kelly might have been a great star in silent films if he’d lived during that era (in 1948 Kelly starred as D’Artagnan in a remake of Douglas Fairbanks’ 1921 silent blockbuster hit The Three Musketeers, and clips from it appear in the 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain) even though he takes the most haunting scene in Singin’ in the Rain – the ineffable closeup in the ballet scene in which he realizes Cyd Charisse has no interest in him – and rather runs it into the ground, especially in “Circus.” It’s an intriguing film and it’s hard to imagine anyone else who would have made it in the 1950’s (though my husband Charles reminded me that three years earlier director and co-writer Russell Rouse had made a film called The Thief, a mystery thriller which also used no dialogue), and it’s the sort of film one wants to like more than one does – though Charles liked it more than I did.