On February 21, 2019, a man died of heart failure in a New York City hospital at the age of 94. He was the last surviving director of Hollywood’s Golden Age, the final living connection to an era of movie making that produced some of the most joyous, technically inventive, and permanently beloved films in the history of American cinema.
His name was Stanley Donut. He co-directed what most critics and institutions consider the greatest musical ever made. He never received a single competitive Oscar nomination for any film he made in a career spanning six decades. He was married five time. Every marriage ended in divorce.
His first wife left him for his closest collaborator. His closest collaborator spent decades taking credit for the work they built together. One of his three sons died at 50. This is the story of the man who made the world dance and why the dancing never quite reached him. Stanley Donan was born on April 13, 1924 in Colombia, South Carolina into a family that occupied the specific precarious position of being Jewish in a city that had very few Jews and was not always certain what to do with them.
His father, Morai Moses Donan, managed a women’s dress shop. A modest, unremarkable occupation in a city where the Donan family was simultaneously respectable and peripheral, present in the community without being fully of it. His mother, Helen Cohen, was the daughter of a jewelry salesman, a woman who would prove to be the most important influence on her son’s decision to leave South Carolina and reach for the world that cinema had shown him was possible.
He had one sister, Carla, 13 years younger, born in 1937, when Stanley was already a teenager with his eyes fixed firmly on an exit from the city he had grown up hating. His description of his Colombia childhood was consistent across every interview he gave throughout his long life. Lonely, unhappy, awful.
He could not wait to get out. The loneliness had a specific source. Being one of the few Jewish children in a southern city in the late 1920s and early 1930 meant navigating a social environment that was not hostile in any organized way, but that was consistently and casually exclusionary. Anti-semitic remarks from classmates.
The sense of not quite fitting the template of the world immediately around him. the particular isolation of a child who understands early that his difference is visible and that the people who notice it do not always receive it warmly. His response to the isolation was the same response that isolated children have always reached for.
He went to the movies. He spent afternoons and evenings and weekends in Colombia’s local theaters, absorbing westerns and comedies and thrillers with the focused attention of someone who is not merely escaping, but actively building an alternative interior world. The movies were not just entertainment for Stanley Donan.
They were evidence that a different kind of life was possible. A life of color and movement and music and the specific magic of images that made people feel things they did not know they were capable of feeling. The film that changed everything arrived in 1933. Flying down to Rio was a musical featuring Fred Estair and Ginger Rogers in supporting roles.
Not yet the stars they would become, but already possessing the specific chemistry that would make them the most celebrated dance partnership in American cinema. 9-year-old Stanley Donan saw them dance and felt something shift in him that never shifted back. He said he must have seen the film 30 or 40 times.
He said it transported him into some sort of fantasy world where everything seemed to be happy, comfortable, easy, and supported. His life was not those things. the screen was. He decided to go toward the screen. He took dance lessons. He performed at the local town theater. He visited New York on family trips with his father, going to Broadway shows in the evenings and storing each of them in the specific inventory of a young man, building a vision of what he intended to become.
By 16, he had graduated from high school, a semester younger than most of his classmates, the specific acceleration of a restless intelligence, and attended the University of South Carolina for one semester before the pretense of psychology study became impossible to maintain. His mother encouraged him to go to New York.
Colombia had given him the wound. New York would give him the cure. New York in the fall of 1940 was the city that the rest of America imagined itself becoming on its best days. Dense, kinetic, indifferent to the particulars of where you came from and entirely interested in what you could do.
Stanley Donan arrived at 16 years old with the specific ambition of a young man from South Carolina who had spent his childhood watching Fred a stair and had decided that the watching was insufficient and that the doing was required. He had training. The dance lessons in Colombia and the further lessons taken in New York during family visits had given him technical foundation.
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And his instructor Ned Wayburn, who had also taught an 11-year-old Fred a stair 30 years earlier, had provided him with the specific vocabulary of theatrical dance that Broadway required. What training could not provide was the thing that separated successful performers from the merely trained, which was the quality of presence that made a room pay attention.
Donan had it. He walked into auditions and was noticed not because he was the most technically accomplished dancer in the room, but because he had an energy and a precision and a specific visual intelligence that directors recognized as useful. After two auditions, he was cast as a chorus dancer in the original Broadway production of Rogers and Hart’s pal Joey. He was 16 years old.
He had been in New York for weeks. The production starred a young Jean Kelly in the title role. Kelly was 28, already established as a significant Broadway presence, and his performance as the charming, calculating Joey Evans was generating the kind of attention that studios noticed and that MGM would eventually act on.
Donan was a chorus boy, peripheral to the production in every formal sense, present in the background of scenes that Kelly dominated. But the gap between their positions did not prevent the recognition that occurred between them. Kelly noticed the teenager from South Carolina. He noticed the specific quality of Donan’s attention.
The way the young chorus dancer watched the production with a technical focus that went beyond what the performance required of him, noting camera angles that did not exist in theater, imagining sequences that the stages physical limitations could not accommodate. Donan was not merely learning to be a dancer.
He was learning to be a filmmaker. and he was doing it in the only classroom available to him which was the stage. Kelly was drawn to him. The relationship that developed was complex from the beginning. Not quite mentorship, not quite friendship, not quite professional partnership, but something that contained elements of all three and that would define Donan’s career for the next 15 years in ways that were simultaneously enabling and constraining.
Kelly described being attracted to a young man who matched his energy and his ambition. The attraction was genuine. The power dynamic between a Broadway star and a 16-year-old chorus boy was also real, and it shaped the terms of the collaboration in ways that Donan would not fully articulate until decades later.
He worked under Kelly as an assistant choreographer on subsequent Broadway productions. best foot forward in 1941, among others. Developing the specific technical skills that translated choreographic vision into executable movement. Learning to communicate between the conception of a dance and its physical realization in a way that required both artistic sensitivity and practical problem solving.
He was in essence executing Kelly’s vision while developing the capacity to execute his own. Hollywood came calling in 1943. Kelly was signed to MGM and Donan followed, moving to Los Angeles at 19 years old to begin work as a choreographers’s assistant in the industry that had produced the films he had watched in Colombia’s theaters as a lonely child.
The transition from stage to screen was not merely geographical. It was a complete reconceptualization of what dance could be and what the medium that contained it required. The technical revelation that absorbed Donan from his first days at MGM was the camera. On stage, the audience’s perspective is fixed.
They see what the physical space presents to them. And the choreography must acknowledge that fixed viewing position in every decision about where bodies move and why. On screen, the perspective is infinitely variable. The camera can move, can cut, can composite, can place the dancing body in relationship to space and architecture and other visual elements in ways that the stage cannot permit.
The dance and the camera could be choreographed together. The film itself could be a dance. This was Donan’s insight, and it was not Jean Kelly’s. This distinction matters enormously for understanding both the films they made together and the bitterness that eventually defined the space between them.
Kelly had the physical genius and the choreographic authority. Donan had the visual intelligence and the cinematic imagination. The greatest musicals in Hollywood history were produced by the collision of those two things. The credit for producing them went for the most part to the man with the physical genius.
The man with the visual intelligence spent decades working through what that meant. MGM’s Freed unit in the 1940 and early 1950 was the most creatively productive small organization in the history of American popular entertainment. Arthur Frerieded, the producer who ran it, had the specific talent for institutional management that allowed extraordinary individual talents to function at full capacity.
He created the conditions for excellence without trying to control the specific form it took, provided resources without demanding oversight, and assembled around himself a constellation of choreographers, directors, composers, lyricists, designers, and cinematographers whose work individually and collectively constituted one of the sustained pinnacles of the American art form.
Stanley Donan arrived in this environment at 19 and found in it the exact alignment of institutional support and creative freedom that his specific combination of abilities required. He was not a performer of Kelly’s magnitude and never aspired to be. He was a filmmaker and the freed unit provided him with the tools and the platform and the collaborative ecosystem to discover what film making at his level of visual imagination could produce.
His first significant contribution as a director came through a sequence in anchors oig in 1945. The film starred Kelly and Frank Sinatra as sailors on leave in Hollywood and contained a dance sequence in which Kelly performs alongside Jerry the cartoon mouse from Tom and Jerry. A sequence that required Donan at 20 years old to solve a technical problem that had never been solved before.
How do you place a live dancer in credible physical relationship with an animated character that does not yet exist maintaining the illusion of interaction between them with sufficient precision that the composite sequence feels like a shared space rather than two separate performances superimposed. Donan conceived and executed the solution.
The sequence required Kelly to perform against an empty frame, responding to movements and timing that existed only in Donan’s imagination and in the animator’s eventual work with the camera placement and the choreographic design calibrated to produce. In the final composite, the specific illusion of genuine partnership between a man and a cartoon mouse. It worked completely.
The sequence is charming and technically remarkable and remains one of the most cited examples of the specific innovation that Donan brought to the medium. The willingness to use cinema specific technical capabilities as choreographic elements rather than simply recording devices. The collaboration with Kelly deepened through the late 1940 as both men’s authority at MGM expanded.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game in 1949, which they co-wrote and co-directed with Busby Berkeley, nominally in charge, established the working dynamic that would produce their greatest films. Kelly supplying the physical vision and the performers authority. Donan supplying the camera grammar and the editorial intelligence that transformed Kelly’s physical vision into film.
The division of labor was not clean or consistent. Both men contributed to both dimensions of the work, but the pattern was identifiable to anyone paying close enough attention. On the Town, released in December 1949, was the breakthrough that announced what the collaboration was capable of. It was the first Hollywood musical filmed substantially on location.
The sequences in which Kelly, Sinatra, and Jules Munchin and their female co-stars move through the actual streets and landmarks of New York City were unprecedented in the history of the genre, and the unprecedented quality was Donan’s. Kelly was resistant to the location shooting initially.
The studio’s controlled environment was more hospitable to the specific kind of choreographic precision he required. And Donan pushed for it because he understood that the actual city with its physical reality and its specific visual texture would give the film a vitality that the backlog could not replicate. He was right.
On the Town crackles with the energy of real New York in the way that studiobound musicals of the era do not. And the difference is not peripheral to the film’s quality. It is central to it. The decision to go into the city was Donan’s decision and it was the right one. And the film’s enduring vitality is partly the product of that rightness.
Arthur Freed, who had watched both men develop through the late 1940, understood what he had. Two people whose individual abilities were complimentary in ways that produced work neither could have produced alone, and who were both sufficiently driven and sufficiently capable that the collaboration generated a specific competitive energy that kept the quality high.
He also understood because Freed was perceptive about the human dimensions of creative relationships in ways that many producers of his era were not that the specific dynamic between Kelly and Donan was not entirely comfortable and would not remain stable indefinitely. Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, which Donan directed alone in 1954.
His first significant solo work without Kelly, was a demonstration of the range of his abilities that the collaborative credits had somewhat obscured. The film had nothing to do with the urban sophistication of On the Town or the formal experimentation of Singan in the rain.
It was a frontier musical broadly drawn featuring athletic physical comedy choreographed by Michael Kidd rather than Donan himself. It worked spectacularly. The barn-raising sequence is among the most purely joyful extended passages in the history of the film musical and its joy comes from exactly the kind of physical energy and editing precision that were don specific gifts.
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers was nominated for Academy Award for best picture. It received five nominations in total. Donan was not nominated for directing it. This was the first significant institutional signal about how the Academy was going to treat him. That his contribution to the films he made was going to be received as the contribution of a craftsman rather than an artist, a person who executed the work rather than created it.
The signal would be repeated throughout his career with a consistency that had the quality of institutional policy rather than individual oversight. Singen in the Rain, the film that came between On the Town and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers chronologically, is the film that sits permanently at or near the top of every serious ranking of the greatest American films ever made.
It emerged from the Freed unit in 1952 as a project built around the MGM song catalog. Producer Freed himself had written many of the songs with Nasio Herb Brown in the 1920s and 1930 and the film’s conceit was to construct a story that would accommodate them in their original context while commenting on the specific moment of Hollywood’s transition from silent to sound film.
Betty Camden and Adolf Green wrote the screenplay with the specific intelligence and the specific wit that their long Broadway collaboration had produced. Kelly starred and co-directed and performed the rain sequence with a fever of 103°, dancing in cold artificial rain until the sequence was exactly what he needed it to be.
Donan managed the camera, the specific visual grammar of the rain sequence, the camera’s movement and placement, the way the editing turned Kelly’s physical performance into a cinematic experience rather than simply a recorded one. The rain sequence is the most famous single sequence in the history of the American musical. The camera swoops back at its conclusion as Kelly spins in circles under the lampost, riding his umbrella like a sail.
And the image is one of the most cited explosions of pure joy in the history of cinema. That camera swoop was Donan’s decision. Kelly’s body performed the joy. Donan’s camera found the frame that made the joy permanent. The film received two Oscar nominations for supporting actress Gene Hagen and for its scoring.
Not for directing, not for best picture. The film that most of the world subsequently decided was the greatest musical ever made received. At the time of its release, two minor Oscar nominations and was not considered for the major awards. This was 1952 and the academyy’s preferences were running in other directions. But the specific indifference of the institution to sing in the reigns achievement is one of the most consequential failures of institutional recognition in the history of Hollywood’s formal awards and its consequences fell most heavily on the person whose contribution was already most invisible. Stanley Donutan Kelly at least had the performance. The performance was in the film indelible and permanent available for recognition in the specific way that physical performance is available visibly undeniably in the man’s face and body
and the specific quality of his joy in the rain. Donan’s contribution was everywhere in the film and nowhere in the image. The camera swoop is Donan. The editorial rhythm that makes the comedy land is Donan. The specific visual intelligence that turns the joke about Lena Lamont speaking voice into genuine comedy rather than mere plot mechanism is Donan.
None of it was separately visible. None of it could be pointed to and therefore none of it was recognized. The collaboration between Stanley Donan and Jean Kelly has been described by film historians as one of the great creative partnerships in American cinema, which is accurate, and as a partnership of equals who simply went their separate ways, which is not.
The ending of the collaboration was not a mutual decision made by two men who had completed what they had to do together and wished each other well on divergent paths. It was the fracture of a relationship that had always been unequal under pressure that had been building for years, finally arriving at a breaking point that left Donan with a bitterness he did not entirely resolve for the rest of his 94 years.
The inequality was structural and was present from the first moment Donan arrived in the chorus of pal Joey at 16 years old. Kelly was the star. Donan was the chorus boy. The distance between those positions was enormous in professional authority, in institutional standing, in the specific power that comes from being the person whose name is above the title.
Kelly’s name was always above the title. Donan’s when it appeared at all in the early years appeared in the smaller lettering reserved for the people who executed the stars vision. As Donan’s contributions became more clearly essential to the work’s quality, the credit structures did not shift in proportion on the town and singing in the rain carried both their names as co-directors, which was unusual.
Co-directing credits were rare in Hollywood because the studio system was built around the director as singular author and splitting that credit was an institutional acknowledgment that two people were genuinely sharing the creative authority. The co-director credits reflected a real arrangement, but they did not reflect the full reality because the film’s public reception attributed their quality primarily to Kelly and secondarily to Donan in proportion to their relative celebrity rather than their relative contribution. Kelly could be cold. He could be condescending. These are Donan’s words offered in various forms across various interviews spanning decades and they carry the specific weight of a person who has thought carefully about how to describe an experience without overstating it and who has arrived at language that is precise rather than merely angry. Cold and condescending are specific qualities
that describe specific behavior. The withdrawal of warmth as a form of assertion. The treatment of a collaborator as subordinate rather than equal. The specific dynamic of a powerful person who bestows or withholds recognition according to their own comfort rather than according to the reality of contribution.
The Gene Coin situation was the most intimate expression of the power dynamic and it was simultaneously the most painful and the most revealing. Coin was a dancer and choreographer who had worked with both men, assisting on productions at MGM from the late 1940s onward. Donan married her in 1948. They divorced in 1951.
The reasons for the divorce are not extensively documented. Donan’s private life was throughout his career more private than most Hollywood figures of his era. But the dissolution of the marriage was followed in 1960 by her marriage to Jean Kelly. Donan’s first wife married his most important professional collaborator 9 years after their divorce.
This is the kind of biographical fact that requires very little analysis to produce emotional resonance. It’s specific meaning for Donan. Whether it constituted a betrayal, whether it deepened existing professional wounds, whether it was managed with equinimity or with damage is not documented in the direct way that would allow confident conclusions.
What is documentable is that the marriage to Coin was the first of Donan’s five marriages, all of which ended in divorce, and that the pattern of romantic difficulty across his personal life ran parallel to the pattern of professional difficulty in his collaborations, which suggests that the two domains were not entirely separate in their origins.
By the time Donan told the New York Times in 1996 that Kelly could be difficult with him and everyone else and that it was always a complicated collaboration, Kelly had been dead for a few months. The timing was not coincidental. Donan had spent decades being publicly restrained about the partnership’s difficulties, maintaining the discretion that professional relationships require even when those relationships have ended.
Kelly’s death released him from that restraint at least partially. He could speak. He spoke. He also said in a 1992 interview the sentence that most completely captures the specific nature of what existed between them. I’m grateful to him, but I paid back the debt 10 times over and he got his money’s worth out of me.
The sentence is extraordinary in its economy. It acknowledges the debt Kelly had advanced Donan’s career, had insisted on his participation in projects that established his abilities, had given a 16-year-old chorus boy from South Carolina access to the professional world that would define his life. That was real, and Donan acknowledged it without qualification.
But the second and third sentences transformed the acknowledgement into something more complicated. The debt had been repaid 10 times over. Kelly had gotten his money’s worth. The framing is financial, which is deliberate. It is the language of a transaction rather than a friendship, a professional arrangement rather than a creative partnership of mutual benefit.
It is the language of a man who has decided after considerable thought that what he and Kelly had was a fair exchange commercially and an inequitable one personally, and who is prepared to say so. It’s Always Fair, the 1955 film that ended their collaboration, is the most honest document of the relationship’s deterioration.
The film was about three veterans who reunion and discover they have become strangers to each other and to themselves. Men who had been bound together by shared experience and who had over 10 years of separate civilian lives become people whose connection no longer held. The subject was close enough to the actual situation between Donan and Kelly to constitute for anyone who knew the context a self-aware examination of what was happening between the two men making it.
They were making a film about the difficulty of maintaining genuine friendship across time and divergence while demonstrating through the making of it that they could no longer maintain the friendship or the creative partnership. The film’s darkness, genuine and unusual for the musical genre, reflected the specific emotional temperature of its production.
Donan described its Always Fair as the most professionally difficult experience of his career up to that point. They finished the film. They did not work together again. Donan’s subsequent interviews about Kelly moved over the years from the diplomatic reticence of professional discretion to something more specific and more personal.
the coldness, the condescension, the failure to appreciate what Donan had contributed. These were not abstract characterizations. They were the description of a person who had spent 15 years in a relationship that gave him access to extraordinary creative possibilities while simultaneously treating him as less than he was and who had eventually said so.
Not explosively, not with the drama that grievances about professional injustice sometimes produce in public figures, just plainly in the specific language of someone who has process the experience sufficiently to describe it without being consumed by the description. The sadness in the situation, and there is genuine sadness in it, beyond the professional bitterness, is that the films they made together were the best work either of them produced.
On the town, singing in the rain, it’s always fair weather. These are the films that appear in the permanent critical conversation about the greatest American movies, the films that get cited by subsequent filmmakers, the films that endure. They could not have been made by either man alone.
They required the specific collision of Kelly’s physical authority and Donan’s visual intelligence. And the relationship that made them possible was also the relationship that eventually produced damage that neither party fully resolved. The cushion in Donan’s living room, which friends reported bore the embroidered motto, eat, drink, and remarry, was either a joke about his five marriages or a philosophy about the necessity of forward motion or both.
He did not like living alone. He was married five times. He never found in the domestic sphere what he had found in the creative sphere. A partnership so aligned in its essential qualities that the combination of two incomplete things produced something greater than either could have achieved individually.
He looked for it in five marriages. The looking was real and the looking failed repeatedly and he made a joke of the cushion because making a joke of it was what you did when the thing was too large and too persistent to engage with directly. The Hollywood musical died between 1955 and 1960 in the specific way that cultural forms die.
Not in a single definitive moment, but in the gradual withdrawal of the audience that had sustained it. the slow evaporation of the economic conditions that had made it possible and the arrival of new cultural energies, rock and roll, television, the particular restlessness of postwar American youth culture that had no use for the genre’s specific pleasures.
Stanley Donan saw it coming. He had been watching the industry with the analytical attention of someone who understood that his primary skill set was aligned with a genre that was losing its commercial viability and who had been quietly developing the range to exist outside that genre. The post Kelly years were therefore not a period of decline but of deliberate reinvention.
a filmmaker who had been primarily known as a director of musicals becoming a filmmaker who used the specific skills that musicals had developed in him. The visual sophistication, the editing intelligence, the instinct for timing and for the specific quality of joy that great popular cinema produces in service of different genres.
Funny face in 1957 was the transitional film still formally a musical still built around the kind of Gershwin song book that the freed unit had been mining for a decade but incorporating Donan’s developing interest in European visual culture and in the relationship between high fashion and popular entertainment that Paris in the late 1950 uniquely embodied Fred a stair and Audrey Hepburn the combination is itself self a statement about the film’s specific ambitions.
Pairing the era’s most technically accomplished male dancer with the era’s most distinctive female present in a film that managed to be simultaneously a showcase for both and a genuinely engaging story about fashion photography and intellectual pretention. Heburn was the discovery of funny face in the sense that the film revealed a quality of hers that had not previously been fully displayed on screen.
A physical intelligence and a comedic timing that placed her in the specific tradition of the great female screw ball performers. While her specific quality of gravity gave the comedy a dimension that pure screw ball lacked. Donan understood what she could do and built the film around it. He was, as she later said in her introduction to his biography, a master movie maker who combined remarkable professional talents with an extraordinary amount of sensitivity and patience.
Her assessment was specific and earned. She appeared in three of his films across a decade and described each experience with the warmth of genuine professional admiration. The transition from musicals to other genres was accomplished by Donan with the directorial equivalent of the Fred Estair approach to dancing.
Make the difficult look effortless. Let the technical sophistication be invisible. Ensure that what the audience experiences is the story and the performance rather than the machinery producing them. Indiscreet in 1958 with Carrie Grant and Ingred Bergman was his first fully non-m musical film and demonstrated that the specific skills he had developed directing musicals, the management of timing, the understanding of how visual rhythm supports narrative and emotional rhythm translated perfectly to romantic comedy. The film worked, the transition worked. Carrie Grant became his primary collaborator in the post Kelly years in the specific way that creative relationships form when two people discover that their respective abilities produce better work together than apart. Grant was the most technically accomplished light comedian in Hollywood history. A performer who had refined the specific art of making
effortless look effortless across decades of practice in precisely the genres that Donan was now working in. They made Indiscreet together. They made Charade together. Charade, released in 1963, is the film that most completely demonstrates what Donan had become in the decade after the Kelly collaboration ended.
It is a romantic comedy thriller, a genre hybrid that had no established template and that required its director to manage the tonal shifts between genuine danger and genuine humor with a precision that most filmmakers of the era could not have achieved. Paris provided the backdrop. Heburn and Grant provided the performances. Donan provided the visual grammar and the editorial intelligence that made the genre hybrid, not merely functional, but genuinely pleasurable.
A film that could frighten and delight within the same scene without the tonal shifts feeling like failures of coherence. The film is set in Paris, which gave Donan the specific visual resources of a city he genuinely loved and understood. the streets and landmarks and light of a European capital that had nothing in common with the Colombia, South Carolina of his childhood except the quality of feeling like somewhere he wanted to be.
He had been spending time in London and Paris since the mid 1950 increasingly drawn to the European filmmaking environment and to the specific freedom from Hollywood’s institutional constraints that European production offer. He would make five consecutive films in England before returning to the United States for Lucky Lady in 1975.
A pattern that reflected both his genuine affection for European cultural life and his growing alienation from the Hollywood that had produced the musical era and was now doing something entirely different. Two for the road in 1967 is the film that Donan himself considered his best work. a judgment that Audrey Hepburn confirmed, noting that he had told her it was the finest performance of her career.
The film was formally ambitious in ways that its 1967 contemporaries rarely matched. A love story told through multiple simultaneous time frames, cutting between different periods of a marriage with the fluid nonlinearity that subsequent filmmakers, including Richard Linklater in the Before Trilogy, would explicitly acknowledge as foundational.
The film did what great cinema does. It demonstrated something about human experience, specifically about the way that love and disappointment and time accumulate within a marriage. that could only be said in the specific language of moving images and editorial rhythm. Two for the road did not make the kind of cultural impact at the time of its release that retrospective assessment has since assigned it.
Critics appreciated it. Audiences were somewhat puzzled by the temporal complexity. The film found its audience over decades rather than in the specific commercial moment of its release, which is the pattern that ambitious formal work tends to follow. The initial reception shaped by the audience’s existing expectations.
The subsequent reputation shaped by what the film actually was. He made The Pajama Game in 1957 and Damn Yankees in 1958, both with George Abbott as co-director, collaborations that were more workmanlike than inspired. But that demonstrated his continued command of the musical form even as the genre was losing its commercial viability.
Damn Yankees in particular gave him the opportunity to work with Bob Fos as choreographer which was the kind of encounter between two people with complimentary visions of what dance on film could be. that Donan’s career had periodically produced and that consistently generated work of above average quality throughout the late 1950 and early 1960.
As Donan was establishing his postmusical identity through the Grant and Heburn films, the Academy was demonstrating with remarkable consistency that it had decided his work was not the kind of work for which directors were nominated. Seven brides for seven brothers had been nominated for best picture in 1955 and Donan had not been nominated for directing it.
Singan in the reigns rehabilitation was proceeding slowly in the critical consciousness but the academy had not revisited its 1952 assessment. Funny face received no directing nomination. Charade received no directing nomination. Two for the road received no directing nomination. This is the accumulation that makes the phrase never nominated extraordinary.
Singing in the rain, seven brides for seven brothers, funny face, charade, two for the road. A career that produced five films of genuine and lasting distinction, any one of which would have been sufficient to establish a director’s reputation as someone the academy should have recognized. And the Academy recognized none of them with a directing nomination.
The oversight was not accidental. It was the product of a systematic institutional failure to see Donan’s contribution as the kind of contribution that directing nominations are given for which is a failure that the history of cinema makes impossible to understand as anything other than exactly what it was.
He had a cushion embroidered with the words eat, drink, and remarry which was the joke version of the reality. The reality was five marriages and five divorces and three sons, one of whom died of a heart attack at 50. The particular loss that parents experience when children predes them. The reversal of the expected order that no amount of distance or difficulty in the parent child relationship makes easier to absorb.
He was not bitter about the marriages in any visible or expressed way. He spoke of them in interviews with the ry equinimity of someone who has decided that the pattern is worth acknowledging with humor because the alternative is a gravity that doesn’t particularly serve anyone. He did not like living alone. He kept trying.
The Triang produced marriages and children and divorces and eventually a domestic arrangement with Elaine May, the writer, actress, and filmmaker who was his companion from around 1999 until his death that had the specific quality of a late life resolution to a problem that had been running since the 16-year-old boy from South Carolina first arrived in New York.
May was brilliant and funny and demanding and entirely herself, which placed her in the company of the women Donan had always been drawn to. The ones who were not peripheral to their own lives, who had strong opinions and expressed them, who could match his intelligence and his humor without being threatened by either.
The partnership was not marked by the institutional recognition of marriage, but it was by the accounts of people who knew them together, a genuine and sustaining companionship. Two difficult, gifted, irreverent people who had found in each other the specific combination of challenge and comfort that they needed and had stopped looking elsewhere.
The specific problem with Stanley Donan’s legacy, the reason his name is less immediately recognizable to general audiences than his films, is the problem of the invisible contribution. What Donan did was everywhere in the films he made and nowhere in the image. He did not appear on screen. He did not perform the dances.
He did not occupy the space that audiences could see and recognize and attach an identity to. What he did was position the camera, determine the edit, find the specific angle that transformed a dancer’s movement into a cinematic experience rather than merely a recorded one, and make the thousand small decisions that constitute the filmmaking craft at its highest level of operation.
These contributions are invisible by definition. The best filmm leaves no fingerprints. The audience experiences the result, the joy, the forward momentum, the specific pleasure of watching images that have been assembled with precision and care without being aware of the assembly. This is what Dolan achieved.
He made invisible art that was experienced as pure pleasure. And the experienced pleasure was attributed to the things that were visible, the dancers, the performers, the songs, rather than to the specific decisions that made the visible elements work. The co-director credit on singing in the rain and on the town.
And it’s always fair whether partially address the invisibility, but only partially because co-director credit is not the same as equal recognition. When critics wrote about singing in the rain, they wrote about Kelly, about the rain sequence, about the physical performance, about the specific quality of masculine joy that Kelly embodied in those four minutes of film.
They wrote about Debbie Reynolds and Donald O’Connor and the comedy of the transition to sound premise. They wrote about Betty Comeden and Adolf Green screenplay. They did not write about the camera swoop at the rain sequence’s conclusion, which was Donan’s decision. and which is the specific cinematic element that makes the sequence transcend its already extraordinary choreographic content and become genuinely cinematic rather than merely theatrical.
This is a distinction that matters enormously in the assessment of what Donan actually did. The choreography of the rain sequence, the lampost, the umbrella, the specific path that Kelly’s body traces through the artificial rain is Kelly’s work. The camera grammar that transforms the choreography into the most cited expression of joy in the history of American cinema is Donan’s work.
The two things are inseparable in the finished film. In the critical discourse, they were routinely separated with the choreography receiving the recognition and the camera grammar being treated as the transparent medium through which the choreography was transmitted. Fred a stair ceiling dance in royal wedding in 1951.
The sequence in which a stair appears to dance up the walls and across the ceiling of a ship’s ballroom. Defying gravity with a casualness that made audiences question what they were seeing was a technical problem that Donan solved. The solution required building a rotating room and mounting the camera inside it so that the room’s rotation relative to the camera’s fixed position produced the illusion of a stair remaining upright while the surfaces around him rotated.
The concept was donins. The engineering was executed according to his specifications. The result was one of the most celebrated visual illusions in the history of the American musical and it is almost always discussed in terms of a stair’s performance rather than in terms of the technical imagination that made the performance possible.
his contribution to anchor’s oig. The Jerry the Mouse sequence, the first credible liveaction/an animation composite in the history of the Hollywood musical has similarly been absorbed into the Kelly legacy rather than being attributed to the person who actually conceived and directed it. The sequence required the specific visual imagination of someone who could think simultaneously about what the camera would see and what the animators would draw and what the composite of those two elements would look like. And it required the directorial authority to execute a precise and technically demanding concept without the benefit of precedent. Donan was 20 years old when he directed it. The concept was entirely his. The pattern across his career is consistent. Technical innovations that shaped the subsequent history of Hollywood filmm were conceived by Donan,
executed under his direction and attributed in the popular and critical discourse to the performers or the productions that contained them rather than to the director who made them possible. This is not a unique injustice in the history of cinema. Cinematographers and editors and production designers routinely work in conditions of invisibility relative to directors and performers, but it is a significant one in Donan’s specific case because the invisibility of his contribution was compounded by the visibility of Kelly’s. The relationship with Fred Aair, which produced royal wedding and funny face, was a different kind of partnership than the Kelly collaboration. A stair was 20 years older than Donan and had been a major star of the Hollywood musical since the mid 1930s. He was technically at the point of his career where the collaboration with Donan began approaching the end of his active performing years. A man of considerable grace and technical
authority who had been doing the same extraordinary thing for two decades and who understood that the medium was changing around him. Donan gave a stare the ceiling dance. Yet he gave him through the camera placement and the editing of the ceiling sequence a moment of pure visual magic that extended his career and his reputation beyond the point where ordinary performing vitality would have carried him.
A stare understood what had been given to him and expressed genuine gratitude for it. Unlike Kelly who received what Donan gave him with a condescension that belied the size of the gift. The contrast between the two collaborations says something about both Kelly and a stare and something about the specific vulnerability of the director whose primary tool is the invisible one.
Donan’s relationship with Audrey Heburn which produced funny face charade and two for the road was the most sustained and most clearly equal of his major professional collaborations. Heburn described him as combining remarkable professional talents with sensitivity and patience and a tremendous sense of humor.
The description captures something specific about what Donan was like as a director of actors when the power dynamic of the collaboration was genuinely balanced, patient with the specific kind of patience that comes from being genuinely interested in what the other person is doing rather than impatient to move on to the next camera position.
Sensitive in the specific way that great directors of actors are sensitive, which is not emotional sensitivity in the therapeutic sense, but the perceptual sensitivity of someone who can see what an actor is doing before the actor is fully aware of doing it. He had that quality with Heburn and he had it with Carrie Grant and he had it with the other major performers he directed in the post Kelly period. The films reflect it.
The performances in charade and two for the road and funny face are not simply technically accomplished but genuinely alive, genuinely inhabited in ways that reflect a director who is paying the specific kind of attention that performers respond to. His personal life in the decades between the Kelly collaboration and the 1998 honorary Oscar was organized around the making of films and the making and dissolving of marriages with a consistency that suggests both the dedication to work and the difficulty with the domestic sphere were structural rather than situational. He was in England making films from the late 1950 through most of the 1960. Two for the road in Paris, Bedazzled in London, Staircase in Paris. Again, the English films reflect a genuine affection for European filmmaking culture and a genuine engagement with
the specific visual qualities of European locations that the Hollywood backlot could not provide. They also reflect a man who had after the breakdown of the Kelly collaboration and the accumulation of MGM’s institutional indifference found more comfortable creative ground in a different country, Lucky Lady in 1975 was his return to Hollywood and his most expensive commercial failure.
a romantic adventure set during prohibition with Bert Reynolds, Gene Hackman, and Lisa Minnelli that had everything a successful film of its era should have had, and that failed dramatically at the box office, as certain expensive productions do for reasons that neither the talent nor the director can easily account for after the fact.
Movie Movie in 1978, a loving parody of 1930s genres with George C. Scott was more interesting and similarly unsuccessful commercially. Saturn 3 in 1980 and Blame it on Rio in 1984 are the films at the bottom of his filmography. Productions that failed to generate the specific chemistry between concept and execution that his best work had always possessed.
Films in which the machinery of filmm was visible in ways that great filmm never allows. The fingerprints of effort present were the illusion of effortlessness should have been. He did not disown them. He acknowledged their failure with the same directness that he acknowledged everything else about his career without the theatrical self flagagillation that unsuccessful late career work sometimes produces in filmmakers who had expected more.
What he had produced across the years from On the Town to two for the road was a body of work of genuine and lasting distinction. Four films inducted into the National Film Registry. Five directors guild nominations. The sustained appreciation of the filmmakers who came after him and who understood what he had done even when the industry’s formal recognition apparatus had declined to acknowledge it.
Richard Linklater named two for the road as foundational to the before trilogy. Edgar Wright cited his editing intelligence as a direct influence. The lineage was real and it was acknowledged by the people capable of recognizing what they owed with the specific directness of genuine admiration. He had built his career on the principle that the camera was not a neutral recording device but an active choreographic element.
That the relationship between the camera’s movement and the performer’s movement could be designed with the same precision and the same intention as the performer’s movement itself. This principle which Donan had understood and applied since he was 20 years old directing Jerry the mouse in Anchor’s Og is now so thoroughly absorbed into the standard vocabulary of filmm that it requires no advocacy.
It is simply how film is made. Donan was one of the people who made it that way. and the invisibility of the principal’s origin. The fact that it is now assumed rather than attributed is the specific form that his legacy takes in the contemporary practice of the art form he helped define.
The cushion in Stanley Donan’s living room bore the words eat, drink, and remarry. And it was either the most self-aware piece of domestic decoration in Hollywood or the most honest or both, which is how the best jokes tend to work. Five marriages, five divorces, three sons spread across three of the five marriages, one of whom predes him.
A romantic biography that reads on its surface as a catalog of failures and that reads on closer examination as something more complicated and more human. A man who genuinely wanted to build something lasting with another person and who did not manage it repeatedly for reasons that were probably not simple and were certainly not for lack of trying.
Jean Coin was the first. She was a dancer and choreographer, beautiful and technically accomplished who had worked her way into the professional orbit of both Donan and Kelly through the MGM productions of the late 1940s. She and Donan married in 1948 when he was 24 and his career was in its first extraordinary ascent.
On the town was in production. The Kelly collaboration was at its peak productivity. The future seemed like a place of unlimited possibility. They divorced in 1951 when Donan was 27. The divorce preceded Coin’s eventual marriage to Kelly by 9 years. nine years during which she continued to work in the professional world that contained both of her former relationships, serving as dance assistant on productions that connected her to both men’s careers with an intimacy that the formal end of the marriage to Donan had not entirely resolved. Kelly married her in 1960. She died of leukemia in 1973, having given Kelly the two children and the genuinely happy domestic partnership that Donan’s career record suggests he had been hoping for himself. The specific emotional texture of watching your first wife marry your most
significant professional collaborator and then watching her be happy in the marriage in ways she had not been happy in yours is not a texture that Donan discussed publicly in any direct way. He managed it. He continued working. He married again quickly in 1952, less than a year after the divorce from coin Marian Marshall, an actress who became the mother of two of his three sons, Peter and Joshua.
Marian Marshall was a woman of considerable charm who had found her way into the professional world of Hollywood through the specific combination of beauty and competence that the industry rewarded and who would later marry Robert Wagner after her divorce from Donan in 1959. completing a romantic trajectory through two of the more successful men of Hollywood’s mid-century entertainment world without apparently finding in either relationship the specific quality of permanence she was looking for.
She and Donan were together for 7 years, the second longest of his marriages after the 13 years with Ivet Mima. Peter Donan, his son from the Marshall marriage, died of a heart attack at the age of 50. This is the loss that does not appear in most accounts of Donan’s personal history.
And that represents in the accounting of a long life, something of the most irreducible weight, the death of a child, whatever the child’s age in whatever circumstances. Peter was 50 years old when he died, which means he was 49 when his father received the honorary Oscar, 47 when Blame It on Rio was released, older than Donan had been when he made singin in the reign.
The mathematics of the loss are not consoling in any direction. Donan’s third marriage to Adele O’ Connor Bey, a socialite known as Lady Bey through her previous marriage to the Earl of Beyed 11 years from 1960 to 1971 and produced his son Mark who grew up in Paris and still lives there. The marriage to Lady Bey was conducted primarily in England during the decade of his English film period and represents the most fully European chapter of a life that had been moving progressively further from Colombia, South Carolina since 1940. He was comfortable in London and in Paris in the way that people are comfortable in places that offer them things their original homes did not. cultural density, visual sophistication, a quality of urban life that the specific American cities he had lived in
had not provided in quite the same form. His fourth marriage to Avet Mima in 1972 was the longest 13 years, lasting until 1985 and involving a woman of considerable intelligence and professional achievement whose own career as an actress had been substantial and whose subsequent life after the divorce from Donan and her third marriage to Howard Ruby was lived on her own terms in ways that suggested she had not been particularly defined by her time with him.
She died in 2022 at 80, having outlived Donan by 3 years. The fifth and final marriage was to Pamela Braden in 1990 when Donan was 66. It lasted 4 years and ended in 1994 and was followed by the domestic arrangement with Elaine May that lasted from around 1999 until his death in 2019. May is the figure in Donan’s late biography who most clearly offers an account of what he was like when the professional ambition and the romantic searching had both settled into something more sustainable.
She is one of the most formidably intelligent people to have worked in American entertainment in the second half of the 20th century. Her work as a writer, actress, director, and collaborator places her in the company of the handful of figures who genuinely change the trajectory of American comedy.
And her personal style, sharp, irreverent, uncompromising, perfectly capable of being the most difficult person in any room she entered, made her not merely a companion, but a genuine intellectual match. Donan, who had spent his career in the company of brilliant people, and who had always found his best work in the friction of genuine creative encounter rather than in the smooth agreement of uncontested authority found in Elaine may the specific quality of companionship that the five marriages had approached but not achieved. Not permanence in the institutional sense, they did not marry, had no formal arrangement, but the permanence of genuine presence. the quality of being actually there. That is the thing that domestic arrangements either have or do not have regardless of their formal status. His three sons, by accounts of those who knew the family, maintained relationships with their father that
were complicated by the specific patterns of his domestic life, the multiple marriages, the different households, the quality of focused attention that Donan gave to his work, and that his children received in the specific diminished form that follows when a parents primary energy is directed elsewhere.
He was not absent in the way that completely absentee fathers are absent. He was present in the modulated way of men whose relationship to their work is the central organizing fact of their lives and whose presence in their children’s lives is genuine but partial. Joshua Donan, his son from the Marshall marriage, became a film producer of considerable achievement.
His credits include the Netflix series House of Cards and the 2014 film Gone Girl, projects of the specific scale and commercial sophistication that reflect a man who grew up adjacent to the film industry and absorbed from that proximity a knowledge of how it worked at the level of genuine production.
The specific nature of the father-son relationship is not extensively documented. But the son’s choice of profession suggests that whatever the complications, the proximity to the father’s passion for film had produced something that endured. Donan’s relationship to his own legacy in the decades between the end of his active directing career and his death in 2019 was characterized by a quality that friends and interviewers noted consistently.
A clarity about what he had done and what had not been properly recognized for doing it, combined with a forward-f facing engagement with the films and filmmakers he admired that prevented the clarity from curdling into bitterness. He watched films with the attention of a man who had never stopped caring about what film could do, who found in the work of subsequent generations the evidence that the things he had argued for and demonstrated in his own practice had taken root and continued growing. He gave interviews with the directness that had always characterized his public speech. Not the diplomatic hedging that Hollywood professionals often default to when discussing the industry’s indifference to their work, but the specific honest assessment of someone who has decided that the truth is more interesting than the managed version. He said that Kelly could be cold and condescending. He said he had paid back the debt 10 times over. He said, “Colia,
South Carolina, was awful and sleepy, and he couldn’t wait to get out.” He said the things that the cushions embroidery was saying in compressed form, that life had been difficult in specific ways, that the difficulties had been met with the specific tools available, and that the tools had included humor and work, and the forward motion of a person who did not spend more time than necessary in the places where the things that hurt him were located.
He tapped his feet throughout his life. This detail appears in multiple accounts of his personal presence at dinner parties, in interviews, in casual situations where other people’s feet would be still. Donanins were in motion. The tap dancer who had arrived in New York at 16 years old had never entirely stopped being a tap dancer.
Even after the dancing had been transformed into directing and the directing had been transformed into the invisible craft of making images that made people feel things they had not expected to feel in a movie theater. The 1998 Oscar ceremony. Martin Scorsese presented the honorary award. A remarkable pairing the most celebrated American director of the last quarter of the 20th century.
handing an acknowledgement to the man who had helped define the first half of it. The connection between eras that the honorary award was itself supposed to mark. Scorsese’s introduction referenced the lonely boy in South Carolina who was captivated by flying down to Rio at 9 years old and the specificity of the reference.
The acknowledgement that Donan’s entire career had its origin in a single transformative cinematic experience in a theater in Colombia was the specific act of recognition that the form of the honorary award allowed that the 46 years of competitive award seasons had not managed to produce. Donan took the award. He looked at it.
He looked at the audience. And then instead of a speech, he began to sing Cheek to Cheek, the Irving Berlin song that a stair had performed in Top Hat in 1935, the song that had been playing in the specific musical universe of the man who had made the 9-year-old boy in the Colombia movie theater decide to become a dancer.
He sang it and he tapped his feet on the stage and he held the Oscar and it was by the unanimous account of everyone who saw it the most joyous acceptance speech in the history of the ceremony. Not for what it said. It said almost nothing in words. For what it did, which was to demonstrate one more time what Donan had spent 60 years demonstrating.
That joy was a real thing that could be produced through the specific combination of music and movement and the willingness to commit fully to the moment without the self-consciousness that commitment in public usually requires. The central technical innovation of Stanley Donan’s career. The thing that separates his filmmaking from the work of his contemporaries who also made musicals and also directed performers of Kelly’s and Estair’s caliber is the choreography of the camera itself.
This is not a metaphor. It is a precise description of what Donan did and why the films he made with and without Kelly looked different from the films other directors made with the same performers and the same material. Most directors of musicals in the 1940s and 1950 treated the camera as a recording device.
The correct response to a great dance performance in this understanding of the director’s role was to position the camera in the place that best captured the performance and to keep it there while the dancer moved. The camera’s job was to not get in the way. The dance was what mattered. The camera was the window.
Donan understood the camera as a performer in its own right. The camera had its own movement, its own rhythm, its own contribution to the experience of watching dance on film. And that contribution could be choreographed in the same way that the dancer’s movement was choreographed with the same precision and the same intentionality, producing a composite experience that was greater than the sum of its two parts.
When the camera moved in harmony with the dancer, amplifying the dancer’s movement through its own movement, the result was not dance recorded, but dance transformed. A third thing specific to the medium of film that could not exist on a stage and could not exist in a static shot. The rain sequence is the most famous illustration of the principle.
Kelly’s performance is extraordinary. the physical commitment, the specific quality of joyful abandon, the technical precision that makes the abandon look genuine rather than calculated. The camera sees it. The camera also participates in it. When the sequence reaches its conclusion, and Kelly spins in circles on the rain soaked street, the camera pulls back and up and into the air above him, describing its own arc through the night while Kelly describes his below.
The two movements, the dancers and the cameras, are choreographed together. The camera’s withdrawal into the air is the visual equivalent of a held note at the end of a musical phrase, the extension of the joy beyond the point where the dancer’s body can sustain it. A declaration that the moment is larger than any single body can contain.
This is Donan’s decision. It is the decision that makes the rain sequence the most cited expression of joy in the history of American cinema rather than simply a very good performance of a very good song. Without that decision, the sequence ends when Kelly’s feet stop moving with it. The sequence continues into the air into the night into the specific immensity that genuine joy inhabits.
Fred a stair ceiling dance in royal wedding is a different kind of illustration of the same principle. The technical concept the rotating room the fixed camera the illusion of gravity defiance is itself a form of camera choreography a decision to put the camera in a relationship with the physical space that makes the dancer’s movement into something that ordinary camera placement and ordinary physical reality would not allow.
Donan conceived the concept because he was thinking about the camera as an active element of the choreography rather than a passive recorder of it and the concept produced one of the most memorable visual sequences in the history of the Hollywood musical. The Jerry the mouse sequence in anchors oig required Don to think about the camera’s relationship to an animated character that did not yet exist.
to choreograph Kelly’s live performance and the camera’s recording of it in such precise relationship to the space that the animator’s subsequent drawings could be composited into the frame with the specific accuracy of genuine interaction. This is camera choreography in its most technically demanding form because it required Donan to hold the entire composite in his imagination before any part of it had been realized.
To understand simultaneously what the camera was recording and what the animation would eventually add and what the combination of those two elements would produce on screen. He was 20 years old when he did this. 20 years old, directing his first significant sequence at a studio that had been making films for 30 years and had never attempted what Donan was attempting. The sequence worked.
Its working was not an accident and it was not Jean Kelly’s contribution. Kelly performed in it with his usual physical authority and his usual total commitment to the moment. The concept that made the performance possible, the technical plan that placed Kelly’s live body in credible relationship with a cartoon mouse who did not exist was Donan’s.
His influence on the subsequent development of the movie musical is most visible in the work of Bob Fos, who took Donan’s principle of camera choreography and extended it in directions that Donan’s own temperament and tastes would not have taken him. Foss was interested in darkness and transgression in ways that Donan was not.
And his films use the choreographed camera in service of a vision of American entertainment and American ambition that has nothing of Donan’s essential optimism about it. But the principle, the camera as performer, the editing as choreography, the relationship between movement and image as a design system rather than a recording arrangement is Donan’s principle applied in Foss’s film to Foss’s subject matter.
Richard Linklater’s acknowledgement of Two for the Road as foundational to the before trilogy is a different kind of inheritance. The narrative structure of Two for the Road, its fluid movement between temporal registers, its refusal to present a marriage as a single coherent story rather than as the accumulation of multiple overlapping stories in multiple registers of memory and present experience.
Gave subsequent filmmakers a template for the kind of nonlinear romantic storytelling that the early 21st century’s best romantic films have been developing. Linklater did not take this template and make it Donanlike. He made it Linklater like but the template’s existence is Donan’s and the subsequent filmmakers who have used it are his heirs whether they know it or not.
The specific quality of two for the road that made it the most formally ambitious film of Donan’s career was the editorial architecture. the way the film’s multiple time frames were assembled and distinguished from each other through visual cues and the specific performances of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finny at different points in their characters shared history.
The film required the editor to hold six different versions of the same relationship in simultaneous tension, ensuring that the viewer could navigate between them without confusion while experiencing them as genuinely different emotional registers of the same thing. This is editorial intelligence of a high order and it is Donan’s intelligence.
The same understanding of rhythm and timing that had made the editing of musical sequences so precise and so effective applied to the more complex editorial problem of nonlinear narrative. His relationship with music was the foundation of everything else he did. He had arrived in New York as a dancer which meant his relationship with music was physical.
He experienced rhythm as something the body responded to, something that organized movement rather than merely accompanying it. The translation of this physical relationship with music into a visual and editorial relationship was the specific development of his career in the 1940s. And the facility with which the translation was made suggests that the two things, the physical response to rhythm and the visual and editorial response to it were for Donan expressions of the same underlying sensitivity rather than separate skills. This sensitivity was not Jean Kelly’s property. Kelly had it too. Obviously, Kelly was one of the great musical intelligences of the 20th century, and his relationship to rhythm was as sophisticated and as physical as Donan’s. But Kelly’s musical intelligence expressed itself primarily through the body, through the specific physical instrument that he had trained
to an extraordinary pitch of responsiveness. Donan’s expressed itself through the camera and the edit. Neither was the others. Both were required to produce the films they made together. This is the simplest and most accurate account of what the collaboration was and it is the account that the credit structures and the critical discourse consistently failed to provide during the years when the films were being made and assessed.
He died on February 21, 2019 at 94 years old in New York City. He had been the last surviving director of Hollywood’s golden age, the last living connection to the specific moment in American cinema when the musical had been the primary vehicle for the art form’s most ambitious formal experiments.
When he died, that connection was severed. The films remained. The films will remain. His sons Joshua and Mark confirmed the death. There were tributes from filmmakers around the world, from people who had studied his work, and from people who had simply loved the films without knowing his name, the specific form of posthumis recognition that the invisible artist receives.
He was not in the Oscars in memoriam segment in 2019 which was reported as an oversight and which may have been but which was also entirely consistent with the institutional history of his relationship with the academy. A relationship defined by the gap between what he had contributed and what the institution had been prepared to acknowledge.
He had sung cheek to cheek on the Oscar stage in 1998, holding the honorary award and tapping his feet and demonstrating one more time the specific quality of joy that had driven him from the Colombia movie theater to New York to Hollywood to London to Paris and back again. The tapping had been his whole life. The 9-year-old boy watching a stair in Rogers and deciding to go toward the joy rather than away from it.
The 16-year-old chorus boy watching Jean Kelly from the back of the stage and imagining the camera angles that did not yet exist. The 20-year-old director conceptualizing a cartoon mouse in a sequence that had never been attempted. The 30-year-old making the camera swoop into the Nevada night above a man dancing in the rain.
And the 74year-old accepting an award that arrived 46 years late and singing about it instead of speaking. He had always known that the joy was the point. Everything else, the credit disputes, the failed marriages, the academyy’s consistent indifference, the Kelly collaboration and its difficult ending was what you navigated on the way to the joy.
The films were the joy. They remained the central technical innovation of Stanley Donan’s career. The thing that separates his filmmaking from the work of his contemporaries who also made musicals and also directed performers of Kelly’s and a stairs caliber is the choreography of the camera itself. This is not a metaphor.
It is a precise description of what Donan did and why the films he made with and without Kelly looked different from the films other directors made with the same performers and the same material. Most directors of musicals in the 1940s and 1950 treated the camera as a recording device. The correct response to a great dance performance in this understanding of the director’s role was to position the camera in the place that best captured the performance and to keep it there while the dancer moved.
The camera’s job was to not get in the way. The dance was what mattered. The camera was the window. Donan understood the camera as a performer in its own right. But the camera had its own movement, its own rhythm, its own contribution to the experience of watching dance on film. And that contribution could be choreographed in the same way that the dancer’s movement was choreographed with the same precision and the same intentionality, producing a composite experience that was greater than the sum of its two parts. When the camera moved in harmony with the dancer, amplifying the dancer’s movement through its own movement, the result was not dance recorded, but dance transformed. A third thing specific to the medium of film that could not exist on a stage and could not exist in a static shot. The rain sequence is the most famous illustration of the principle. Kelly’s performance is
extraordinary. the physical commitment, the specific quality of joyful abandon, the technical precision that makes the abandon look genuine rather than calculated. The camera sees it. The camera also participates in it. When the sequence reaches its conclusion, and Kelly spins in circles on the rain soaked street, the camera pulls back and up and into the air above him, describing its own arc through the night while Kelly describes his below.
The two movements, the dancers and the cameras, are choreographed together. The camera’s withdrawal into the air is the visual equivalent of a held note at the end of a musical phrase, the extension of the joy beyond the point where the dancer’s body can sustain it. A declaration that the moment is larger than any single body can contain.
This is Donan’s decision. It is the decision that makes the rain sequence the most cited expression of joy in the history of American cinema rather than simply a very good performance of a very good song. Without that decision, the sequence ends when Kelly’s feet stop moving with it. The sequence continues into the air into the night into the specific immensity that genuine joy inhabits.
Fred a stair ceiling dance in royal wedding is a different kind of illustration of the same principle. The technical concept the rotating room the fixed camera the illusion of gravity defiance is itself a form of camera choreography a decision to put the camera in a relationship with the physical space that makes the dancer’s movement into something that ordinary camera placement and ordinary physical reality would not allow.
Donan conceived the concept because he was thinking about the camera as an active element of the choreography rather than a passive recorder of it and the concept produced one of the most memorable visual sequences in the history of the Hollywood musical. The Jerry the mouse sequence in Anchor’s OG required Don to think about the camera’s relationship to an animated character that did not yet exist.
To choreograph Kelly’s live performance and the camera’s recording of it in such precise relationship to the space that the animator’s subsequent drawings could be composited into the frame with the specific accuracy of genuine interaction. This is camera choreography in its most technically demanding form because it required Donan to hold the entire composite in his imagination before any part of it had been realized to understand simultaneously what the camera was recording and what the animation would eventually add and what the combination of those two elements would produce on screen. He was 20 years old when he did this. 20 years old, directing his first significant sequence at a studio that had been making films for 30 years and had never attempted what Donan was attempting. The sequence worked. Its working was not an accident and it was
not Jean Kelly’s contribution. Kelly performed in it with his usual physical authority and his usual total commitment to the moment. The concept that made the performance possible, the technical plan that placed Kelly’s live body in credible relationship with a cartoon mouse who did not exist was Donan’s.
His influence on the subsequent development of the movie musical is most visible in the work of Bob Fos, who took Donan’s principle of camera choreography and extended it in directions that Donan’s own temperament and tastes would not have taken him. Foss was interested in darkness and transgression in ways that Donan was not.
And his films use the choreographed camera in service of a vision of American entertainment and American ambition that has nothing of Donan’s essential optimism about it. But the principle, the camera as performer, the editing as choreography, the relationship between movement and image as a design system rather than a recording arrangement is Donan’s principle.
Applied in Foss’s film to Foss’s subject matter, Richard Linklater’s acknowledgment of Two for the Road as foundational to the Before Trilogy is a different kind of inheritance. The narrative structure of Two for the Road, its fluid movement between temporal registers, its refusal to present a marriage as a single coherent story rather than as the accumulation of multiple overlapping stories in multiple registers of memory and present experience.
Gave subsequent filmmakers a template for the kind of nonlinear romantic storytelling that the early 21st century’s best romantic films have been developing. Linklater did not take this template and make it Donanlike. He made it Linklater like but the template’s existence is Donan’s and the subsequent filmmakers who have used it are his heirs whether they know it or not.
The specific quality of two for the road that made it the most formally ambitious film of Donan’s career was the editorial architecture. the way the film’s multiple time frames were assembled and distinguished from each other through visual cues and the specific performances of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finny at different points in their characters shared history.
The film required the editor to hold six different versions of the same relationship in simultaneous tension, ensuring that the viewer could navigate between them without confusion while experiencing them as genuinely different emotional registers of the same thing. This is editorial intelligence of a high order and it is Donan’s intelligence.
The same understanding of rhythm and timing that had made the editing of musical sequences so precise and so effective applied to the more complex editorial problem of nonlinear narrative. His relationship with music was the foundation of everything else he did. He had arrived in New York as a dancer which meant his relationship with music was physical.
He experienced rhythm as something the body responded to, something that organized movement rather than merely accompanying it. The translation of this physical relationship with music into a visual and editorial relationship was the specific development of his career in the 1940s. And the facility with which the translation was made suggests that the two things, the physical response to rhythm and the visual and editorial response to it were for Donan expressions of the same underlying sensitivity rather than separate skills. This sensitivity was not Jean Kelly’s property. Kelly had it too. Obviously, Kelly was one of the great musical intelligences of the 20th century, and his relationship to rhythm was as sophisticated and as physical as Donan’s. But Kelly’s musical intelligence expressed itself primarily through the body, through the specific physical instrument that he had trained
to an extraordinary pitch of responsiveness. Donan’s expressed itself through the camera and the edit. Neither was the others. Both were required to produce the films they made together. This is the simplest and most accurate account of what the collaboration was and it is the account that the credit structures and the critical discourse consistently failed to provide during the years when the films were being made and assessed.
He died on February 21, 2019 at 94 years old in New York City. He had been the last surviving director of Hollywood’s golden age, the last living connection to the specific moment in American cinema when the musical had been the primary vehicle for the art form’s most ambitious formal experiments. When he died, that connection was severed.
The films remained. The films will remain. His sons Joshua and Mark confirmed the death. There were tributes from filmmakers around the world, from people who had studied his work, and from people who had simply loved the films without knowing his name, the specific form of posthumis recognition that the invisible artist receives.
He was not in the Oscars in memoriam segment in 2019 which was reported as an oversight and which may have been but which was also entirely consistent with the institutional history of his relationship with the academy. A relationship defined by the gap between what he had contributed and what the institution had been prepared to acknowledge.
He had sung cheekto-cheek on the Oscar stage in 1998, holding the honorary award and tapping his feet and demonstrating one more time the specific quality of joy that had driven him from the Colombia movie theater to New York to Hollywood to London to Paris and back again. The tapping had been his whole life. The 9-year-old boy watching a stare in Rogers and deciding to go toward the joy rather than away from it.
The 16-year-old chorus boy watching Jean Kelly from the back of the stage and imagining the camera angles that did not yet exist. The 20-year-old director conceptualizing a cartoon mouse in a sequence that had never been attempted. The 30-year-old making the camera swoop into the Nevada night above a man dancing in the rain.
And the 74year-old accepting an award that arrived 46 years late and singing about it instead of speaking. He had always known that the joy was the point. Everything else, the credit disputes, the failed marriages, the Academyy’s consistent indifference, the Kelly collaboration and its difficult ending was what you navigated on the way to the joy.
The films were the joy. They remain.
