Today’s #SundayStar is birthday boy Gene Kelly, star/choreographer/director/hunk, who was born 108 years ago today.

Steven Cohan classes Kelly’s star persona as ‘virile’, characterised by ‘athletic, sexually aggressive dancing’. Kelly’s frequent partner Stanley Donen made this more explicit, stating that Kelly was ‘the only song & dance man to come out of [the classical] period who had balls’.

Kelly was hyper-focused on bringing an everyman sensibility to dance, saying he wanted to dance ‘the way a truckdriver would dance [….] or a bricklayer, or a clerk, or a postman’.

His masculinity was often complicated though by his occupying the typically feminine position of object on display, enticing the female gaze with his body.

Kelly often played sailors as the uniform was an ‘ideal outfit for a dancer’, with a monochromatic colour scheme that produces an unbroken line of the body like a unitard with embellishments like a ‘rakish tie’ & ‘jaunty cap’ that ‘inject an element of fantasy’. (Beth Genné)

Sue Harris notes the soldier characters Kelly played were often ‘a man at ease in the company of men, for whom dance is an expression of exuberance and liberation, as well as of confident modern masculinity’.

Jerome Delamater draws attention to the ‘strongly intellectual’ approach Kelly took to dance, constantly innovating how to best integrate the kinetic art form with film.

Michael Wood has argued that Kelly embodies a specific 1950s ‘public, temporal, American promise’, one of ‘not confidence in yourself, or in America, but confidence in confidence’.

Kelly’s star persona is multifaceted, not just a movie star but a ‘cinematic auteur’ whose film directing, @marilynjustine argues, is characterised ‘through control, authenticity and innovations in mise-en-scene’.

Kelly’s popularity continues to thrive today, with thousands following @genekellyfans for updates, fan fiction & fancams devoted to fictional romance between him & Judy Garland, and perhaps the most important Tumblr ever. https://genekellysbutt.tumblr.com/ 

For more on Kelly’s camp persona see ‘Dancing with Balls: Sissies, Sailors, and the Camp Masculinity of Gene Kelly’ in Steven Cohan’s Incongruous Entertainment. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Incongruous-Entertainment-Cultural-Value-Musical/dp/0822335956/

Jerome Delamater devotes a whole chapter on Kelly’s importance to film dance in the seminal Dance in the Hollywood Musical. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dance-Hollywood-Musical-Jerome-Delamater/dp/083571893X

For more on Kelly as director, see Gillian Kelly’s ‘Gene Kelly: The Performing Auteur—Manifestations of the Kelly Persona’ https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_141053_smxx.pdf

For non-academic conversation on Kelly, bring up any topic to this thread’s curator @_yankinlondon & she will find a way to tie it to the greatest film ever, The Pirate.