General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

It's Always Fair Weather

It's Always Fair Weather is a 1955 American musical comedy from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen and written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, in which three World War II army buddies reunite ten years after the war and find their friendship and their lives have soured.¹ It was the third and final film Kelly and Donen co-directed for MGM, after On the Town (1949) and Singin' in the Rain (1952).²

Key fact	Detail
Release	2 September 1955 (United States); 101–102 minutes, 13 reels, 9,105 feet³
Format	CinemaScope widescreen, Eastman Color, Western Electric Sound System³
Principal cast	Gene Kelly (Ted Riley), Dan Dailey (Doug Hallerton), Cyd Charisse (Jackie Leighton), Dolores Gray (Madeline Bradville), Michael Kidd (Angie Valentine), David Burns (Tim)²
Key crew	Producer Arthur Freed; screenplay Betty Comden and Adolph Green; music André Previn; cinematography Robert Bronner; editing Adrienne Fazan¹
Production	Filmed 13 October 1954 to early May 1955 at MGM; estimated budget $2,771,000³^•⁴
Awards	Academy Award nominations for Best Story and Screenplay and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture¹
Reception	Placed on the New York Times' yearly top ten list; a box office failure²

Spoilers

Plot

At the end of World War II, soldiers Ted Riley (Gene Kelly), Doug Hallerton (Dan Dailey), and Angie Valentine (Michael Kidd) return to their favorite New York neighborhood bar run by Tim (David Burns). After learning that Ted's girlfriend has married someone else, the three drink their way across the city, then vow to meet again at Tim's bar in exactly ten years.³

A decade later each man has fallen short of his youthful plans. Ted manages a double-dealing prizefighter in the world of gamblers and bookies; Doug, once a promising painter, has become an ulcer-ridden advertising executive; Angie runs a hamburger diner in Schenectady absurdly named The Cordon Bleu.²^•⁵ At the reunion their old camaraderie is gone, and their strained lunch is observed by Jackie Leighton (Cyd Charisse), a television program coordinator who sees a marketable story. She books the three for Midnight with Madeline, a saccharine show hosted by the glamour-puss Madeline (Dolores Gray), a parody of 1950s "reality" programs such as This Is Your Life. As Jackie schemes to keep the alienated friends together until airtime, and begins falling for Ted, the broadcast descends into a brawl with fight fixers in front of a national television audience.²^•⁵

Origin and production

The film began as an effort to capitalize on On the Town by following the lives of that film's three sailors after they returned to civilian life. When Frank Sinatra declined the assignment and Jules Munshin was unavailable, the sailors were changed to soldiers and the roles recast with dancers; the working title was Fair Weather.¹ Dan Dailey was borrowed from Twentieth Century-Fox for the production.¹

The film's tone reflects its circumstances. By 1955 the popularity of movie musicals and the power of the major studios were waning, MGM budgets were being slashed, and the studios feared television, which the film satirizes directly while its CinemaScope format was itself one of the industry's gimmicks for competing with the small screen.⁶ MGM executive Dore Schary's budgetary restraints showed in the film's final look, which was shot in Eastman color rather than the Technicolor of earlier Freed Unit musicals.²^•⁶

Musical numbers and style

The film's set pieces include the three leads dancing with garbage can lids strapped to their feet under the elevated tracks; Kelly roller skating through the backlot "New York" streets singing "I Like Myself"; Charisse's "Baby, You Knock Me Out" dance with boxers at Stillman's Gym; and Dolores Gray dispatching a male chorus line with trap doors and exploding stage props.² "I Shouldn't Have Come" sets Comden and Green's special lyrics to Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube," and Donen splits the screen into a triptych during the number to show the three leads' separate perspectives on their failed reunion.¹^•²

Donen used the wide CinemaScope frame in innovative ways, breaking up space to place characters at odds with one another, and the film's satire targets television, advertising agencies, and television commercials.²^•⁷

Reception and legacy

Contemporary critics admired the film even as audiences stayed away. The New York Times placed it on its yearly top ten list, above Oklahoma! (1955), and critic Bosley Crowther called it "a winning show," praising the "sharp barbs" Comden and Green flung at television's commercials and audience-participation shows.²^•⁷ TIME called it "a sunny example of a Hollywood rarity," a song-and-dance movie with enough plot to justify its dialogue, and rated it among the year's top lightweight films.⁵ Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, found the mixture of parody, cynicism, and song and dance "perhaps a little sour" and noted it was a box office failure.⁷

The film's blend of cynicism and dance numbers, and its far less opulent production values than earlier MGM musicals, are usually cited for its failure with 1950s audiences, arriving as it did at the tail end of the musical wave.² Later critics have ranked it more generously: the Chicago Tribune called it "the third and least of the three great Kelly-Donen MGM musicals," adding "but that's no knock," and the Chicago Reader called it one of Donen's most formally perfect works.⁷ Its spoof of television and advertising, its melancholy about the transitory nature of friendship, and Dolores Gray's performance have made it a continual favorite with contemporary audiences.²

It's Always Fair Weather was the last directorial collaboration between Kelly and Donen, and Donen's last film for MGM.¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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