Ex-GI Jerry Mulligan lives in Paris where he’s trying to make it as a painter. One day, wealthy heiress Milo Roberts finds Jerry and falls for his art and his attitude. Milo shares her intent to advance Jerry’s art through her influence and also shows romantic interest in him. When he doesn’t reciprocate these feelings, she still commits to supporting his art but is made jealous by his interest in other women—such as Lise, a woman Jerry meets and basically stalks into a date. Meanwhile, Jerry’s friend and neighbor Adam, a struggling concert pianist, has an ongoing working relationship with French singer Henri Baurel. We (the audience) know that Henri is set to marry Lise (the same one). But as Jerry and Lise’s fling unfolds, she grows increasingly conflicted by which man to commit to. It’s a love-quadrilateral quagmire that can only be resolved by a 17 minute fantasy ballet sequence.
“An American in Paris” managed to establish five rather interesting characters with competing desires and motivations—and then sort of just sings and dances through a story that doesn’t know what to do with them. There’s actually a lot that I loved and wanted to love about this film. I really dug Gene Kelly’s Jerry, both carefree and cantankerous, until he couldn’t take Lise’s “no” for an answer and kept looking at Milo’s gift horse in the mouth. I also liked Adam, the “ugly-faced” pianist but he literally had no role other than to be the conduit between Jerry and Henri. It’s a funny reveal, but c’mon man, we sat through a whole fantasy concert for his character! I loved the music and at one point thought, “damn, this sounds an awful lot like ‘Rhapsody in Blue’”—you can imagine my mildly-curious surprise when I realized that the soundtrack was stocked with George Gershwin’s music. I think I was better primed to tolerate the 17 minute dance sequence than I was in “Singin’ in the Rain”, and I liked the art design and choreography of the sequence. But the sequence never really addressed the film’s drama. Rather, the film resolved itself through the hokiest of Hollywood endings. But maybe that’s what everyone needed in post-war America.