Chic, light as air confection is a pleasant diversion and a wonderful showcase for its three leading ladies.This was a career high for Taina Elg, a charming elfin actress who worked steadily but never broke through to the majors. She's pixish and very appealing. As the most pragmatic of the trio Mitzi Gaynor is slyly comic, wonderfully relaxed and of course dances beautifully, this is one of her best performances. But the real standout and the person who walks away with the picture is the magical Kay Kendall. A performer with an enormous comic gift and a vibrant screen persona she was already suffering symptoms of the leukemia that would take her life within two years. You would never know it from watching her on screen she is so full of life and radiates energy and vitality, a bewitching creature. Gene Kelly is good but his is really a sidelined role. The full MGM treatment was brought to bear on this, one of the last of the big successful musicals before the studios somehow lost their way and gave in to gargantuan overproduction. There were still a few good musicals that came after, Gypsy, West Side Story, My Fair Lady, Funny Girl and a few others but before too long overblown dinosaurs like Hello, Dolly, Finian's Rainbow and Dr. Doolittle killed off the genre.Not quite in the same league as Singin' in the Rain, On the Town, Meet Me in St. Louis or other MGM musical classics this is still a solid show from the time when MGM reigned supreme and was able to manufacture this sort of quality entertainment effortlessly.

This movie is a failure on so many fronts, I'm not sure where to start.Perhaps by saying how very sorry I am that it's such a disappointment. I very much like Gene Kelly's other work, love a lot of Cole Porter, many George Cukor movies, etc. Yet everything goes wrong here.To begin with, this is a dud of a musical. None of the numbers come close to being memorable, the plot is uninteresting, the characters all often disagreeable. And if you were ever to watch it a second time - which I don't recommend - to see if the end resolves the apparent contradictions that come up throughout the movie, I suspect you'd find that it doesn't.Because the plot and the characters are uninteresting, the actors really have nothing to work with. Kelly has been so good in so many movies, it is almost painful to watch him try to do something with this mess of a role. The three women, though all fine dancers, simply don't have the star power between them that you need to bring off such a movie. Even Mitzi Gaynor, a great performer, seems weak here, except in her one dance number with Kelly, the motorcycle number, where they are both first rate.There's no point in going on further. There just isn't anything here of interest. More's the pity.

While I really do like this film, every time I hear "Ca C'est L'amour", I'm reminded how similar it is to "C'est Magnifique". Anyone else notice the obvious similarity in the music and the lyrics between the two songs? "Love is wonderful. When love goes away, it's terrible. When love comes back, it's wonderful again." I think Porter simply did a rewrite of "C'est Magnifique", and hoped nobody would notice.Otherwise, I think this is a well-done film. Although the music isn't the best, it is serviceable. One disappointment is that the "Ladies In Waiting" number has so much peripheral stuff going on (Elg trying to hide her face, Kendall drunk), that you don't get the full impact of Porter's "naughty" lyrics.

Cole Porter's final film score and next to last music written for any media is Les Girls. The same team producer Sol Seigal and writer John Patrick who produced and wrote the adaption of The Philadelphi Story for High Society worked with Porter again and this time George Cukor was directing. It's a good film, but I've got the feeling that it could have been a whole lot better. One of the criticisms that Porter used to get annoyed with was the perennial 'it isn't up to Cole Porter's standard' and then you'd look in the score and see a lot of classics. Can-Can is the best example of that. But in the case of Les Girls Porter admitted this to be true. According to the George Eells biography of Porter, he was starting to suffer the decline in health that would eventually end his life in 1964. He did have surgery to bypass an ulcer and was not feeling up to par.Still the numbers are mostly for a vaudeville act, Barry Nichols and Les Girls so they're serviceable to a bright Rashomon like plot. The members of the act are Gene Kelly and the girls are Mitzi Gaynor, Taina Elg, and Kay Kendall. Kay's written a memoir that includes an alleged suicide attempt by Elg and she's suing her in an English court. As we get testimony from Elg, Kendall, and Kelly, they all give out with different versions. It's also clear he had his fling with all of them at one time despite his alleged no fraternization policy.Elg has the best ballad of the score, Ca C'est L'Amour which sounds like something that might have been written for Can-Can and discarded. Cole Porter discards are better than a lot of composer's best efforts. The sparkling Kay Kendall was never shown to better advantage on the screen than with You're Just Too Too in a duet with Kelly. And Cole Porter wickedly satirizes Marlon Brando and The Wild One in Why Am I So Gone About That Gal with Kelly and Mitzi Gaynor.In addition to this being Cole Porter's last film score, this film also marks Gene Kelly's last full blown musical. He did do other musical numbers in films like What A Way To Go and Young Girls From Rochefort and Xanadu, but this was the last musical he did. They were getting way too expensive to make, something Kelly learned from behind the camera when he directed Hello Dolly.Even with a score that Cole Porter himself wasn't thrilled with, Les Girls is still a fresh bit of film making. And since it's original to the screen, the Porter wit is not edited severely. All in all four great musical performers, three of them Les Girls.