Donen Dancing on the Ceiling
1999; Salisbury University; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0090-4260
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoStephen A Silverman. Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies. New York: Knopf, 1996. At the age of 72, director Stanley Donen has received his first full-scale biography. Despite stellar credits in the field of musicals (On the Town, Singin' in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, It's Always Fair Weather Funny Face and Pajama Game) and sophisticated comedies (Indiscreet, Charade, Two for the Road, Bedazzled, Movie Movie), Donen has often been overlooked over the years in favor of his collaborators, in particular Gene Kelly, with whom he made seven films. This is partly due to an inbred tendency toward selfeffacement on Donen's part. More crucially, however, Donen and his biographer feel that it was Kelly the film star's uncharitable treatment of Donen in interviews over the years which has contributed to the resistance to the concept of Donen as a major director in his own fight. The negative portrait painted by Donen and Silverman of Kelly (as both man and artist) throughout the book is easily the most surprising thing about it. In discussing the DonenKelly screen collaborations, Silverman concedes that it was Kelly's clout at Columbia and MGM which secured jobs for Donen and that Donen rarely devised dance steps for Kelly. However. he gives Donen the edge for having conceived both the ideas and the indispensable camerawork for such technically astonishing and groundbreaking sequences as Alter Ego from Cover Girl, Jerry the Mouse in Anchors Aweigh and the opening location-filmed montage in On the Town. By contrast, Kelly's contributions to these joint efforts (particularly On the Town, with Kelly's own Day in New York ballet) are routinely dismissed as cliched, self-indulgent and pretentious. Silverman's greatest and most admirable accomplishment with this somewhat rambling tome is his solidifying an image of Donen as a forceful and thoroughly self-assured presence on the set (from his first film experience at age 19) as well as a filmmaker with a distinctly personal style and, for the most part, superb taste in material and collaborators. The author's generous treatment of Donen's abilities is not based on mere supposition or personal affection for him but backed up by such collaborators as Michael Kidd (who valued Donen above Minnelli, who was indecisive and knew little about choreographing dance for the camera), Cyd Charisse,Audrey Hepburn, Betty Comden and Adolph Green and Ray Walston, most of whom have never before given their opinions of Donen. …
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