Can we arm-twist some kind of comparison between the shiny-smiling all-American song-and-dance man Gene Kelly, subject of a WGBH American Masters episode this Wednesday, March 6, at 8 p.m., and the imperious, Lear-like Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa, whose story is told on WGBH’s Great Performances March 20 at 9 p.m.? One an Irish Catholic kid from Pittsburgh who referred to himself as a blue-collar performer; the other born into Japan’s samurai class and most content at his mandarin country retreat looking out on Mount Fuji.
Actually, the difference between small-bodied Kelly’s loafers-and-a-T-shirt informality and Kurosawa’s imposing frame and elitist visage masks some interesting similarities. As we learn from these video bios, both were self-absorbed film artists (Kurosawa: "Subtract movies and I am zero") who drove their casts hard with athletic, physical demands (Kelly: "If they aren’t professional, they shouldn’t be around"), and neither suffered fools. Each had a left-wing film-union past, and also a disastrous fallout with his key artistic collaborator (co-director Stanley Donen for Kelly, actor Toshiro Mifune for Kurosawa). Each had his most transcendent cinema moment in a downpour: Kelly, of course, dancing and splashing about in Singin’ in the Rain, and Kurosawa staging perhaps the greatest movie battle of all in a ferocious deluge at the climax of The Seven Samurai.
And these posthumous TV bios? Each is lucky to have located a long on-camera career interview with its subject, in the 1980s with Kelly and in 1990 with Kurosawa, when each man was still lucid and in a mood to talk. Both programs supplement the long-ago interview with recent interrogations of the deceased’s surviving family, friends, and collaborators, and with commentary by film historians. Both end, touchingly, with an octogenarian filmmaker’s fading, stooped body, and death.
The Kelly American Masters is the more conventional work, hardly stretching beyond talking heads and film clips. But many of these clips are luminous: MGM true Technicolor, as beautiful as color gets, with Kelly kicking up a storm in scenes from On the Town, An American in Paris, and It’s Always Fair Weather. The interviews with others tell the success story of a kid from a large, happy Catholic family who floated from home to New York to the Broadway lead in Pal Joey to being courted by Hollywood.
Gene’s "manliness" was never in question. It made perfect sense that, in the 1950s, he hosted an episode of TV’s Omnibus that situated dance among other professional sports. He tossed a baseball with Mickey Mantle and (not in the documentary) tapdanced with boxing’s Sugar Ray Robinson. A guy’s guy. Many of his dance numbers are buddy-buddy items that team him with Sinatra or Donald O’Connor — or, famously, with Jerry, the cartoon mouse. Only once did he dance with Fred Astaire, a non-buddy-buddy kind of male. It seems there was no rivalry between Kelly and Astaire — they swung so differently. Kelly: "Fred represented the aristocratic when he danced. I represented the proletariat." As we are told by experts, Gene liked to dance low, Fred high. Gene dug in; Fred skimmed and floated. Fred was about the heart, Gene about muscles and the body. Fred made the most difficult steps easy and graceful. Gene made every dance turn seem an athletic feat. Says Cyd Charisse, who wrapped her leggy legs about both: "If I didn’t have a mark when I came home, it was Fred Astaire. Black and blue, it was Gene Kelly."
The Kurosawa Great Performances is a more cinematic effort, and told with some visual flair. It’s also a bit pretentious, with not one but two narrators: Sam Shepard offering voiceover and Paul Scofield doing a royalist BBC-voiced reading of sections of Kurosawa’s memoir, Something like an Autobiography. What’s best about this documentary are the interviews with some unexpectedly still-living stars (the female leads of Rashomon and Throne of Blood) and with Kurosawa’s grown son and daughter, and the peeks into Kurosawa’s summer home and into the humble Kyoto bed-and-breakfast room that he rented to write his screenplays.
Again the clips are fabulous, and as the documentary argues, the films are often autobiographical. Remember the dying old cancer-ridden man in Ikiru (1952), who’s spurned by his conventional adult son? How prescient of Kurosawa’s 1971 suicide attempt, after which his son lectured him in his hospital bed (so Hisao Kurosawa recalls without shame), "Pull yourself together. Stop making trouble for other people."
