The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 20-26
Les Girls (1957)
Directed by George Cukor
The choreographer Jack Cole brought to more than twenty Hollywood films a style of movement that mixed Western jazz with African and Indian rhythms, creating a result he called “urban dance.” Among its most vivid practitioners were Rita Hayworth (who put the blame on Mame in Gilda and shimmered luminously as a goddess in Down to Earth), Marilyn Monroe (who professed diamonds to be a girl’s best friend in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, then worked with Cole on five subsequent films), and the multinational trio of Taina Elg, Mitzi Gaynor, and Kay Kendall in Les Girls, who form a spinning triangle as they dance around Gene Kelly’s heart. The Cole Porter-scored film takes as its basis a libel trial waged by Elg’s character against Kendall’s, two former showgirls turned proper ladies in Europe who takes turns in court narrating their versions of events involving ex-impresario and possible sweetheart Barry (Kelly) before he comes to the stand himself. The flashback-based musical numbers both advance the plot and comment on the relationships emerging between Barry and the British, French, and American (played by Gaynor) girls whom he might have fancied. The set pieces all revolve around the nature of truth. Barrie Chase, who was Jack Cole’s assistant on Les Girls and who appears dancing in it, will attend both of the film’s MoMA screenings. Aaron Cutler (January 22, 7pm; January 23, 1pm at MoMA’s Cole series)
