DVD: Gene Kelly's Invitation to the Dance As Pretentious As Its Reputation Suggests

After being exposed to the gateway drug known as That's Entertainment! as a young child, I spent much of my early film-geek years seeking out the great MGM musicals. But one I never managed to track down was Gene Kelly's Invitation to the Dance (now available from Warner Archive). Most film books I read dismissed it in passing as a pretentious experiment, so I was excited to finally see the film for myself on DVD. Alas, the critics were right all along.

In the same way that Walt Disney thought he would "educate" the American booboisie about classical music with Fantasia -- a hit-and-miss affair with thoroughly middlebrow taste when it came to the soundtrack -- Kelly wanted to go full-tilt-boogie with a terpsichorean twist, creating three segments without dialogue or lyrics; just dance, dance, dance.

Invitation opens with "Circus," starring Kelly as a clown who longs for the pretty dancing girl who only has eyes for the strapping high-wire walker. There's some lovely choreography (all by Kelly, who also directed), but Kelly's dancing is undercut by Kelly's acting -- he pours on the tear-milking lovesick-Pagliacci routine so thick that you find yourself hoping one of his fellow harlequins will come out and slap him across the face with a flounder.

Then there's "Ring Around the Rosy," a contemporary (the film was released in 1956) piece inspired by La Ronde, in which a bracelet gets passed around amidst a group of unfaithful spouses and lovers. Even the best moments of this sequence feel like pale duplications of the extraordinary "Broadway Melody" number that Kelly and Stanley Donen crafted for Singin' in the Rain four years earlier. (And if you really want to see Kelly at his best as actor, dancer, director, and choreographer, that's the movie to see.) It bears noting that the "Crooner" character in this part of the film is a Frank Sinatra type whose vocals are substituted by a wah-wah trombone; the real Sinatra had starred opposite Kelly in On the Town (also co-directed by Kelly and Donen), Anchors Aweigh, and Take Me Out to the Ball Game.

Finally, there's "Sinbad the Sailor," in which Kelly dances with animated characters created by legendary MGM animators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. (He had previously danced with Jerry, the mouse from Tom & Jerry, in 1945's Anchors Aweigh.) Kelly seems to be having the most fun here, and he gets to rock a sailor suit, one of his on-screen trademarks. This part's also notable for one of the rare screen appearances by dancer Carol Haney (also credited as one of Kelly's assistants), best known for her smokin' hot "Steam Heat" number from The Pajama Game -- although here, as Scheherezade, she mostly just sits in a lotus position and waves her arms around.

Overall, Invitation to the Dance falls into the "noble failure" category, and while it must have been a passion project for Kelly, the film really can't maintain 92 silent minutes. Much of the choreography feels overdone or overly familiar. Still, it's great that companies like Warner Archive are digging deep into their vaults so completists like me can revisit the flops of the past for the good parts they have to offer.