Gene Kelly never achieved much renown for his voice despite issuing a handful of recordings and performing songs on screen; instead, his stature as a dancer, choreographer, and director shaped the mid-century revival of numerous song catalogs. Born Eugene Curran Kelly, he displayed early gifts for both gymnastics and dance, absorbing every available detail about ballet and other forms by his early teens. Already running a thriving dance studio in Pittsburgh, he gained his first major break in the original Broadway staging of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s Pal Joey. That success brought a motion-picture deal with David O. Selznick that quickly transferred to MGM, launching a partnership that, aided by producer Arthur Freed, revitalized the studio’s musical slate for the following fifteen years. MGM had been producing important musicals since the 1929 release The Broadway Melody, and under Freed’s supervision the unit was advancing toward more sophisticated work; by the time Kelly joined, the “Broadway Melody” cycle had run its course and the maturing Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney were ending their run of youthful, formula-driven vehicles.
Paired with Garland in the period vaudeville tale For Me and My Gal, Kelly next carried Thousands Cheer (1943), an adult counterpart to the earlier “let’s-put-on-a-show” pictures. By the middle 1940s the studio was mounting larger, more varied musicals with substantially increased budgets; some faltered, among them the Cole Porter adaptation Du Barry Was a Lady, whose bolder stage elements were toned down. During a loan-out to Columbia Pictures for the more ambitious Cover Girl, Kelly demonstrated mastery across five disciplines—dancer, actor, singer, choreographer, and director. In Anchors Aweigh he shared the screen with a youthful Frank Sinatra and staged a celebrated Technicolor sequence blending live action with animated footage of Jerry the Mouse.
As Kelly’s box-office appeal increased, so did his sway over projects; he began advocating for more expansive productions both behind and in front of the camera. When MGM launched its own record label in 1948, one of the earliest albums was his Song & Dance Man. Although he traded pleasant harmonies with Sinatra on several soundtracks, his vocal contributions remained secondary to his choreography and movement. The late-1940s blockbusters On the Town—drawn from the Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein stage hit—followed by the more personal An American in Paris and Singin’ in the Rain, cemented Kelly’s deepest impact on popular song. His once-light tenor had darkened since For Me and My Gal, yet his genial screen presence helped restore currency to numerous George and Ira Gershwin numbers as well as songs by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown. The same films’ soundtracks, along with those for Brigadoon, Summer Stock, and the later compilation That’s Entertainment! The Best of the M-G-M Musicals, further extended their reach. Ironically, Kelly’s singing on Brigadoon was uneven, yet the album kept the score before the public long after its original Broadway engagement.
Kelly’s peak creative period lasted less than twenty years. Arriving just as MGM reached its zenith in musical production, he helped realize that high point, only to watch television erode theater attendance and a new teenage audience reshape studio priorities. By 1955 the lavish MGM musical was commercially moribund, prompting Kelly to pursue directing opportunities that proved infrequent. He increasingly turned to straight dramatic roles in Marjorie Morningstar and Inherit the Wind, proving equally capable in non-musical material. In the 1970s the renewed interest in Hollywood’s past sparked by That’s Entertainment! led him to helm the sequel That’s Entertainment, Part 2. Arguably his finest post-MGM screen work came in Jacques Demy’s Young Girls of Rochefort, where the French director fashioned a fresh, non-Hollywood musical language for the decade; Kelly’s own later efforts, such as Hello, Dolly, remained within the grand-scale tradition he had helped perfect, while That’s Entertainment, Part 2 allowed him to curate and celebrate his own legacy.
