The following is my contribution The Misunderstood Blogathon hosted by Culture Snob, which winds up, officially anyhow, today. Check it out. The following includes pretty much the entire plot of the film I’m discussing, but it’s an MGM musical, not “The Crying Game.”

I don’t how else to say it: there’s a cloud over It’s Always Fair Weather.

It seems that three-quarters of the writers who discuss arguably the second or third greatest musical from MGM’s legendary Arthur Freed unit, find it somewhat depressive, even bleak. Sure, the movie has plenty of upbeat music and dance and its share of wit and slapstick comedy too, but writers can’t seem to get near it without using the words “dark,” “cynical,” and “bitter”, usually all in the first sentence. The premise — three war buddies reunite ten years after VE day, only to find that their friendship has become something of a fizzle — definitely has a touch more sadness to it than, say, Ants in Your Pants of 1938, but Uncle Vanya it ain’t.

Or maybe it is the first Chevhovian musical. As Richard von Busack (the only writer I’ve found lately who likes It’s Always Fair Weather half as much as I do) recalls, Pauline Kael likened it to a hangover. Fifty-plus years later, co-director Stanley Donen doesn’t seem to like talking about it. Even the short documentary on the new DVD edition accentuates the negative. Naturally, it’s nowhere to be found on AFI’s 25 best musicals list. (If Chekhov did make musical comedies, you know he’d be edged out by some piece of song and dance frippery by Henrik Ibsen. But that would be okay, because life is about suffering and work, work and suffering, and sometimes a production number.)

It’s easy to see why this movie is a touchy subject for Mr. Donen. It’s a tale of frayed friendships that, we are told, permanently broke his relationship with his best collaborator and former pal, Gene Kelly, and it didn’t do much good for his (or anyone else’s) career. But what’s up with the rest of us?

It’s Always Fair Weather was painful to make, but it’s easy to watch. It’s tone may not be the candy colors of Singin’ in the Rain, but for all it’s muted, Edward Hopperesque views of New York via Culver City and calmly melancholy interludes, it’s also chipper and bright in the way of a many worldly-wise comedies of the forties and fifties, and as funny as any of the other great film musicals written by Comden and Green, and even smarter. Still, there’s obviously something in this goodhearted and ultimately optimistic musical comedy that gives people who relish the bleakest Bergman film or the life-is-meaningless ennui-fests of Antonioni the absolute heebie-jeebies.

As far as I can figure it, viewers are expecting an ice cream sundae — it’s an MGM musical after all — and getting a slightly bittersweet souffle, and so they emphasize the bitter. Part of me wants to just tell everyone to shut up and grow-up a little, but it’s probably better just to talk about why It’s Always Fair Weather isn’t bleak, it’s mature.

A bittersweet softshoe…or an instant R rating?

It’s Always Fair Weather opens with a prologue that sets up the main story but which feels as if it belongs to another film. That other film would be the first Kelly-Donen-Comden-Green Freed Unit collaboration, On the Town. Fair Weather was originally intended to be a sequel — and spiritually it’s opening sequence remains very much a follow-up to that iconic tale of three gobs on shore leave, even if we’ve switched branches of the service from the Navy to the infantry.Like much of On the Town, the prologue is told mostly through song and dance. The cheekily named “March March” begins cheerfully enough for a war anthem, but the increasing monotony and views of wartime battles allow that, even in an MGM musical, war might actually be hell.

But, with victory in Europe, our three main characters, Ted (Kelly), Angie (Michael Kidd), and Doug (Dan Dailey) are at last free and already a bit lost. First, the happy mood is broken when Ted, the aspiring politician, gets the “Dear John” treatment, leading to a ballet of drunkenness which seems to strengthen the emotional bond of the three, but is really a continuation of their wartime habit of supporting each through adversity.

Their favorite bartender, however, is kind of an unpleasant grump, and excessively truthful. He’s only too quick too school these naive youngsters that friendships made in the army rarely last outside the service. (”It’s like a girl you meet up in the Catskills.”)

This leads to a bet that, ten years hence on the very same day, the three ex-soldiers will return to the very same New York City bar, regardless of circumstance. The friends leave the bar, full of hope and melancholy. Real life begins now.

Of course, since this is a movie, real life is a montage sequence. And, just as Kelly and Donen used the widescreen space to split our attention (almost) equally between the three leads during the opening ballet numbers, that three-way split of onscreen space continues here and throughout the movie, only to be dropped towards the ending.

The body of the film takes place on that reunion day in New York in 1955. Ted has abandoned any thought of politics for life as a rakish professional gambler and now manager of Kid Mariachi, a fighter he won in a crap game. Ted, an abstract artist, has gone to work for an advertising company representing Klenzrite soap and other fine products; the gray flannel suit life hasn’t agreed with him — he suffers from any number of gastric concerns and his wife, probably fed up with his increasingly snobbish and distant ways, is getting ready to divorce him. The presumably Catholic Italian-American Angie (short for Angelo) is a happily married father of five, and his culinary aspirations have culminated in his ownership of Le Cordon Bleu, a burger joint.

To the tune of “The Blue Danube Waltz” — “This guy is a slob, a slob, a slob…”

Ted and Angie travel from their homes for the reunion, but Ted — busy preparing for Kid Mariachi’s title bout — nearly forgets. Even so, it takes some time for the guys to spot each other. Once they do, they start to wish they hadn’t. It starts with Doug’s reluctance to drink over the reunion (it’s hardly noon and booze no longer agrees with him) and his insistence on sporting the other two to lunch at a stuffy gourmet restaurant. Both Angie and Doug are clearly disappointed in Ted’s career choice — Doug out of snobbery, Angie out of (correct) suspicions about gambling and the fight game. Of course, none of them are happy about their own choices much either.

Their mutual, poorly concealed, loathing — explicitly including self-loathing — is expressed hilariously during the upscale lunch. As the three sit, trying to make small talk and awkward chewing on celery stalks, their thoughts are sung in voice over to the tune of Strauss’s “Blue Danube” waltz. As each sing of their sudden disillusionment in their old buddies, the screen crops out the other two, expressing their isolation. For the big finish, they “sing” in unison, starring off and twitching aggressively at each other. In later films, the use of the sung voice-over would later become a cheat, as if its somehow more realistic to have the characters sing with full orchestral accompaniment as long as their mouths are closed. Here, for once, it makes total sense. They’re not hiding that they are in musical, they’re hiding their feelings.

As the three former comrades part for what they each hope may be eternity, Kelly (who we are told fought with Donen to keep his character central to the film) succeeds in keeping Ted, the gambler, in the spotlight — though now he has to share it with Cyd Charisse as Jackie Leighton, an uber-genius advertising woman. As in their Singin’ in the Rain screenplay, Comden and Green seem to take special joy in allowing an intelligent woman to pierce Kelly’s protective ego-coating — and Jackie is no ordinary intelligent woman. When Ted muscles his way into sharing a taxi alone with her, she first tries to intimidate this obnoxious masher first by forcing a long kiss on him (removing the male initiative usually puts off this type, she finds), and then by showing off an amazing mastery of unrelated facts on highbrow subjects — and boxing — in an attempt to thoroughly intimidate him.

Doing so, she utters a very salient line from Shakespeare. “Most friendship is feigning, most loving sheer folly.” She’s thinking of the second half of the line, but Ted and the audience are thinking more of the first. To an adolescent, the line can seem unbelievably cynical. It sure threw me for a bit of a loop when I first encountered it as a young English major. The key word, however, is “most.” Most movies aren’t good; most songs are forgettable; most cooks couldn’t last a round with the Iron Chef; most friendship is feigning at least some of the time, etc.

At this point things are starting to get a bit down, but usually if the characters are happy at this point in the story, they’ll all be dead or worse by the end. And the film’s long second act is just beginning. The plot machinations now take us in three directions — Klenzrite’s TV show, “Midnight with Madeleine” has lost its reality-based “Throb of Manhattan” segment (alas, reality TV goes back as far as TV itself). The hostess (the amazing Dolores Gray) a pre-Oprah diva with a flair for the ultra-excessively dramatic is worrying and eating and drinking herself into a state of oblivion over it.

Madeliene: We had something so wonderful, a totally reformed drunkard who was going to tell us his inspiring story.

Jackie: Yes, but he got drunk.

Klenzrite must be sold and uplift is a must, so there’s only one solution: re-reunite Ted, Angie, and Doug on the air. The possibility that the first reunion was a disaster doesn’t even enter the mind of Jackie, the super-genius. Not that it matters. Everyone smiles when they’re on live television, right?

Jackie’s job is making sure that Ted shows up for the show, which forces her to spend more time with the aggressor she worked so hard to repel. Meanwhile, Doug, the advertising man, is being shepherded by his rotund boss, while TV-struck Angie is under the supervision — almost entirely off-screen — of Madeleine and some attractive showgirls.

And this is where the movie becomes interesting — and almost clinical in its use of popular psychology. The real subject of the film is not how men can or cannot reunite with old buddies, but how they can stop hating themselves so they can be friends with anyone. Strangely enough, that would include the women they’re involved with.

Doug, the ex-artist turned Chicago ad cartoonist, has compensated for his failure to pursue his art by turning his anger outward into a smug sense of superiority, driving a wedge between him and his wife back home who’s suddenly found herself married to a snob.

And not just a snob, but a guy prone to incessant use of the latest business buzzwords, including the infamous -wise suffix that was apparently so widely known that it turns up in almost every business satire of the time, including The Apartment a few years later. (It’s tagline: “Movie-wise, there has never been anything like it - laugh-wise, love-wise, or otherwise-wise!”)

A martini-fueled afternoon with the boss turns that anger into rage, and then to a complete drunken breakdown. Yes, this is a movie where someone dances with a lampshade on their head. The song, “Situation-Wise” is a seeming-nonsense ditty which reveals the obvious: there’s nothing wise about Doug’s situation.

If you’re doing to get drunk and dance with a lampshade on your head, a background in vaudeville helps.

The breakdown is a therapeutic one. Not only has Doug/Dan Dailey had the big musical moment that Stanley Donen had to fight so hard for, but he’s shaved off his mustache — forever the symbol of male pretense.

Meanwhile, Jackie has accompanied Ted to Stillman’s Gym, where his fighter is getting ready for the big fight. This leads to a terrific number (”Baby, You Knock Me Out”) where she bonds over boxing trivia with the not-so-tough guy boxers. Ted’s not there to see it, but if he did, he’d fall for her even harder.

It’s an amazing dancing tour de force for Charisse, but her career’s full of those. What’s different is that, just once, that dance is built around a fully formed character. As an actress, I’m usually not a big fan of Charisse. Her range is usually pleasant-to-completely-stiff, but if all her performances were as human and funny as Jackie, that would be different. I love Jackie.

Meanwhile, Ted is finding out that he’s not such a wise guy after all. Kid Mariachi’s big fight has been fixed, and Ted would never have known if it weren’t for the fact that the the champion, Rocky Lazar (Hal March), is an overly friendly idiot who assumes Ted is in on the deal. His first instinct is to shift his bets and keep his mouth shut. But love steps in and Jackie persuades him to act in a more noble fashion. (I’m all for exposing crime, but I fear this would usually be a life-ending move. On the other hand, the boss in this movie is clearly no Marsellus Wallace.)

This is set-up for what actually ought to be Gene Kelly’s single most famous set-piece — though it’s so stunning (screen captures don’t begin to it justice) it’s probably his second or third most famous number, despite being in a movie that relatively few people have even seen. It’s best known as “the scene where Gene Kelly skates,” but the song title is as telling as it gets, “I Like Myself.” Comden and Green’s lyrics — the underrated music for the film is by Andre Previn — are not the obnoxious ode to self-esteem that they could be. This isn’t the greatest love of all, and “she likes me, so I like myself” is not quite what the self-esteem movement of the eighties and nineties would have liked (it’s all supposed to come from within, right?). But it’s make sense for the character and, at the risk of sounding like George Will, self-esteem ought to be based on something.

He likes himself…he really likes himself!

In this case, Gene Kelly’s beyond healthy self-regard is most definitely with some basis. For once in his life, this second greatest movie-star dancer tops the greatest movie-star dancer (Fred Astaire, dummies), combining his usual athletic chutzpah with sheer grace, and it’s a transcendent moment, lyrical ironies aside.

From there, it’s on to the set of “Midnight with Madeleine” and a satirical interlude poking fun at over-serious advertising and show biz in general, including a soap jingle set to Liszt and the amazing “Thanks a Lot, But No Thanks” — an insanely elaborate send-up of cabaret numbers. (Available on YouTube. Check it out if you’ve never seen it.)

The rest of the story is mainly an excuse to get the friends to perform the act that their entire relationship is based on — fighting. It is, however, I believe the first and — thanks to an ultra-slow double take from Hal March’s unwiseguy boxer — easily the funniest use of the “trick the bad guy into incriminating himself on live TV” gambit.

First, however, there will be a humiliating forced public reunion on live television. But it is redeemed by a humbling confession from Ted on live TV. It starts out sarcastically (”Boys, don’t be like me. Live clean. Use Klenzrite.”).

But then Ted foreshadows the more comic confession to come by admitting that the last ten years have been a sham. This moves Ted and Angie — we can see the that three have realized that their mutual dislike says more about their disappointment with themselves than with each other, but that’s not quite enough.

There has to be a righteous battle — before it was the fascists in Italy, now it’s gangsters. It’s pretty gracefully done slapstick violence, and it should be, considering it’s performed by three of the most technically talented dancers in Hollywood, and two of its best choreographers (and Stanley Donen behind the camera). But it’s also nothing really that special, and reasonably brief. The details of the fight aren’t important, it’s that, one last time, Angie, Doug and Ted get to fight side by side and defeat an enemy.

Later, back their formerly favorite bar, the three reclaim an old memory revolving around another comrade who accidentally saved their life. More important, it’s clear that Ted’s relationship with Jackie will continue; and, after an emotional telephone conversation Doug’s estranged wife — whom we never meet outside of a montage sequence — seems willing to give her man a second chance. (Dan Dailey does the film’s best acting here, with a phone for a scene partner.)

I call this an upbeat ending. It’s not that they three war buddies are going to be best friends for life. They’re not, and if the film implied that they were going to stay close, it wouldn’t be a happy ending, but a dishonest one.

Antiwar war correspondent Chris Hedges has said frequently (and most famously in a heckled commencement speech) that bonds forged in battle aren’t exactly friendships, they’re comradeships based not on shared affinities, but on facing a common threat. “…This is why once the threat is over, once war ends, comrades again become strangers to us. This is why, after war, we fall into despair.” Though it may be dangerous to mention fifties-style movie in the same breadth as modern, real war, Hedges would agree that Tim, the grumpy bartender, is right after all.

Hedges is a fairly gloomy guy, prone to rhetorical extremity, and I’m lucky to have never been in the kind of danger he’s talking about, but I think he (and Tim) are probably right. I’m sure that there are lots of people who have stayed close with their old war buddies, but I’m guessing that those people would have become friends if they’d met under any circumstances. As Hedges implies in his speech, not all of us get to have friends — some of us are too shy, too mean, or too selfish — but anyone who can be a in a war can have a war buddy.

It’s hard to say, but we’re shown little evidence of much in common between Angie, Doug, and Ted apart from the war and a certain basic sense of human decency. By contrast, the male-female relationships in the film are, by Hedge’s definition, true friendships, with apparent intellectual and emotional affinities. Since we never see Doug and Angie’s wives, we’re forced to guess but, even off-screen, the are hints of a strong emotional bond in both cases. And, certainly, the new romance between Ted and Jackie is very much a relationship of equals. On second thought, Jackie might be more than Ted’s equal, and that’s the challenge he probably needs to fulfill his potential, whatever that may be.

It’s Always Fair Weather gives us the happiest possible ending, and makes us poignantly cheerful without lying to us. That’s the only kind of happy ending worth having.