Gigi Introduction Introduction
Release Year: 1958
Genre: Comedy, Musical, Romance
Director: Vincente Minnelli
Writers: Alan Jay Lerner, Colette (novel)
Stars: Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier, Louis Jourdan
It's amazing what a fancy get-up can do for your love life:
- Hooker-with-a-heart-of gold hits couture shops on Rodeo Drive and wins the hand of a rich guy.
- Poor hotel chambermaid tries on an expensive designer coat, and... ditto.
- Low-class flower vendor loses her accent, puts on a fabulous gown and... you get the picture.
Bottom line? Say yes to the dress, and you'll get your Cinderella story—at least in the movies.
Gigi, the 1958 American-made romantic musical set in turn-of-the-century Paris, is no exception. Just imagine My Fair Lady taking place in France instead of England. And instead of a cheeky flower girl in need of a makeover and manners, it's a rosy-cheeked schoolgirl about to discover the delights of being a woman. A woman of the night, that is. Oh, and that stodgy professor? Just swap him out for a handsome, bored, millionaire playboy.
Just as My Fair Lady was based on Shaw's Pygmalion, Gigi was based on a 1944 novella of the same name by the French author Colette. When MGM-producer Arthur Freed (known for box-office hits like Meet Me in St. Louis and Singin' in the Rain fell in love with the novella's movie possibilities, he bought the rights from someone else and went to work. To write the words and music, he went straight to My Fair Lady's writing team, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who even recycled some unused songs from My Fair Lady for the new project. The similarities between the two musicals led one critic to speculate that Lerner and Loewe might sue themselves for copyright infringement (source).
But whatever it was, it worked.
With a budget of 3.3 million—that same year, Hitchcock's seminal Vertigo had about a million less—and a crack team of actors, designers, and cinematographers, director Vincente Minnelli (Judy Garland's hubby, and Liza's pops) shot the luscious story in only three months, filming in Paris and on a studio lot in Hollywood.
Released less than a year later, the movie was a huge box-office success. It also won an at-the-time record-breaking nine—count 'em, nine—Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Score, and Best Costume Design, plus one honorary lifetime achievement Oscar for veteran actor Maurice Chevalier. (The record was broken again the next year, when Ben-Hur won eleven. Oh well. But fun fact: Arthur Freed produced that ceremony for TV.)
Since then, the story's been revived as a theatre production, unsuccessfully in 1973, and for 2015's Broadway version starring former Disney star Vanessa Hudgens as Gigi. But will someone remake the film? Maybe set in the present day? Or in 1958?
We'd be lying if we said we wouldn't want to watch that.
Why Should I Care?
In the years since Gigi's success, viewers have noticed something a little strange: that Gigi, a young girl of indeterminate age, is being trained to be a courtesan. In fact, it's the family business.
So when her slightly-older bored millionaire family friend begins to see the girl in a new, romantic light, his lawyers offer her family a benefits package, promising that she'll be "taken care of beautifully." Her grandmother, her great aunt, everyone's cool with it. Except for Gigi herself, who sees a grim life for herself once this man casts her aside like a broken plaything. In the end—spoiler alert—she holds out for a marriage proposal and gets it, avoiding the whole pay-for-play arrangement.
This movie was made in the '50s, a time when even suicides could be punchlines. (Hello, The Apartment.) Also, Gigi could be either 14—hello, Lolita—or 18, solidly at the age of consent.
In Colette's novel, though, Gigi was 16. Gigi's definitely not treated like an adult by the adults in the movie—she chills in a plaid schoolgirl outfit, she's sent to her room, she's excluded from grownup conversations—all that jazz. So maybe we shouldn't be assuming consent, especially after hearing Maurice Chevalier sing "Thank Heaven for Little Girls." Nobody gave it much thought in 1958, but…kinda creepy, right?
On the other hand, it wasn't unusual at all in 1900s Paris for young women to marry at 16. The life of a courtesan could be a better option for poor women than manual labor in dangerous conditions. The possibility was there of meeting a rich guy or at least having the finer things in life. And Chevalier was singing about little girls being wonderful because they grew up into beautiful women—he wasn't showing sexual interest in children.
Was he?
Whether or not you're interested in sexual politics and gender portrayal in mid-20th-century American musicals, Gigi is still a passport to a strange world. Much of this has to do with the collision of time periods, from Colette's 1944 writing of a story set in 1889, to a bunch of noisy post-war Americans setting up shop to shoot in Paris in 1957, shooting around anything that didn't look like the year 1900.
The movie's an opportunity to think about how things have changed over all of these time periods, and how they've stayed the same. So let yourself be blitzed by its strange, colorful world, filmed in gorgeous CinemaScope. And then, get down to business, and help us figure out what this movie has to say about gender roles, age, class, romance, and eating endangered birds whole.