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An American in Paris
original movie poster
Directed by	Vincente Minnelli
Produced by	Arthur Freed
Written by	Alan Jay Lerner
Starring	Gene Kelly Leslie Caron Oscar Levant Georges Guétary Nina Foch
Distributed by	Metro Goldwyn Mayer
Release date(s)	October 4, 1951
Running time	113 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$2,723,903 (est.)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

An American in Paris is a 1951 musical film inspired by the 1928 classical composition by George Gershwin. Starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the film is set in Paris, and was directed by Vincente Minnelli from a script by Alan Jay Lerner. The choreography is by Gene Kelly. All the music is by George Gershwin, the lyrics by his brother Ira. The climax is "The American in Paris" ballet, an 18 minute dance featuring Kelly and Caron set to Gershwin's An American in Paris. The ballet alone cost more than half a million dollars, a staggering sum in those days.

Jerry Mulligan (Kelly) is an exuberant American expatriate trying to make a living in Paris as a painter. His friend Adam (Levant) is a struggling pianist who's a long time associate of a famous singer, Henri Baurel (Georges Guétary). A lonely society woman (Nina Foch) takes Jerry under her wing and supports him, only to have Jerry fall for Lise (Leslie Caron), a French girl he meets at a restaurant. Lise loves him as well, but she is already in a relationship with Henri, whom she feels indebted to for having saved her family during World War II.

The plot is interspersed with showstopping dance numbers choreographed by Gene Kelly and set to popular Gershwin tunes. Songs and music include "I Got Rhythm," "I'll Build A Stairway to Paradise," "S'Wonderful," "Our Love is Here to Stay" and Concerto in F.

• Academy Award for Best Picture - Arthur Freed, producer
• Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture - Musical or Comedy
• Academy Award for Best Art - Set Decoration, Color - E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons, F. Keogh Gleason, and Edwin B. Willis
• Academy Award for Best Cinematography, Color - John Alton and Alfred Gilks
• Academy Award for Best Costume Design, Color - Orry-Kelly, Walter Plunkett, and Irene Sharaff
• Academy Award for Best Musical Score - Saul Chaplin and Johnny Green
• Academy Award for Best Writing, Scoring and Screenplay - Alan Jay Lerner
• Writers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Written Directly for the Screen - Alan Jay Lerner

• Academy Award for Best Director - Vincente Minnelli
• Golden Globe Award for Best Director - Motion Picture - Vincente Minnelli
• Golden Globe Award for Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy - Gene Kelly
• Academy Award for Best Film Editing - Adrienne Fazan

Gene Kelly received an honorary Academy Award that year for "his versatility as an actor, singer, director and dancer, and specifically for his brilliant achievements in the art of choreography on film." It was his only Oscar.

In 1993, "An American in Paris" was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

In 2006 this film ranked #9 on the American Film Institute's list of best musicals.

Trivia sections are discouraged under Wikipedia guidelines. The article could be improved by integrating relevant items and removing inappropriate ones.

The film was shot on Hollywood sets, so it features some quirks in the occasional French dialogue. Notably, near the beginning of the I Got Rhythm number, one of the "French" kids says Jerry, parle anglais à nous, which sounds rather curious. In the French soundtrack, which switches to the original sound for the duration of the songs, the à nous is masked through a plop sound, to make the sentence more palatable.

There is a cameo representation of Winston Churchill painting during the opening section of the movie.

Hollywood movies set in France seldom used location shooting or native speakers. However, great care was sometimes put into reproducing Paris surroundings, as in American in Paris or Irma La Douce. Ironically, a lot of older French Paris-based movies were studio work as well and the same art directors (e.g. Alexandre Trauner) were sometimes working on both sides of the ocean...

Oscar Levant, who plays Adam Cook, was one of George Gershwin's closest friends in real life.

• Filmsite.org's Greatest Films An American in Paris
• Combustible Celluloid's review of An American in Paris