An American In Paris (1951)
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Directed by: Vincente Minnelli
Starring: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Nina Foch
An American In Paris ranked # 68 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 American Films list.
An American in Paris is a 1951 musical film based on the classical composition by George Gershwin. Starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, the film is set in Paris, and directed by Vincente Minnelli from a script by Alan Jay Lerner. All of the music in the film is by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. The climax of the film is 18 minutes of dancing featuring Kelly and Caron, set to Gershwin's An American in Paris.
The film was shot on Hollywood sets, so it features some quirks in the occasional French dialogue. Notably, near the beginning of the I got rhythm number, one of the "French" kids says Jerry, parle anglais à nous, which sounds rather curious. In the French soundtrack, which switches to the original sound for the duration of the songs, the à nous is masked through a plop sound, to make the sentence more palatable.
Hollywood movies set in France seldom used location shooting or native speakers. However, great care was sometimes put into reproducing Paris surroundings, as in American in Paris or Irma La Douce. Ironically, a lot of older French Paris-based movies were studio work as well and the same art directors (eg. Alexandre Trauner) were sometimes working on both sides of the ocean.
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