Stanley Donen

Film Director

• Born: April 13, 1924
• Birthplace: Columbia, South Carolina
• Died: February 21, 2019
• Place of death: Manhattan, New York City, NY

Film director

Donen directed some of the most famous musicals of the 1940s and 1950s. These films helped liberate the musical from its stagebound conventions and are notable for their energy and cinematic beauty.

Area of achievement: Entertainment

Early Life

Stanley Donen was the eldest child of Mordecai Donen, whose parents emigrated from Russia, and Helen (Cohen) Donen, whose parents emigrated from Germany. Donen’s father managed a chain of dress shops in South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee, and the family spent its summers in New York City, where his father’s employer had its headquarters.

Donen escaped the loneliness of his childhood by attending motion pictures and by making home films with an eight-millimeter camera that was a gift from his father. Donen’s life changed in 1933, when he saw his first musical, Flying Down to Rio, and began taking dance lessons. He worked at Columbia’s Town Theatre in South Carolina as a teenager, and he left for New York after he graduated from high school in 1940.

Donen quickly landed a part in the chorus of the musical Pal Joey (1940), with music by Richard Rodgers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart. Star and choreographer Gene Kelly was impressed by Donen’s energy and made him assistant choreographer on Best Foot Forward (1941) the following year and then on Beat the Band (1942). When Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) purchased the rights to Best Foot Forward, Donen followed Kelly to Hollywood.

Life’s Work

With Kelly’s help, Donen was signed to a seven-year MGM contract. He was a chorus boy in the film Best Foot Forward (1943), and then, on loan to Columbia Pictures, Donen assisted Kelly in choreographing for Cover Girl (1944). Back at MGM, the pair collaborated on Anchors Aweigh (1945), best known for Kelly’s dance with the animated mouse from the Tom and Jerry cartoons. Donen then served as choreographer for eight films, including the Esther Williams musical This Time for Keeps (1947), featuring a water ballet.

Donen and Kelly came up with the idea for the baseball musical Take Me out to the Ball Game (1949), for which they codirected Kelly’s numbers and were rewarded by getting to codirect On the Town (1949), which broke ground by leaving the MGM soundstages to film a few scenes on location in New York. The opening “New York, New York” number was shot at several tourist locations, giving a sense of the city’s hectic pace. Some have called this number the first cinematic musical sequence.

Rewarded with a new seven-year contract, Donen directed his first solo effort, Royal Wedding (1951), with Fred Astaire’s famous dancing-on-the-ceiling number. After Love Is Better than Ever (1952), a comedy with Elizabeth Taylor, Donen and Kelly codirected Singin’ in the Rain (1952). Starring Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor, the film looks at Hollywood’s painful transition from silent to sound films.

After two minor efforts, Fearless Fagan (1952) and Give a Girl a Break (1953), Donen directed his masterpiece, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). The highlight of this musical set on the Oregon frontier is a barn-raising number choreographed by Michael Kidd for which Donen exploited the CinemaScope wide-screen process to capture the constant movements of the performers.

Following another minor film, Deep in My Heart (1954), Donen joined with Kelly to codirect It’s Always Fair Weather (1955), a musical satire of advertising and television starring Kelly. The longtime collaborators had a falling out during this production and never worked together again.

Leaving MGM, Donen moved on to Paramount Pictures to make Funny Face (1957), with Astaire and Audrey Hepburn. Funny Face is the most romantic of Donen’s musicals and the first of several films he made in Europe. Donen followed with The Pajama Game (1957), the first of his two adaptations of Broadway musicals. Codirected with George Abbott, the original’s writer-director and the director of three productions in which Donen appeared, The Pajama Game, starring Doris Day, is set in an underwear factory, presented with unusual realism for a musical.

Following the service comedy Kiss Them for Me (1957), notable as the first of Donen’s four films starring Cary Grant, the director formed a production company with writer Norman Krasna. Their first effort was the light comedy Indiscreet (1958), starring Grant and Ingrid Bergman. Donen followed with Damn Yankees! (1958), another Broadway adaptation collaboration with Abbott, starring Gwen Verdon and Tab Hunter.

Donen then signed with Columbia Pictures and made a string of mild comedies: Once More with Feeling! (1960) and Surprise Package (1960), both with Yul Brynner, and The Grass Is Greener (1960), with Grant, Deborah Kerr, Robert Mitchum, and Jean Simmons. While these bland comedies lacked the energy and visual style of Donen’s musicals, he recovered from this shallow period by making his best nonmusical. Charade (1963), with Grant, Hepburn, and Walter Matthau, is a crime comedy influenced by such Alfred Hitchcock films as North by Northwest (1959). With constant shifts among romance, comedy, and action, Donen demonstrated his sheer professionalism and his skills as a storyteller. The complex spy thriller Arabesque (1966), with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren, was almost as good.

These two films illustrate Donen’s maturity as a film stylist and his awareness of the increasingly sophisticated films of European filmmakers. The influence of director Ingmar Bergman can be seen in the disintegration of the marriage of Hepburn and Albert Finney in Two for the Road (1967), which fractures time by jumping back and forth among several periods in the characters’ lives. Written by and starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Bedazzled (1967) is a lively satire of sex, religion, and fame and the last of Donen’s better films.

Donen went into a bit of a decline after Bedazzled. A gay couple, portrayed by Richard Burton and Rex Harrison, mugged their way through Staircase (1969). Except for Bob Fosse’s interpretation of a snake, The Little Prince (1974) was a lifeless musical adaptation of the Antoine de Saint-Exupéry novel. The Prohibition-era comedy Lucky Lady (1975) was an uninspired teaming of Gene Hackman, Liza Minnelli, and Burt Reynolds. The best of Donen’s later films, Movie Movie (1978), starring George C. Scott, is a spoof of 1930s musicals and melodramas. Saturn 3 (1980), a science-fiction film with Kirk Douglas, is generally considered Donen’s worst effort, though it did inspire screenwriter Martin Amis to write one of his best novels, Money (1984), which satirizes the egos and the insecurities of film stars. Blame It on Rio (1984), Donen’s final theatrical film, finds Michael Caine falling for a much younger woman. In 2002, he served as director for Elaine May's Off-Broadway production Adult Entertainment.

The father of three sons, Donen was divorced five times. For several years, he was in a relationship with May. He died in Manhattan on February 21, 2019, at the age of ninety-four.

Significance

Donen was one of the most productive directors of his era, making sixteen films from 1951 to 1960. Along with Vincente Minnelli, Donen is considered a master of the musical film. Though Donen was nominated for Directors Guild of America Awards for Singin’ in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Funny Face, Damn Yankees!, and Two for the Road, he was never nominated for an Academy Award. In 1998, he received an honorary Academy Award for the body of his work. Charade, Arabesque, and Two for the Road demonstrated that his cinematic skills could be applied to nonmusical subjects.

Bibliography

Casper, Joseph Andrew. Stanley Donen. Scarecrow, 1983.

Chumo, Peter N. “Dance, Flexibility, and the Renewal of Genre in Singin’ in the Rain.” Cinema Journal, vol. 36, 1996, pp. 39–54.

Heilpern, John. "Out to Lunch with Stanley Donen." Vanity Fair, Mar. 2013, www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/03/stanley-donan-singin-in-the-rain. Accessed 25 Apr. 2016.

Hess, Earl J., and Pratibha A. Dabholkar.“Singin’ in the Rain”: The Making of an American Masterpiece. UP of Kansas, 2009.

Silverman, Stephen M. Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies. Knopf, 1996.

Wollen, Peter. Singin’ in the Rain. BFI, 1992.