The Happy Road (1957)

(On Cable TV, November 2020) Gene Kelly was an outspoken Francophile, and while you don’t have to dig deep in a filmography that includes An American in Paris and Les demoiselles de Rochefort to realize it, there are a few other films lower down his filmography that make an even bigger case for it. How else, for instance, would have Kelly found himself in a film entirely set and shot in France, playing a father on a road trip to find his boy after he ran away from school? Today, The Happy Road ranks as one of Kelly’s least-remembered films—a lighthearted trifle in which Kelly teams up with the mother of another runaway from the same school in a series of adventures from Switzerland to Paris, going through the back roads of small-town France. It’s more lighthearted than funny, often a bit too twee in the way it finds the escapades of the kids funny rather than terrifying for the parents trying to reunite with them. The Happy Road is not a low-budget affair—by the end of the film, we even run in the French army conducting manoeuvres in the field. Kelly is his usual charming self, helped along by co-star Barbara Laage in a role that inevitably turns romantic. The Happy Road can’t be classified as an essential film, or a particularly memorable one. But for Kelly fans, it’s a welcome illustration of one of his most endearing traits, and another occasion to see him set against a French backdrop.