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From my favorite movies..

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

The music isn't one of the best from Cole Porter and it features a strangely subdued Gene Kelly. There's a reason Cukor was called a woman's director, because in this film the women are the focus and are they hilarious! I never heard of Kay Kendal before watching this movie. Her unique beauty and comedic timing are genius. It is the worlds loss that she passed away so soon. Top notch performances, sumptuous costumes and choreography make this musical a must see.

Copyright 1957. A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer picture. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 3 October 1957 (ran 6 weeks). U.K. release: 22 December 1957. Australian release: 12 December 1957. 10,278 feet. 114 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Which of his three dancing partners is Barry Nichols in love with?NOTES: One of the last original (as opposed to Broadway adaptations) big-screen musicals, this movie also stands in the record books as Cole Porter's last score and Gene Kelly's last film for Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer. While the critics loved it (the film came in 6th in the Film Daily's annual poll of film critics and commentators) and New Yorkers took it to their hearts, the rest of the nation was pretty well indifferent. I remember seeing it with a very modest crowd at its L.A. showcase.COMMENT: A most stylish and invigorating musical, "Les Girls" gives the impression that director Cukor set out to emulate the best of Minnelli, whilst producer Siegel threw down a similar challenge to Arthur Freed.Like all the very, very best musicals, the plot of "Les Girls" is particularly strong. In fact, so fascinating and appealing is it that our novel story and its colorful characters actually tends to overshadow the musical numbers — even with a score by the great Cole Porter.Naturally, being a Cukor film, the acting is particularly enchanting. Kay Kendall enacts a most difficult role with a consummately delightful ease which will set both critics and fans cheering.Taina (pronounced "Tina" to rhyme with China) Elg also handles a challenging role with considerable skill and finesse. In fact, she even succeeds in eliciting and maintaining audience sympathy for a character who is too worldly-wise for her own good.Both comediennes receive able support from the two men in their lives, namely British stalwart Leslie Phillips and charming (if aptly a little stiff) Frenchman, Jacques Bergerac.It is the wonderful Mitzi Gaynor who receives somewhat short shrift from the script. True, she looks most attractive, but it is not until the third of the story flashbacks that she has anything much to do. And as for her singing and dancing abilities, these are hardly catered for at all. Her numerous fans from "South Pacific" are going to be mighty disappointed.Mr. Kelly of course is much his usual calculatedly easy-going self. As mentioned above, "Les Girls" is nothing if not stylish. The color, the sets, the costumes — all represent M-G-M musical craftsmanship and artistry at its highest. If the movie is not a masterpiece, it's not for want of creativity and sensibility, it's simply that the score itself is — by Porter standards — somewhat second-rate.OTHER VIEW: I don't consider myself a director of musicals, like Minnelli or Stanley Donen. There's something illogical about musicals: people open their mouths and start singing, all of a sudden. It has to be done with a certain amount of style, not realistic at all. Did you notice how carefully color was used in "Les Girls"? Color- coordinator George Hoyningen-Huene and I decided to give each girl a color to herself, that would color each girl's sequence. Sometimes there was no color at all, which whets your appetite for later. Of course, we also had Gene Allen working with us, a very talented designer and now, sometimes, a writer. Gene is credited with George for designing the main title, but he actually did much, much more than that. - George Cukor.

An old school Hollywood filmmaker, George Cukor dives right into the most profound questions of humanity in "Les Girls" (1957), an MGM musical from the golden days, with an arguably tongue-in-cheek mentality which is, however, too often and too quickly taken as a loss of ambition and artistic devotion. The film discovers its peculiar place in between of conventional romantic comedy and philosophical tragedy. It consists of three flashback sequences linked together by a trial concerning a defamation suit. While all of the testimonies try to tell about the same time, place, and events in Paris around springtime when three female dancers were working for an American dance producer, the things the camera witnesses in each of the stories are wholly different from one another. The grandiose mise-en-scène, the Cinemascope aspect ratio, and the mobile camera as well as the complex narrative give the story an almost epic quality, thus creating poetry out of pulp prose. "Les Girls" is a very modern film. It has inter-textuality and its narrative shows signs of self- awareness. Although a concept laden with many meanings, modernism is often associated with something called perspectivism, meaning that all of events are filtered through the subjective perspectives of the characters which, in modern fiction, are juxtaposed with one another. "Les Girls" presents the spectator with three stories about the same time and place -- that is, they are intentionally directed to a same spatio-temporal point in the past -- but actually contain different events. This is due to the fact that all of the stories are, as all intentional experiences for that matter, about something from a perspective. "To see is to see from somewhere," wrote the French philosopher, Maurice Merleau- Ponty. Although the final testimony offered by the man involved at first seems to be the most plausible account and a certain final truth on the subject matter, it is very soon questioned by the third girl whose point of view was never heard. To see is always also to avert, and to uncover is always also to cover.This theme of the subjectivity of truth, and the integral role of perspectival perception in understanding and knowledge, connects "Les Girls" to the masterpiece of modern cinema, Akira Kurosawa's "Rashomon" (1950) which also consists of different stories about the same event from different perspectives. All the characters have experienced things from their own point of view -- which is both physical and mental, one might add -- and give a different account of them to the judge and the jury. Understanding is further problematicized in one scene where a Spaniard in a train compartment cannot linguistically understand the English dialogue between the main characters; yet he, too, arguably has his own point of view to the events. Cukor even seems to joke about this in the title of his film (deriving from the musical act the girls and the man are performing), combining the French definite article with an English word in a satirical slur (which never takes itself that seriously, however) towards Hollywood films where French people cannot speak their mother tongue -- only English in a French accent. In the end, as in "Rashomon", truth remains an issue. "Truth can make lovers of enemies, but lie can make enemies of lovers," one of the girls summarizes. Lie, in this sense, might be closer to primordial truth than truth itself; or, "art is a lie that makes us realize the truth," as Pablo Picasso once expressed. Truth remains a very concrete issue in the sense that the characters (quite literally) keep stumbling upon the immortal question "what is truth" carried around the courthouse by a man as if he was carrying a billboard for the latest scoop, an ironic comment on the capitalist modifications of truth, perhaps, working also as a certain chorus of Greek tragedy, making Cukor's "Les Girls", once again, a very modern film. The final beauty of the film lies, I suppose, in its brilliant courage to mix things, to throw outrageous comedy with poignant tragedy, menial stories with intelligent insight in the same pot of pondering humanity.

There are fabulous talents involved in this film, but the result is not as good as I expected. Cole Porter's songs are surprisingly undistinguished, and there's not quite as much singing and dancing as there could be. The settings and costuming are great however, and keep the eye entertained. Love those 50's wasp waists and bouffant skirts! The screenplay is sharp, the acting good, and the intriguing story keeps bowling along.Predictable it's not. Kay Kendall displays her talent for comedy, but for me the standout is Mitzi Gaynor. She is a snappy little actress and a lithe and fluid dancer. In this vehicle she outclasses Gene Kelly who falls short of his usual charm. Taina Elg (who?)is pretty enough, but to me does not have any charisma. Overall, while witty and entertaining, the story is lacking in warmth and romance. Maybe it's too witty: the stuff about relationships is pretty cynical. To summarize, it falls short on delivering the magic of the great musicals. You won't fall asleep, but you won't be singing or dancing around the living room either. 6 out of 10.