Oscars Retrospective: Gigi (31st Academy Awards Review)

 

I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore~Frederick Loewe, Maurice Chevalier (voc.) - Gigi

Gigi has been called the last of the great MGM musicals from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Notice how I specified MGM musicals, and not musicals in general and this should tell you what kind of movie Gigi is. Musicals would continue to be produced throughout the 60s but they would usually start using the lens of the musical to examine social settings a bit more (e.g. West Side Story (1960), Mary Poppins (1964)). MGM’s particular style of musicals are more like the great 30s musicals such as 42nd Street (1932) and the Astaire and Rogers tap-dancing films which would get a second wind in the 50s with masterpieces such as Singin’ in the Rain (1952). These are movies that are not about using the musical to analyze modern mores; it’s about giving the audience some catchy songs, great dance sequences and fun characters who we want to see fall in love.

Gigi is set in what is probably the most movie-fied Paris that has ever been put on the silver screen. It revolves around Gaston Lachaille (Louis Jordan), a young socialite whose bachelorhood is the talk of the town, being reported on in the gossip columns. He deems most of the women and fellow socialites he meets to be dreadful bores and not anyone he would want to settle down with. The only people in life he seems to enjoy the company of are his uncle, Honoré Lachaille (Maurice Chevalier), a family friend, Madame Alvarez (Hermione Gingold) and Alvarez’s down-to-earth and charming granddaughter, Gigi (short for Gilberte) (Leslie Caron). Gaston finds that Gigi is the only person that he can confide in about how much he would prefer to marry anyone but the constant stream of vapid socialites that keeps encountering. And, wouldn’t you know it, Gigi is in fact anyone? Will the two be able to overcome the awkwardness of their lifelong friendship to take the next step? If you don’t know the answer to that question within the first 30 minutes of this movie, you’re either very young or very stupid.

As mentioned, the MGM musical has had a tried-and-true formula going for almost 30 years at this point but, like most formulas, the fun is not about the surprises they hold but instead about how well these tropes are utilized. What kind of songs, what kind of dance sequences, how good is the romance, these are the questions that should be used to judge whether or not Gigi is a good movie. And, judging by those standards, this is a delightful little film. Not the best musical ever made by MGM or its perennial director, Vincente Minnelli (my vote for both would go to Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)), but it’s still a good one.

The song numbers are interesting in that they don’t have much, or really any, dancing attached. Minnelli was a pioneer in directing musicals in that the kinetic energy that one expects from a musical doesn’t come from the dancing but, instead, from the camera itself. His movies made the camera and setting feel like a dancer and it hooks us with what the characters are singing about being so charming that you don’t particularly care. For example, one of the more enjoyable numbers in the film is this one where Gaston talks about how much he hates his life with his uncle. With another director, this could easily be dull. Instead, by placing them on a horseback carriage and having the background race by in the background, it gives the number a lot more movement.

Even if it is obviously green screened.

The leads are charming if not especially memorable. What made Minnelli’s musicals stick out from a lot of the other MGM films is that he does give his protagonists more depth than is usual. Instead of Gaston being the typical Hollywood swinger who’s obsessed with a woman (characters that Fred Astaire would play with great gusto), he’s a more aloof man who’s sick of womanizing. Him and Caron do have believable chemistry as both friends and lovers and, despite the plot being generic (even back then), they do give a good reason why they have trouble getting together in the last act.

While they’re good together, let’s stop beating around the bush and acknowledge the real star of the film, Maurice Chevalier as Uncle Honoré Lachaille. Chevalier was one of the best actors from the early days of sound, starring in some of the first great sound musicals such as The Love Parade (1929) and Love Me Tonight (1932). He balanced a career between Hollywood and French cinema and theater, eventually putting his career on hiatus in America due to that whole World War II and Red Scare thing. Gigi was one of his big comeback movies, returning to Hollywood after over 20 years. And he owns every second of it.

Whimsy is one of those things that classic Hollywood really tried to mine wherever they could and so rarely did well. There’s a fine line between a film being whimsical and being downright annoying and syrupy. While this was the trend at the time, it does lend to a lot of early films aging incredibly poorly, especially when the whimsy is just obnoxious that it comes off as insufferable to watch. Maurice Chevalier is someone who got this trick down perfectly and, to this day, I’m not entirely sure why he succeeds where so many others failed.

No matter what movie he was in, whether as a young man in the classic musicals or as an older man in Gigi, Chevalier is just so delightful to watch. What did he have that so many other actors didn’t? Shirley Temple never had it, the actors in the Lassie films never had it, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers sometimes had it but sometimes they didn’t; Chevalier always got down this sheer delight better than anyone else.

I think it’s because despite that big grin and happy-go-lucky attitude about him, there was always a bit of an element of mischief to his characters, like he knew he was up to something naughty. His characters in The Love Parade and The Smiling Lieutenant (1931) are confirmed womanizers (and his character in Gigi is really the exact same character just a little older) and he plays his whimsy like he enjoys sleeping around and doing things that many people would find scandalous. But not in a way that’s really degenerate or creepy or unsettling. This archetype is basically the stereotypical Frenchman. A man who loves fine culture, fine food, fine drink and fine women. He loves falling in love and if you don’t return his feelings, hey, no skin off his nose, there’s plenty of other fish in the sea. He just loves life so much that it’s hard not to enjoy it with him.

In terms of how that makes his character age for the modern audience, the weird thing is that I think Gigi might be a bit more poorly-aged in that regard than the earlier movies he made in the 30s. Not necessarily because he does anything that’s too risque in the film, more because of the somewhat uncomfortable implications of the film’s most famous musical number, Thank Heaven for Little Girls.

Yeah, this is a little uncomfortable now. I’m going to go ahead and assume that this is one of those things that was just so silly back in 1958 that audiences would’ve been laughing. Because it definitely wouldn’t fly today.

While Chevalier basically steals the show of the movie, it does add for some interesting commentary. The French were (and still are) known for having much more liberal attitudes towards sex than Americans which does make the contrast between Gaston and his uncle a bit more interesting. While you could argue that there is some commentary on young men being pressured by their elders into being more promiscuous when they just want to pursue love, I think that might be a bit more of a reach as I don’t think Gigi is the type of film really trying to say anything major about society and gender roles. Still, it does provide some interesting avenues for film analysis.

Even ignoring that, this movie is a lot of fun. Every romantic-comedy ultimately comes down to how good the chemistry between the leads are and it is great here. Leslie Caron’s Gigi is just the right level of naive, delightful, charming and sexy all rolled into one. I’m also impressed that for a character who spends most of the movie being such a miserable stick-in-the-mud, Gaston is still a pretty likable dude. Louis Jourdan somehow found the right balance between being just enough of a pissant that you want to see him fall in love and be happy without thinking of him being a total whiner.

Jourdan would have an interesting second wind as a villain character actor in cheesy 80s action movies such as Swamp Thing (1982) and Octopussy (1983).

In terms of flaws, Gigi doesn’t really have any noticeable ones though the tradeoff is that it does feel like it plays things a little safe at times. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but when lining up all the great, classic musicals of the early film era, it doesn’t feel as ambitious as 42nd Street, as pathos-evoking as Meet Me in St. Louis or as just so perfectly-done as Singin’ in the Rain. This leads to Gigi being relatively forgotten today, despite the play still making regular rounds on the Broadway circuit here and there. 

Still, if that’s the biggest flaw to say about Gigi, that’s not exactly a searing indictment. It’s got a likable romance, fun songs and one Hell of a great performance by Maurice Chevalier. And, on top of all of that, this movie just looks beautiful. It took a pretty hefty page out of An American in Paris’ (1951) book and magnified it a dozen times over. As mentioned, this isn’t Paris how it was in 1958 but is how Hollywood thought Paris was in 1958 and it provides an interesting time capsule in that regard. Something about seeing an exotic locale through such a Hollywoodified lens can be a treat to experience.

But could it be called movie of the year?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2

14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2

15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2

16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2

17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2

18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2

19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2

20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2

21st Academy Awards (1948): Hamlet: Part 1, Part 2

22nd Academy Awards (1949): All The King's Men: Part 1, Part 2

23rd Academy Awards (1950): All About Eve: Part 1, Part 2

24th Academy Awards (1951): An American in Paris: Part 1, Part 2

25th Academy Awards (1952): The Greatest Show on Earth: Part 1, Part 2

26th Academy Awards (1953): From Here to Eternity: Part 1, Part 2

27th Academy Awards (1954): On the Waterfront: Part 1, Part 2

28th Academy Awards (1955): Marty: Part 1, Part 2

29th Academy Awards (1956): Around the World in 80 Days: Part 1, Part 2

30th Academy Awards (1957): The Bridge on the River Kwai: Part 1, Part 2