In may this year, film director Stanley Donen sued Gap for $5m for using footage from his 1957 film Funny Face in an advert. Many people must have been surprised to learn he was still alive. Donen, who made Singin' in the Rain, is firmly in Hollywood's pantheon, responsible for its pre-modern burnish and joy. He made Fred Astaire dance on the ceiling, filmed Gene Kelly's rapture as he skipped along a rain-drenched pavement, choreographed Cyd Charisse and Rita Hayworth, directed Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra, and modernised the American screen musical. In Empire magazine's recent poll of the best 500 films of all time, three of Donen's appeared: On the Town (1949), Singin' in the Rain (1952) and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954). They come from an age of enchantment, a time before Brando and the Method, Nixon and Watergate, 9/11 or YouTube. His honorary Oscar, presented to him by Martin Scorsese in 1998, was for the "grace, elegance and wit" of his body of work. Yet those who know Donen were not surprised by the writ. He was always famous for his short fuse—and his late work reveals as great a darkening of temperament as the last, penumbral paintings of Caravaggio.
Born in 1924 in South Carolina to Jewish parents, Donen was bullied at school. When, aged nine, he saw Fred Astaire dance in Flying Down to Rio, "something exploded inside me," he later recalled. The explosion blasted him to Broadway, where he danced, and then MGM where, at the grand old age of 24, he co-directed his first full film with Gene Kelly, On the Town.
A third signature hints at deeper ideas in Donen's work. Near the beginning of Singin' in the Rain, its story loops back to vaudeville, de-glamourising Kelly's character's rise to fame and skitting the pomposity of showbiz. Towards the end of the movie, a dreamlike flash forward shows Kelly dancing on a stage with a bridal Cyd Charisse. The flashback de-romanticises, the flash forward does the reverse. Watch Donen's subsequent two-dozen films and you notice that the best of them (there are turkeys) similarly break up the linear timelines of their stories. In his wildly undervalued Peter Cook and Dudley Moore Faust spoof, Bedazzled (1967), seven flashbacks—or flash-tos—show a wish that ends in disaster for Moore's Stanley. And Two for the Road, released the same year and written by Prospect contributor Frederic Raphael, is a series of intersecting memories of moments in the relationship between Mark (Albert Finney) and Joanna (Audrey Hepburn)—pictured, above right.
This fragmentation takes us to the core of Donen's work. Two for the Road and Bedazzled are strikingly melancholic. The flashback structure of the former shows that, from the start, the married couple were never on the road to happiness. The very first words of the film are "They don't look very happy. Why should they? They got married." But it's not their togetherness that's causing their misery. It's their knowledge. They've seen enough of life to be suspicious of romance and rapture.
At the time, critics saw this pessimism as more Raphael than Donen, but it was Donen who approached Raphael about the project. And look at Peter Cook's devilish Spiggott in Bedazzled, who says "Adam and Eve were happy because they were pig ignorant." The same attitude to knowledge, the same paradise lost. Cook gets solo writing credit, but Donen rewrote extensively.
What caused this darkening in Donen, this ebbing of enchantment and tomfoolery? Perhaps he'd simply lost the idealism of his youth. Society had fragmented since Singin' in the Rain. And, by 1967, he was on the third of five marriages, so ardour must have seemed impermanent indeed.
But these are hardly the works of an old growler—Donen was only 42 when he offered us these dark masterpieces. His collaborators say he was always gruff and short-tempered. In 1995, Chris Challis, who shot six Donen films, recalled: "He either liked you or not. If you fell into the latter category, you might as well die."And even in his earlier movies, Donen was always interested in the struggle between seriousness and fun. Deep in My Heart (1954) turns on the clash between Sigmund Romberg's old world, sophisticated Viennese music and Broadway's hotsy-totsy sassiness: between art and democracy. And of It's Always Fair Weather (1955), Donen said: "Everything is derision in this film and the tone is almost completely cynical."
In his early work, every camera move is planned, rehearsed and hits its kinetic and emotional marks. Yet by the late 1960s, the imagery was often handheld, with shallow focus, sometimes haphazard framing and crash zooms. Gone were the industrial-aesthetic certainties of the classical studio style; instead there was visual (and social) uncertainty. Near the end of Two for the Road, someone says: "The whole world is changing beyond recognition. There is no such thing as permanence any more. And we should be glad." Donen's career charted this change more, perhaps, than any other living filmmaker. With this is mind, his movies have more to say to us than ever.
