Invitation à la danse

The first two segments of this film may or may not impress you, but do watch the third: "Sinbad the Sailor". Kelly plays an American sailor in an exotic Oriental market. He rubs an old lamp and a genie appears, played by an amazingly talented kid. After a bit of messing around,the genie gets a sailor suit, too. Then they open a book to a picture of a wonderous land. The genie transports them inside and all the rest features the two dancers (mostly Kelly alone) dancing with animation.This segment is much longer than any other live-plus-animation sequence until Mary Poppins excepting, possibly Song of the South whose sequences were nowhere near so complex as this. Kelly dances with an animated dragon (that wraps around him), into a harem, is chased by the Sultan's guards, has a long sequence with one harem girl, and then a very long sequence with the guards. This is amazing work for 1952, especially when you remember that every bit of the animation is hand-painted on cels. Hanna-Barbera (then with MGM doing Tom and Jerry directed the animation. (Kelly also did a famous dance number with Jerry in Anchors Aweigh eight years earlier.) Walt Disney advised. This is swell stuff and any fan of animation should give it a look.

This is the result of many years of effort on the part of Gene Kelly to create an all-dance film. Since he was a major-studio rather than an indie production child, Kelly convinced his home studio, MGM, to finally take on the project.

The final results, unfortunately, are mixed. The movie is simply average, with long stretches of off-timed and miscalculated action and uninspired choreography. Were Kelly to have collaborated in the writing, choreographing and direction departments, rather than taking everything on himself, things might have gone better.

The project was simply too great a task for Kelly; with other imput he might have made a film with greater perspective and flair. The story in "Circus" is only fair, and there's more pantomime than dancing for Kelly as Pierrot. Unfortantely, Jacques Ibert's music doesn't help either.

"Ring Around the Rosy" suffers from disjointed continuity, with awkward bridges and motivations. Too, the fine Tamara Toumanova as the Streetwalker provides a clash of styles when paired with Kelly as the Marine. Physically, their types don't match well, try as they will. Nor was this Andre Previn's finest compositional hour.

Finally, Roger Eden's adaptation of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's score for "Sinbad the Sailor" makes for the most effective music in the film. Kelly at last gets to display his distinctive dancing manner, and does some impressive work (at age 44) in the interesting cartoon sequences.

It's not Kelly at his best, though, and "Inviation to the Dance" remains an interesting curio, earnest on effort and short on realization. Both dance fans in general and Kelly fans in particular will value this video in their collectiona.

It might better have been called "Invitation to the Pantomime" because there is no speaking, much less singing, in the film, a production much better suited to the stage. The movie does in fact look like a filmed stage production, and the format and ambitions of the film are not what audiences had come to expect from Gene Kelly. But this was his baby, and he wanted to take filmed dance to entirely new levels of artistic achievement. In many ways, it is a testimony to his power as a choreographer and a star that he was able to pull it off. Nevertheless, beautiful as it is, this is not everyone's cup of tea. Watching the first of the three dance sequences, I longed for Kelly to take that white paint off his mime face and stop mooning over the ballerina. He did, and the next two sequences are more enjoyable, the last being rather fun when animation takes over. ---from Musicals on the Silver Screen, American Library Association, 2013

Invitation To The Dance took three years to make and it was a labor of love for Gene Kelly. Too bad for him that the public didn't take to it. But it was a film aimed at a highly specialized audience, those lovers of the ballet and other forms of dance.

Around the time that Kelly was winning plaudits for Singing In The Rain he pitched the idea to the MGM studio heads and having just starring in a film that many claim as the greatest musical ever made, he was in a position of considerable leverage. To cheapen costs MGM shot it over in the United Kingdom and this does explain Kelly's appearance in a pair of British films, Crest Of The Wave and The Devil Makes Three while putting together his dance film.

All this is according to the Citadel Film series book on Gene Kelly's films and then because the third and the best sequence was to be done with animated figures like Kelly's famous dance number with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh, MGM wanted to use Hanna&Barbera their crack cartoonists. Which meant him coming back to the USA to shoot that sequence. All in all it wasn't until 1956 that Invitation To The Dance finally made it before audiences.

The story I found most astounding was Andre Previn who was brought in to score the second sequence about a piece of jewelry making the rounds. MGM didn't like the original score, but the sequence had already been shot. So Previn had to score a ballet which had already been shot with another man's music. No small feat indeed and more production delays.

All this for what was really a film that should have had limited art house release. But MGM didn't do art house type films and they wanted their money back some how.

The three sequences all have Kelly in them, MGM would have it no other way. The first casts Kelly as a Pagliacci type clown in a circus dance drama. The second is as I described before. The third has Kelly as a sailor who gets a magic lamp and a genie appears. It is the best of them.

I'm sure Gene Kelly was disappointed in the lack of applause from a mass audience for Invitation To The Dance. It's a good film, but definitely for a special audience.

Invitation to the Dance is what you get when you take an artist at the peak of his abilities and allow his imagination to run wild. Gene Kelly--and some very talented people in all fields--integrated music and dance to create three distinct stories.

He reduces some scenes to their visual essences by using abstract or minimalist sets, aided by lighting effects. The third story includes cartoons, allowing Kelly to take his imagination beyond the bounds of human limitations and physics.

The performances are a synthesis of various dance and related forms (ballet, tap, jazz, mime, acrobatics, pop, and ethnic) with musical accompaniment (classical, jazz--cool and hot--ethnic, and pop).

Invitation to the Dance is a treat for any dance lover. It should be seen by all young students of dance.

It would be interesting to see this film they way Kelly originally imagined it, with him dancing in one section only.