Stanley Donen’s Movie Magic

In Singin’ in the Rain (1952), widely regarded as the greatest of all Hollywood musicals, a silent film star (Kelly), his best friend (Donald O’Connor), and a chorus girl (Debbie Reynolds) save a troubled 1920s-era production by turning it into not just a talkie but—of course!—a Hollywood musical. Film Comment editor Nicolas Rapold has pulled up an interview with Donen that appeared in the July/August 1973 issue. “All of us loved movies,” Donen told Stephen Harvey. “That’s the thing about Singin’ in the Rain that I still find nice, that we didn’t look back on the early talkies or silents and say that we were superior to them. We looked back on them with great affection and appreciation.”

For Noel Murray, writing at the Dissolve in 2013, the bittersweet It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), in which three G.I.s (Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd) who got along famously during the Second World War discover, ten years on, how far apart they’ve grown, is the richest of the undeclared trilogy. Musicals “are all about slipping past the part of the audience’s brains devoted to thoughtful analysis, and instead reaching the subconscious, where dreams, childhood memories, and the fundamentals of stimulus and response all mingle,” writes Murray. “The masterstroke of It’s Always Fair Weather is that it uses that particular quality of the musical—the ability to poke at viewers’ most primal instincts—to explore the subtle feeling of disappointment, rather than the broader strokes of joy or sorrow or lust.”

Between these productions, Donen was already striking out on his own. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw argues that he “had an instinctive grasp of how the musical worked when it was muscular and forthright and uninhibited, but also within its own world of mannered artifice. Maybe that was never truer than in Royal Wedding (1951) with Fred Astaire, whose own miraculous lighter-than-air style was different from Kelly’s more visceral approach. This was the movie with Astaire’s dancing-up-the-walls-and-on-to-ceiling scene, a trick shot achieved with a camera fixed into a set within a rotating drum: it was not Donen’s own idea, but he carried it off with aplomb.”

Donen got to work with his idol again on Funny Face (1957), which teamed Astaire, playing a fashion photographer, with Audrey Hepburn as a shy bookshop clerk turned model. Sheila O’Malley recalls the day years ago when Donen visited her class. “During his time with us, he was asked, ‘How do you direct Audrey Hepburn and not fall in love with her?’ He replied, ‘You don’t.’” Donen worked with Hepburn again on Charade (1963), a colorful amalgam of Hitchcockian thriller and screwball romance that pairs Hepburn with Cary Grant. And “they’re both so insanely beautiful,” writes O’Malley. “The film revels in it frankly and with no apology. Why deprive ourselves of enjoying their beauty, or pretend that that’s not what we’re doing? Donen knew what we wanted.” Audiences reciprocated by making Charade Donen’s biggest box-office hit, dethroning his popular 1954 musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.

In all, Donen made four films with Cary Grant, including Indiscreet (1958), Grant’s second film with Ingrid Bergman after Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946). He plays an American bachelor in London who falls for an actress but staves off commitment by pretending to be married. “Though tedious in its opening reels,” wrote Variety at the time, “the production warms up in direct relation to the heat of the love affair and, in the end, manages to fade out in a blaze of playful merriment.”

By the mid-1960s, Donen was embracing “new narrative styles as the Hollywood director most influenced by the French New Wave,” writes Carrie Rickey at RogerEbert.com. “The director’s third film with Hepburn, Two for the Road (1967), was the best of his career. This bittersweet mosaic of marriage jump-cuts back and forth among four time periods. Hepburn and co-star Albert Finney play the marrieds,” and the film’s “non-chronological narrative, surprising editing, and vulnerable performances still make it a standout in his incredible filmography.”

As a choreographer himself, Donen was an early admirer of Bob Fosse, whom he cast in Give a Girl a Break (1953), hired to choreograph The Pajama Game (1957) and Damn Yankees! (1958), and cast again in The Little Prince (1974), a musical adaptation of the beloved children’s tale by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Donen worked with British comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore on Bedazzled (1967), “perhaps the nearest anyone came to capturing Cook’s comic inspiration on film,” as Peter Bradshaw suggests. Lucky Lady (1975), starring Liza Minnelli, Gene Hackman, and Burt Reynolds, ran over budget and then flopped, and Movie Movie (1978), a salute to Hollywood’s golden age and a double feature packed into 105 minutes, hardly fared better. In 1984, Donen directed his last feature, Blame It on Rio, in which Michael Caine falls for his friend’s teenage daughter.

Donen spent the following years directing television, theater, and the occasional music video, and in 1997, he received an honorary Academy Award presented by Martin Scorsese. Ever the professional entertainer, Donen meticulously rehearsed his acceptance speech, and even if you’ve seen it again recently, it always rewards another viewing:

Married and divorced five times, Donen settled in with the great comedian, filmmaker, and actress Elaine May in 1999. He liked to joke that he asked her to marry him “about 172 times,” and instead of a wedding ring, May gave him a silver dog tag he often proudly wore at public events. It bore the inscription: “Stanley Donen. If found, please return to Elaine May.”

As Justin Chang writes in his appreciation in the Los Angeles Times, Donen leaves us a filmography full of “boundless pleasures, of ebullient miracles casually and generously given, graced by a sophisticated lightness of touch and a delicate wit that seem to have all but vanished from American movies.”

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