It’s Always Fair Weather (1955)

(On Cable TV, April 2020) A very strong selling point for It’s Always Fair Weather is that it reunites a good number of people who worked on Singin’ in the Rain: Director Stanley Donen, choreographer-star Gene Kelly, dancer-actress Cyd Charisse, and so on—this was, after all, one of the “Freed Unit” musicals handled with impeccable craftsmanship by people who knew what they were doing. The lineage from Singin’ in the Rain to The Band Wagon to It’s Always Fair Weather is not only obvious—it’s playful and very much self-aware. There is a lot to like here: Many distinctive musical numbers (trashcan tap-dancing, roller-skate tap sequence, boxing-ring serenade), innovative filmmaking (decade-passing montage, triple-split screen), some cultural commentary (poking at the advertising culture of TV, with a live-confession climax that must have felt far more innovative back then), clever musical touches (such as the brilliant use of Blue Danube as an internal musical number) and a far more wistful tone than you’d expect from a 1950s movie musical. Plus, well, there’s Cyd Charisse—her green dress is wonderful, her first long scene in a taxi is a delight, and those are only two of the reasons why she gets here one of her most substantial roles—singing, dancing, comedy and romance, almost as much as in Silk Stockings. It’s not exactly perfect—the missed opportunity to make this a sequel to On the Town still rankles—but sometimes, even its flaws are endearing. The wolf-whistling bit, for instance, is awful by today’s standards, but it’s so dated, so overdone (and kind of cute) that it becomes hilarious. The 1950s were a very strong decade for musicals, and the production history of It’s Always Fair Weather suggests that this was the beginning of the end of an era at MGM, with slashed budgets and less interest in the result. No matter—I’m ranking this film high on my list of top 1950s musicals, and if it signals the end of an incredible streak, then it’s a pretty high note on which to go out.