Les Girls (Sol C. Siegel Productions, MGM, 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran my husband Charles a 1957 MGM musical, Les Girls, a rather frustrating film indeed because, while it’s entertaining enough on its own terms, it’s a striking comedown from the best work of its highly talented creators: director George Cukor, star Gene Kelly (in his last musical for MGM) and songwriter Cole Porter (who, according to Clive Hirschhorn, “was extremely ill at the time and needed the invaluable assistance of Saul Chaplin to enable him to complete the score”). The plot came from a novel by Vera Caspary (also known for her association with a far better film, Laura) adapted by John Patrick (a mediocre screenwriter whose characters tend all too often to sound like their lines were written for greeting cards) and featuring Kelly as an American entertainer holding forth in 1949 Paris (not only returning to the time and place of An American in Paris but even reusing some of the same sets!) with the titular characters forming the three main dancers of his backup group, American Joy (Mitzi Gaynor), French Angèle (Taina Elg) and British Wren (Kay Kendall).

The film is framed by a series of sequences taking place in 1957 London, involving a libel suit filed by Angèle against Wren over her recently published memoirs — and, ironically, the framing scenes feature two of the best actors in the film, Henry Daniell as the judge and Patrick Macnee (later Steed in the original Avengers) as Angèle’s attorney. The central action is a Rashomon-like sequence of flashbacks detailing the history of “Les Girls” (that stupid title really annoys me) from the differing points of view of Wren, Angéle and Barry (Kelly), with Joy somewhat along for the ride — though it’s made clear at the end that she ended up with Barry despite the alleged affairs between him and the other “Girls.” The Porter songs are undistinguished — nothing from this score has entered the standard book (whereas several of the songs from High Society, a score he’d written the year before for another Patrick-scripted MGM musical with Sol C. Siegel as producer, have) — and though there’s quite a lot of singing and dancing only two numbers really stand out: an instrumental ballet in which Kelly and Elg tie each other up with ropes (S/M: The Musical!) and a final sequence spoofing the 1953 movie The Wild One, with Kelly in the Brando role as the leader of a motorcycle gang and Gaynor (who elsewhere in the movie is as flat and affect-less as usual — she was a talented singer and dancer but had utterly no ability to create a character and she’s one of the big reasons the film of South Pacific is far less fun than it should have been) as the waitress he terrorizes.

I remember seeing this film in my childhood but I remembered nothing about it (my affection for MGM musicals in general and Gene Kelly in particular would come later), and seeing it now, despite some strengths (notably a sharply edged comic performance from Kendall and absolutely gorgeous cinematography from the young-ish Robert Surtees) it seems to lumber along well-trod paths and creak to its destination —a fallback to traditional musical formulas after the nervy brilliance of It’s Always Fair Weather and a far less stylish film than Silk Stockings, also based on a Porter score (but at least most of that one had seen service previously in a stage version) and also made at MGM in CinemaScope in 1957 but with more charismatic stars (Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse), a far more stylish director (Rouben Mamoulian) and a stronger plot (derived from the Garbo/Lubitsch/Wilder classic Ninotchka). — 5/9/03

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Last night (Monday, October 28) at 9 p.m. I watched a film on Turner Classic Movies, a 1957 Gene Kelly musical from MGM called Les Girls (a bilingual title that’s always irritated me) whose credits both in front of and behind the camera promised a lot more than the film delivered. I’d seen it before on May 8, 2003 and been rather disappointed by it, but this time it seemed even worse. Les Girls was directed by George Cukor and choreographed by Jack Cole (TCM was showing it last night as a tribute to him). The songs were by Cole Porter (his next-to-last project ever; the only score he’d do after this was for the TV-movie version of Aladdin for the DuPont Show of the Month in 1958), though according to Clive Hirschhorn in his book The Hollywood Musical he was ill through much of this period and Saul Chaplin, assigned to write the background music for the film, had to help with the songs as well. The stars were Gene Kelly, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall and a Finnish ballerina and screen newcomer named Taina Elg. Elg plays a Frenchwoman, but this was during the period in which Hollywood producers (including Sol C. Siegel, who made this film) thought one foreign accent was as good as another. Actually the part was intended for Leslie Caron, who was genuinely French, but Caron was busy preparing for Gigi and Gaynor took over a role originally intended for Cyd Charisse, who was busy making Silk Stockings with Fred Astaire – also with songs by Cole Porter, though Silk Stockings had previously been a stage musical and Astaire, producer Arthur Freed and director Rouben Mamoulian only needed two new songs from him for the film. Astaire wrote Freed a letter during the preparations for both films and complained Porter didn’t want to talk to him about Silk Stockings because “[h]e did nothing but play me songs for Les Girls. … Cole has a way of losing interest in the revivals of the vehicles he has already done on the stage.”

Les Girls began as a story by Vera Caspary, an otherwise obscure author who “made her bones” in the film business by supplying the story for Laura, a mordant quasi-noir about a hard-bitten police detective (Dana Andrews) who falls in love with the woman whose murder he’s investigating, only to have her show up alive, well and played infectiously by Gene Tierney. Les Girls kicks off with a scene in a British courtroom in which former French dancer Angèle Ducros (Taina Elg) is suing British noblewoman Lady Sybil Wren (Kay Kendall, in a marvelous performance that’s by far the best thing in this movie; alas, she was already ill with the leukemia that would take her life in two years) for libel over a memoir she just published about her days in a dance troupe called “Les Girls” in 1949. “Les Girls” were three young women sidekicks for American dancer Barry Nichols (Gene Kelly), and the third “girl” was American Joanne “Joy” Henderson (Mitzi Gaynor, as usual a highly talented singer and dancer but with almost no star charisma). Screenwriter John Patrick – of whom I once asked, while my then-roommate and a friend of ours were watching the film Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, which he wrote, “Was the screenwriter for this film previously employed by a greeting-card company?” – adopted the Rashomon gimmick of having the “Les Girls” flashback told first from Sybil’s point of view, then from Angèle’s, and finally from Barry’s after Barry arrives in London from Los Angeles, where he’s running a chain of orange-juice stores once his doctors advised him to retire from dancing.

The story is a singularly dull tale of Barry’s travels round Europe with his dance troupe and the desire of Sybil and Angèle to continue their relationships with their fiancées despite Barry’s hard-core attitude against “complications.” Sybil’s fiancé is a British nobleman named Sir Gerald Wren (Leslie Phillips, the sort of high-born British actor who got cast in roles like this because David Niven was unavailable and he was apparently one of the next actors in line for that “type”) and Angèle’s is a highly strung Frenchman, Pierre Ducros (Jacques Bergerac), who’s pretty blank as a character except for the typical male-chauvinist demand that “his” woman not work for a living. One interesting thing about Les Girls is that the callous way Barry Nichols treats “Les Girls” tallies with the stories that have begun to trickle out about Gene Kelly being a tough taskmaster and hard to work with from his demands. All three plot lines end in an alleged suicide attempt by one of “Les Girls” over Barry’s aberrant affections, since at different times Barry romanced all three women in his act, though to utterly no one’s surprise it’s Joanne he ended up with (she’s in his car, waiting for him, as he leaves court following his testimony). The film ends with Barry’s version of the story, in which the “suicide attempt” turns out to be an accident – a ruptured break in a gas line that knocked out both Sybil and Angèle – and Sybil dismisses her libel suit.

The framing scenes of the trial are actually some of the best things in the movie, courtesy of two great performances by old-line British actors: Henry Daniell as the judge in the case (just 12 years after he’d played super-villain Professor Moriarty in The Woman in Green, with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson – and I had the odd fantasy of someone stumbling into the courtroom and wondering, “How the hell did Professor Moriarty become a judge?”) and Patrick Macnee as the prosecutor (four years before he began his breakthrough role as the sidekick of Diana Rigg’s super-spy in the British TV series The Avengers). Cole Porter’s songs are O.K. rather than great; they’re mostly rehashes of things he’d done better before (and the best song of Porter’s in the movie is actually “Be a Clown,” heard only instrumentally, from his score for a previous Gene Kelly musical, The Pirate). There’s a nice romantic duet called “Ça, C’est l’Amour” and an O.K. patter song called “You’re Just Too, Too” that’s a duet for Kelly and Kendall but one Porter had done much more effectively in songs like “C’est Magnifique” and “Friendship” as well as well-known masterpieces like “You’re the Top.”

Jack Cole’s choreography is explosive but a little too over-the-top; the best numbers are the opening title song, in which Kelly and “Les Girls” are backed by a chorus of eight Black women (remember that Kelly had previously insisted on dancing on screen with The Nicholas Brothers in The Pirate, so it’s not that surprising to see him with a Black chorus line), and the one number Kelly choreographed himself, “Why Am I So Gone (About That Gal)?,” a musical parody of the 1953 film The Wild One (produced by Stanley Kramer, directed by Laslo Benedek, written by John Paxton and starring Marlon Brando as the head of a motorcycle gang that terrorizes a small town). There’s also a great number in which Kelly plays a fly trapped in a spider’s web and he and Elg tie each other up with ropes (the last time I saw this I wrote, “S/M: The Musical!”), which gets repeated later in a version in which Kelly’s stage crew screws up and trips him with the ropes. George Cukor’s direction hardly seems to exist; much of the film was shot on “Paris” sets left over from An American in Paris, and a) looks it and b) just reminds us of how much more stylish that film was and how much better directed (by Vincente Minnelli). Les Girls was Gene Kelly’s last film as an MGM contractee and his last musical there until both he and Fred Astaire appeared in the 1974 compilation documentary That’s Entertainment! and narrated quite moving tributes to each other. It was also Cole Porter’s next-to-last project just before his long-standing leg injuries became gangrenous, leading to his legs being amputated, which ended his creative career. – 10/29/24