---

SHH... IT'S STARTING: Punchin' in the Rain
Movie musicals and kung fu epics rank low on the realist's list of favorite types of film. Nobody breaks into song and dance in everyday life, let alone whole crowds of jubilant, synchronized, and coordinated citizens. Likewise, when a group of guys in the real world want to cause you harm, they attack you en masse instead of thoughtfully permitting you to elegantly dispatch them one by one. But to gripe about vérité is to entirely miss the point. The pleasure of both martial arts and dance movies comes from seeing the human body at work. Nobody understood that more than Gene Kelly and Bruce Lee, two performers whose legacies occupy a middle ground that's not quite dance and not quite violence.

Both Lee and Kelly were small, powerfully built men, each five foot seven inches of hard-earned muscle. Both were incredibly competitive, natural athletes with an insatiable thirst for exertion, and both were blessed with the kind of charisma — equal parts looks, joie de vivre, and damn-I'm-good confidence — that transfers easily to celluloid. Both were also intensely masculine personas working against a stereotype of sexual passivity (Kelly because dancers were suspected of being twinkletoes, Lee because he was Asian), misconceptions they battled with every resource available, including shamelessly exploiting their own sex appeal.

Standards of studio decency probably prevented Kelly from stripping to the waist like Lee did on the flimsiest of pretenses (ripped the neckline of your black bodysuit? Too hot to fight Chuck Norris at the Coliseum? Well, that shirt's just going to have to come off!) , but the nude bodysuit Kelly wears in An American In Paris (1951) leaves nothing to the imagination. Dressed or not, Kelly had a sensual, blue-collar, unpretentious demeanor that took all the starch out of dance and made enjoying his films an acceptable enterprise for regular Joes.

But aren't we forgetting someone? It's impossible to talk about movement on film without mentioning Fred Astaire, and rightly so. To watch Astaire in action — especially at his prime in films like Swing Time (1936) or Top Hat (1935) — is to experience a vicarious weightlessness unrivaled by anything NASA can cook up. But he's an affable neuter, a perfect gentleman who's probably as blank as a Ken doll beneath his top hat and tails. Gene Kelly, the self-described Brando of dance (to Astaire's Cary Grant,) was physical, prowling and pacing in proletarian getups (like the very Stanley Kowalski t-shirt and jeans he wears to waltz with a mop in Thousands Cheer (1943)) with an undercurrent of animalism. He could dance just as well as Astaire and he telegraphed the same unabashed joy when he did, but his very he-man style carried a tinge of sex and violence that places him closer to Bruce Lee. ...