Hi,
I know they call the music during the last musical scene The American In Paris Ballet but there are songs we already know mixed in. Does anyone know what is playing during the steamy part of the dance when he is holding her in his arms? It's so familiar but I can't place it. Thanks ahead of time.
The music for the ballet sequence at the end is Gershwin's symphonic poem "An American in Paris" in it's entirety. The choreography was done right to the piece which is written to sound like a medley of songs. The reason it sounds like you've heard it before is because the slow "love song" portion is tremendously prolific in the society much like the love theme from Tchaikovsky's "Romeo and Juliet" (you know the one that plays whenever two people are running through a field towards each other ;) ).
shareThanks for your answer...still drives me crazy...like a thought you can't quite grab on to. I'll have to listen for it in other things.
shareThe final ballet sequence is NOT Gershwin's "An American in Paris" but a hodge podge of bits of the orchestral work, variations on it and bits of other things. The sultry dance theme is the middle section of An AmericanParis but the whole thing is a complete mess musically compared to the original piece which is a superb piece of classical music showing off Gershwin's orchestration skills.
I'm not criticising the film. It's very enjoyable and a riot of colour, but it doesn't give you much idea of Gershwin's original piece.
It's an odd choice of unrealted Gershwin songs too. What on earth do they start off the film with "By Strauss" for? Something deliberately Austrian?
And "Stairway to Paradise"? And the messed up chunk of Gershwin's piano concerto???
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"The final ballet sequence is NOT Gershwin's "An American in Paris" but a hodge podge of bits of the orchestral work, variations on it and bits of other things. The sultry dance theme is the middle section of An AmericanParis but the whole thing is a complete mess musically compared to the original piece which is a superb piece of classical music showing off Gershwin's orchestration skills."
I disagree. I mean yes the orchestration and arrangement are modified, but only slightly. I listen to Gershwin's own recordings of "American in Paris" all the time, and really the only part that's significantly altered is the part right before the middle section, when all the marching bands are out on screen. For the most part this is the original arrangement, I think 95% of it at least is straight out of Gershwin.
"It's an odd choice of unrealted Gershwin songs too. What on earth do they start off the film with "By Strauss" for? Something deliberately Austrian?
And "Stairway to Paradise"? And the messed up chunk of Gershwin's piano concerto???"
I dunno about "By Strauss", I guess you could detect a note of making fun of Germans there. I mean it's not unrealistic in that sense, Kelly's character is an ex-G.I. who fought the Germans and then settled in Paris, it makes sense that he would have a reservoir of songs making fun of Germans. Also this is a trend in MGM musicals, note that they resurrected "I Love Louisa" for "Three Little Words," essentially a German drinking song done in a style to poke fun at Germans in the film.
I love the portions of "Concerto in F" that they used here. I mean it would be nice to see the whole thing, but it's just great that it made it into the film and I think the device with which they staged it, the whole bit with Levant conducting (and applauding!) himself, was fantastic. I think it just would have slowed the movie down way too much to have done the whole song. But it would be a shame to have a Gershwin movie like this and to have Oscar Levant in it and to not let him show off on the ivories, don't you think?
Just looking at the songs as a whole, I think that Minnelli, Kelly and Lerner when they were constructing the film did not really want to make this a "greatest hits" of Gershwin movie. Notice how nobody sings "Swanee." If it was a greatest hits thing, then Levant would have played "Rhapsody in Blue" and not the Concerto in F. I heard they considered hundreds of songs actually. Of course you want to use a few recognizable ones, and often the best tunes do become popular. But I think that to bring a few songs that maybe people hadn't heard in a few years into the mix was a great idea. In reality I think you could take Gershwin's catalog and make dozens of great musicals out of it without repeating the same song. But people who make these "jukebox" things these days just pick the big recognizable names. Minnelli was up to something more ambitious, he and Lerner wanted the audience to completely forget that the music was "old."
"Stairway to Paradise" was a moderate hit in George White's Scandals, one of Gershwin's first real hits that proved "Swanee" in the 1910s wasn't a fluke. But it didn't become a major standard and had sort of been forgotten by the 30s in preference of fresher Gershwin tunes from the time. I'm pretty sure this film actually brought it back to public attention to some extent. The thing that's always struck me as strange is that the character that Charles Guetary plays was set up as this jazz-hater, and then he goes and incorporates an "original" jazz song in his live act! That seems strange, but I guess it would be a waste not to let Geutary sing something. So I suspect "Stairway" was picked because it matches fairly well the Parisian cabaret or music hall style better than most of Gershwin's later stuff would. I think "The Songs of Long Ago" from "Primrose" would have been a more fitting pick personally since it would have been more in-character.
Did I not love him, Cooch? MY OWN FLESH I DIDN'T LOVE BETTER!!! But he had to say 'Nooooooooo'