Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire in the Zigfield Follies. Image courtesy of MGM and Warner Bros.
In this world of ours, there are simply some debates that are timeless. Picard or Kirk? Wine or beer? Star Wars or Star Trek? Oxford comma or regular person? And when it comes to the world of dance, the lines have been clearly drawn - was Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly the best dancer of their era?
It might seem hard for modern audiences to fathom, but the movie musical used to be quite a thing in Hollywood. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers pretty much owned the 1930s, pumping out 9 hits from 1933 to 1939 at RKO including classics like Top Hat and Swing Time. Several of their later RKO pictures featured the music of George and Ira Gershwin and on cold November mornings my grandmother could often be found in the kitchen looking for the coffee pot while humming the melody of “You Can’t Take That Away From Me.” Such was the cultural memory of Fred and Ginger’s reign at RKO in pre-war America.
As RKO began a slow descent into bankruptcy (helped along when Howard Hughes purchased the studio and proceeded to run it into the ground) the 1940s and 50s were MGM’s time to shine. The most famous producer of hit musicals of the time was Arthur Freed who ran MGM’s Freed Unit and produced a string of classics over a two decade arc, including Gene Kelly’s iconic turns in Singin’ in the Rain and An American in Paris. During this early post-war period of the 1940s and 50s musicals were insanely popular, and MGM became well-known for its lavish productions featuring huge stars like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. It was Freed who, high on the mid-century appetite for musicals, recruited Fred Astaire to MGM after his contract with RKO expired. The studio was indisputably the king of musicals during that era.
Eventually, though, tastes changed. By the 1960s a new wave of young filmmakers were looking to break free from the tired, formulaic tradition of MGM’s big budget Technicolor productions featuring singing and dancing. The Hay’s Code was on its way out, as was the old Hollywood studio system, and the movie musical was seen as a relic of a bygone era. Finian’s Rainbow, one of Francis Ford Coppola’s first films, was released in 1968 and is often considered the definitive moment when the big budget studio musical died.
It was Fred Astaire’s last starring role in a musical, and by 1968 some of the pep had obviously gone out of his step. But the film also reflects the tensions that were going on under the surface in Hollywood at the time. Coppola wanted to inject some film school realism and gravitas into the film, which is about - and I cannot stress this enough - an Irish rogue who finds a pot of gold and tries to bury it while being pursued by a singing and dancing leprechaun. I have watched this film and I can confirm it is, indeed, terrible. That kind of light, fluffy, mildly idiotic material which was so perfect for a 1950’s musical was simply inimical to the sensibilities, tastes and styles of audiences and filmmakers in the late 1960s. Times had changed, and the musical was on the way out. MGM lost a huge amount of money on Finian’s Rainbow.
But we can’t really judge things like film by the changing standards of different eras. We need to situate them in the context in which they were created and meant to be enjoyed, and from the 1930s to the 1950s, the extremely popular genre of the movie musical was dominated by Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, who expressed mutual admiration for one another but were no doubt wildly competitive as they appeared very rarely together on screen (The Zigfield Follies, I believe, is the only time they shared a major number together). But the question remains - who was the better dancer?
I think the answer is clear - Fred Astaire. Singin’ in the Rain might be more famous on a purely pound-for-pound basis, but that doesn’t make it the better film, nor does it make Kelly the better dancer. The two are a study in contrasts. Gene Kelly’s style of dancing was highly athletic and physical. Fred Astaire, with his slim figure often decked out in a tuxedo, was lighter on his feet and more velvety in his movements. He always gives the impression of gliding across the dance floor, with his patented leg slide that influenced a generation of dancers to come including Michael Jackson (more on that later). Astaire is elegance; Kelly is brute force. Which one you think is better just depends on your preference.
Whenever I wanted to needle my grandma, I would just casually say to her “You know Fred Astaire was clearly a better dancer than Gene Kelly.” Even as she sank deeper into dementia, she would flare up like a rhino at the mere suggestion that Astaire was better. But he was, and grandma was wrong.
Aside from the fact that Fred and Ginger did a lot to popularize movie musicals in the 1930s, thus setting the stage for Gene Kelly’s later success at MGM, true dance aficionados know that Fred Astaire was the real deal. When he moved it was like lightning - beautiful, fleeting and charged. He couldn’t sing or act worth a lick, but he moved so smoothly and with such delicate precision that it set the gold standard against which all later dancers and choreographers held themselves.
Take the production design and costuming from 1953’s The Band Wagon, starring Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse.
The Band Wagon. Image courtesy of MGM and Warner Bros.
Does it seem familiar? It should. It heavily influenced the choreography, design and look of Michael Jackson’s Smooth Criminal video, one of the most famous music videos of modern times.
Anti-gravity lean in Smooth Criminal, from the film Moonwalker. Image courtesy of Warner Bros. and Sony Music Films.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Don Lockwood features prominently in any iconic music videos from the 1980s.
So Fred Astaire was the more interesting dancer, and the influence of his films is still reflected even in contemporary pop culture to a greater degree (in my opinion) than Gene Kelly’s. But I also have a soft spot, personally, for the guy and his films.
In the mid-2000s I had finished my degree at UCLA and was working in commercial real estate in Los Angeles. The job was a dead-end, soul-destroying kind of affair - so pretty typical for a 20-year-old with a BA in English Literature. (Here’s a bit of advice for you kids out there thinking about doing a BA in English at UCLA: employers don’t give a shit about Chaucer!). To make the most of my time, I decided that I would work there for a few years and save money so I could travel the world (this plan ended up working out pretty much exactly as designed). And in the meantime, I would focus my energy on learning as much as I could - about films, literature, history.
That is how I first got turned onto cinema - I was desperate to distract myself from how much I hated my job, so I sought solace in the pursuit of knowledge. This was back when Netflix delivered DVDs via mail, and they had a HUGE library, so when I got to the part in film history about RKO and the MGM musicals, I was able to rent them off Netflix and have them delivered to the house. I had first seen Singin’ in the Rain during a film class at UCLA and I remember thinking it was…. quaint. It’s a fun little musical, and an interesting slice of film history, but it’s not gonna knock your socks off. But when The Barkleys of Broadway arrived in the mail, it was revelatory.
The Barkleys of Broadway was Fred and Ginger’s only non-RKO film, and it was the last film they starred in together. It was also the only color film they appeared in together. It was produced by Freed at MGM in 1949, and it was a big deal because it reunited Fred and Ginger after a decade apart. A lot of the music was from Ira Gershwin, and Oscar Levant plays a prominent supporting role. Levant was a super weird and super interesting character. He was a classically trained pianist and a hypochondriac and during the film he randomly busts out virtuoso numbers on the piano like Sabre Dance and Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1. The film is wild and weird and features some stunning Technicolor dance numbers from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers who had not lost a step since their RKO days. It blew me away.
I started going through Astaire’s filmography, ordering films from Netflix and having them mailed to my grandma’s house so we could watch them together. She was slipping into early Alzheimer’s by then, but with dementia the first thing to go are the more recent memories. Older memories linger for much longer, and when she would see Fred Astaire bang out a flawless routine to an old Gershwin tune she would come alive. It gave me great joy to revisit that era in American cinema history, sitting on the couch with my grandmother who had borne witness to that very history as it was being made. So it’s not just that Fred Astaire is a great dancer, perhaps the greatest of all time. He’s a piece of history, and one that I could happily re-visit with my grandmother while she was still with us.
For a while it seemed like the musical was primed for a comeback. Chicago won Best Picture in 2002, and Moulin Rouge created quite a stir. Glee was very popular for a time on Fox. But they were all false starts, with many of the more famous titles being ruined by crap directors like Baz Luhrmann and Tom Hooper. Contemporary musicals are all about the flash and the sizzle, falling victim to the modern obsession with lots of edits and quick cuts and kinetic, frenzied camera movements. The true genius of a Fred Astaire film was that he was such a brilliant dancer, the camera could just roll on him as he performed a routine in a single, unbroken take. No cross-cutting or stylish camera angles. Just a supremely talented dancer floating across the dance floor while the camera captured it all. The talent on display was so pure, it required no camera trickery or additions. We’ve lost that kind of elemental approach to filmmaking in general, and doubly so in newer musicals.
The days of the MGM musicals are gone, and unlikely to be revived. And if Finian’s Rainbow is any indication, that might be for the best. But Fred Astaire will forever occupy a special place in the history of American cinema and dance, and in a smaller way in my personal history as his films and his movements delighted me, informed me and and provided me with an experience that I could share with my grandmother in the few years that she had left. And for those reasons, and more, we can definitively say that in the question of Fred Astaire vs Gene Kelly, old Twinkle Toes surely comes out on top.
