Invitation to the Dance

Some years back when Gene Kelly was TCM's Star of the Month, they ran a documentary on his career; unsurprisingly the documentary spent some time discussing one of his more ambitious projects: Invitation to the Dance. I had never seen the movie, so the most recent time that TCM ran it, I finally got around to putting it on my DVR. It has another airing coming up, tomorrow (July 11) at 11:30 AM, so now is the time for the review.

Invitation to the Dance is an anthology movie, which in and of itself is not unusual. But this is Gene Kelly, so he had a daring idea, which was to make a movie using only dance. Well, not only dance, but music of course. The bigger point, however, is that there's no dialog, not even like in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg where there is dialogue but it's all sung. Kelly appears in three stories told through dance, directing himself and a lot of people who are as I understand it better known as dancers than traditional actors.

The first story is called "Circus", which is set among the characters in an old-fashioned traveling circus. Kelly plays a clown, while there's a male aerialist and a woman. Kelly's clown loves the woman, but she and the aerialist are already in love with each other. So the clown decides he's going to try to win the woman over, but....

That's followed by the most complex of the three stories, "Ring Around the Rosy". This one starts off with a sort of opening credits scene that introduces us to 10 different characters. A man gives a bracelet to his wife, only for him then to learn that his wife may not be quite faithful to him. The wife then gives the bracelet to one of her friends, after which it goes through a series of people, including Kelly as a married marine. In the end, I couldn't help but think of the Jacques Tourneur short The Grand Bounce, about a bad check that gets passed among a bunch of different people to pay off a debt.

Finally is "Sinbad the Sailor". Kelly plays Sinbad, although this one looks more like a US Navy man who is in port somewhere in the stereotypical storybook Arab world. He buys a lantern and, because everyone knows the genie myth, rubs the lantern. Only, this one actually does have a genie in it, who takes Sinbad into a cartoon world where he falls in love with an animated odalisque protected by two animated guards. This segment is reminiscent of Anchors Aweigh for its combination of live action and animation.

Invitation to the Dance was released in theaters by MGM a good two years after it was made. It's easy to see why the studio sat on it, as they had no idea what to do with it. Critics of the time were not kind to it, and again, it's easy to see why. The dancing feels way too unnatural and stylized, and if anything the dancing really gets in the way of the story for the most part, although the last segment is a bit of an exception.

More recent reviewers have been less unkind to the movie, although I have to say I'm not one of those less unkind people. I can understand why Kelly would want to try something daring like this, but Invitation to the Dance just doesn't work.