Gene Kelly

His best movie roles never lost that sparring bounce, which is at the heart of his dancing style, too, with its shrugs and pretzel turns and raucous mix of glides and kicks. That's why he never seemed quite right in fanciful costumes, carrying a rose to Kathryn Grayson in his teeth in Anchors Aweigh or embodying the styles of various French painters in the overblown finale to An American in Paris. That is, not unless he could lampoon them, the way or he and Jean Hagen do in the explosively funny costume-epic sequence in Singin' in the Rain. Kelly belongs on the Montmartre street corner in An American in Paris, hawking his paintings and razzing the art students who try to critique them, or in the back-lot tenement in Cover Girl, where he executes the tricky, memorable "alter ego" number, playing call-and-response with his own conscience and finally making it disappear by hurling a garbage can through a window.

Kelly was funniest in Singin' in the Rain, and he did his best acting in An American in Paris. They were his finest pictures, and most of the numbers he's remembered for crop up in one or the other. The Gershwin showcase An American in Paris, which Alan Jay Lerner wrote and Vincente Minnelli directed, has the morning-ritual routine (inspired by Buster Keaton) where Kelly transforms his studio apartment from a bedroom into a breakfast nook, and the pas de deux by the Seine with Leslie Caron ("Love Is Here To Stay"), and the great duet with Georges Guetary, " 'S Wonderful," which is built on the exchange of two archetypes, a Yank and a Frenchman.

Singin' in the Rain, with a script by Comden and Green and songs by Arthur Freed and Nacio Herb Brown, has the love song on the soundstage with Debbie Reynolds ("You Were Meant for Me"), the sofa-leaping trio with Reynolds and Donald O'Connor ("Good Morning"), and of course the lamppost-hugging, puddle-stomping title number, which is three minutes of sheer heaven. On most of these he sings as well as dances, in a voice as light and high as whipped egg whites. It's always a surprise that he goes that high; when he duets with Garland, on "For Me and My Gal" or the second chorus of "You Wonderful You" in Summer Stock, she takes the alto part.

He and Astaire shot one number together: the Gershwin brothers' "The Babbitt and the Bromide" (a song Astaire and his sister Adele had performed on stage in Funny Face), for the last guest spot on the bill of the 1946 MGM extravaganza Ziegfeld Follies. It's not a highlight of either artist's career, but it's cheering, and you do get to see Kelly kick Astaire in the ass (twice). The Kelly musical I wish got more attention is 1955's It's Always Fair Weather, which has a terrific Comden-Green script that undercuts the bland gobs-and-girls optimism of On the Town (which also starred Kelly and came out of a Comden-Green stage show). It's a very unusual picture, directed (like both On the Town and Singin' in the Rain) by Stanley Donen. Kelly, Dan Dailey, and Michael Kidd play three GIs, buddies who vow eternal loyalty after the war and arrange to meet again in 10 years. When they do, Dailey has become a corporate snob, Kelly a seedy fight promoter, and Kidd a small-minded restaurateur. They hate one another (at least, until the end of the movie).

Fair Weather includes a number based on the Blue Danube Waltz where the guys' off-camera voices vocalize their disappointment in the way each of the others has turned out, and a lovely, melancholy trio that makes inventive use of the split screen, and Dailey's corporate-parody number "Situation Wise," and Kelly's marvelous roller-skating number "I Like Myself." One of the high points of MGM musicals of the '50s, it gave Kelly his last great role. He made only three musicals after it, one of them for the French filmmaker Jacques Demy. Then he retired to occasional straight parts and an occasional career as a director-choreographer. Nothing he did after Fair Weather stays in the mind, but that hardly matters. He left a wealth of three-minute masterpieces.