24th Academy Awards · 1952
An American in Paris
Directed by Vincente Minnelli
“What a joy! It's M-G-M's Technicolor musical!”
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The story
Jerry Mulligan is an exuberant American expatriate in Paris trying to make a reputation as a painter. His friend Adam is a struggling concert pianist who's a long time associate of a famous French singer, Henri Baurel. A lonely society woman, Milo Roberts, takes Jerry under her wing and supports him, but is interested in more than his art.
What critics & audiences say
Tomatometer95%Fresh#26 of 98 winnersIMDb7.140K votes#86 of 98 winners
Metacritic83/ 100#54 of 93 winners
TMDB7.0/ 10
Famous lines
Back home everyone said I didn't have any talent. They might be saying the same thing over here, but it sounds better in French.
Jerry: That's, uh, quite a dress you almost have on. What holds it up?
Milo: Modesty.
Brother, if you can't paint in Paris, you'd better give up and marry the boss's daughter.
It's not a pretty face, I grant you, but underneath its flabby exterior is an enormous lack of character.
Paris? No, not this city. It's too real and too beautiful. It never lets you forget anything.
Henri: So be happy! You only find the right woman once.
Adam: That many times?
I like Paris. It's a place where you don't run into old friends, although that's never been one of my problems.
Let's just say I'm old enough to know what to do with my young feelings.
You must be out of your mink-lined head.
Maybe that's enough for some but it isn't for me anymore because the more beautiful everything is, the more it will hurt without you.
Quotes via Wikiquote
Fun facts
- Leslie Caron recalled that the Hays Office called part of her dance with a chair "sexually provocative," which surprised her: "What can you do with a chair?"Wikipedia · Introduction
- The climactic 17-minute ballet has no dialogue at all, cost nearly half a million dollars, and was filmed on 44 sets on MGM's back lot.Wikipedia · Introduction
- The ballet's sets and costumes pay tribute to painters including Dufy, Renoir, Utrillo, Rousseau and Toulouse-Lautrec, and some of its backdrops measured 300 feet wide and 40 feet high.Wikipedia · Music and dance
- Production was halted in September 1950 so Vincente Minnelli could direct Father's Little Dividend; he returned afterward to film the ballet sequence.Wikipedia · Music and dance
- An American in Paris was Leslie Caron's film debut, opposite Gene Kelly, who also choreographed the film's dance numbers.Wikipedia · Introduction
- Gene Kelly received an honorary Academy Award that year for his achievements in screen choreography. It was the only Oscar of his career.Wikipedia · Awards and honors
- The film exists because Ira Gershwin, after his brother George's death in 1937, sold the Gershwin musical catalog to MGM producer Arthur Freed in the late 1940s.Wikipedia · Introduction
- The epilogue of La La Land references the set design and costumes of An American in Paris, which director Damien Chazelle called "a movie that we just pillaged."Wikipedia · In popular culture
- A 2014 stage adaptation directed and choreographed by Christopher Wheeldon premiered in Paris at the Théâtre du Châtelet before transferring to Broadway in 2015.Wikipedia · Stage adaptations
- In the season 3 finale of The Boys, Soldier Boy reminisces about his own biopic, which supposedly lost the Best Picture Oscar to An American in Paris.Wikipedia · In popular culture