It’s Always Fair Weather, the finale of the trilogy which has On the Town as its beginning and Singin’ in the Rain as its famous middle film, is a satirical and melancholy bookend about the contradictory emotions of the Eisenhower Era. Even if it’s still mainly about smiles and joy, something fatal has happened. The war buddies have a sacred agreement about eternal friendship. Time, however, has worked its ways, and now ten
years later the guys regard each other as intolerable. In fact, they are disappointed about themselves, after a blatant sell-off to the materialist values for which the 1950s is justly famous. The space of joy has now become the stage of melancholy, and the sense of life is falling apart. The glorious CinemaScope screen is trembling with resignation and disappointment.
One of the three guys is Gene Kelly, which means we are face-to- face with the unforgettable trio of On the Town. This is both a continuation and a new reading, made critical by the times. It’s not only a genre tradition but a renewal, all the more tragic since the film was made at the moment when the genre was in the process of vanishing in its vital form; what followed would be dominated by the Broadway-based “book musical”. This creates the strange feel of the film: it’s funny only at times, and almost as if by force. Naturally so. The question of whether an individual can face himself is a tough one. The finale, a great sequence, takes place in a television studio, and solves the “existentialist problems” comically and appropriately in the absurd methods of the age.
It’s Always Fair Weather might not be one of the most entertaining musicals, but it is a wise, human, and painfully true one, a classic “buddy movie”. It also inspired a magnificent cinematic comment, Ettore Scola’s C’eravamo tanti amati (1974), which creates an essential variation on the original’s story line and inner meanings.

Peter von Bagh