It's Always Fair Weather, from 1955, is the saddest and darkest musical ever made in Hollywood. It represented a radical experiment in expanding the tonal range of the musical form, an experiment that didn't find favor with audiences of the time, who greeted it with a shrug. On its initial release it barely made its costs back.
It had other problems besides its eccentric tone. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, who co-directed, didn't see eye to eye on the film and fought constantly. Kelly reportedly cut out major numbers which featured his co-stars because he was afraid that they would outshine him.
The redoubtable Cyd Charisse is left with only one big set-piece -- though admittedly it's a knock-out -- and never does a number with Kelly. The whole structure of the film seems slightly off-kilter.
The film has many great moments but few transcendent passages, where song, dance and camera soar into ethereal realms -- the sort of passages that can redeem otherwise undistinguished musicals -- and the songs themselves are mostly forgettable.
But it's an oddly moving film for all that -- deeply melancholy in powerful ways. It opens with three returning war vets having a drink at a bar in New York upon their discharge from the service. The best of pals, they vow to meet again at the same bar in ten years to celebrate an unbreakable bond. The years duly pass but the reunion doesn't go well. Life has changed the men, disappointed them -- they not only have little in common, they actually find each other irritating.
The story offers a grim view of post-war America. The great democratization of the war years has unraveled -- the citizen soldiers have reverted to the prejudices of their respective classes. They have not lived up to their youthful dreams. One, an aspiring painter, has become an advertising executive. One, who dreamed of becoming a fancy chef, runs a hamburger joint. The Kelly character, the one they all thought was destined for greatness, has become a bon vivant hustler.
It's not just the men who have failed -- there's a strong sense that American society, with its triviality and materialism and cynicism, has failed them. The story involves a Tashlin-esque satire of the worlds of television and advertising and sports. One of the three friends has a marriage that is falling apart, another has avoided marriage like the plague. Charisse plays a tough-as-nails career women who wanders into their reunion. She doesn't need men and has elaborate strategies for deflating their egos and keeping them at arm's length. Relations between the sexes in 1955 America are shown as highly problematic.
The film is steeped in angst -- the same sort of angst that plays out in other, more violent ways in film noir. This being an MGM musical, the story ends in a hopeful and touching reconciliation between the former pals -- not in the bleakness of a traditional film noir -- but it's a quiet sort of denouement, hardly triumphant, laced with rue. It involves an acceptance of the fact that the grand hopes aroused by the war are not going to be fulfilled.
In part this is about men growing up, but it's also in part about America losing its optimistic joy, its sense that anything is possible. "We won the war," the film seems to be saying, "but where did it get us?" The subject was a brave one for the Freed unit at MGM to tackle, and if the film is ultimately a failure, on various different levels, it's a noble one, and highly instructive about the mood of post-WWII America.