# American in Paris, An (1951)

### reviewed by
Jude Wanniski

    April 23, 1998

Number Three of Ten Movies That Shook Wanniski

Memo To- Website browsers, fans & clients From- Jude Wanniski http://www.polyconomics.com Re- Ten movies that helped shape my life: #3

One at a time, in the weeks ahead, I'll list here the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my favorite films. They are the movies I've seen that have had the greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each entry. Try to think of your own experiences with film s and how they influenced the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday NYTimes "Arts and Leisure" section had a piece on how difficult it is to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, which had a scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in the ways that I have. Films don't move masses. They move individuals who move masses.

3. "An American in Paris." (1951) There is no motion picture I've watched more than this MGM classic musical, easily a hundred times without exaggeration. Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron in a love story that made me dizzy when I first saw it in raging adolescence (15). The music is George Gershwin, my entry point to classical music. If I had to have one movie on a desert island, this would be it. It is flawless. There is no scene in it that is less than the others, no number I can decide is my favorite of all. Oscar Levant is priceless in a supporting role. George Guetary's "I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise," stoked my raging adolescence with every step. Gene Kelly plays a GI who stayed in Paris after the war to learn how to paint. When he sees Leslie Caron in a smoky nightclub, he is hit by the old lightning bolt, and pursues her until the movie's glorious finish. When she asks why, if he says he is such a great artist, he is not famous, he asks her to be patient. "Civilization," he says, "has a natural resistance to improving itself." In the years that followed, whenever I've been discouraged about my progress in moving the world in the direction I wish it to go, I think of that line and why it must be so.

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