Waste of time

That was an excellent one.

Good concept, poorly executed.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The washed-out colour on the print I watched does little for a movie that needs all the help it can get. To me Gene Kelly has always been a bad nowhere to Fred Astaire, a carthorse up against a thoroughbred, nevertheless I'm happy to applaud Kelly for this attempt to broaden the appeal of dance and to shepherd this non-commercial labour of love to fruition. At least one person writing here has questioned Kellys' decision to do everything but cater the production himself rather than taking on a collaborator. One-man bands are fine as long as the proprietor is Orson Welles but you don't get too many Orsons to the pound. The first segment, Circus, is ho hum at best, the second, Ring Around Rosy is a blatant rip-off of Max Ophuls' Madame D and the most imagination has been invested in the third, Sinbad The Sailor. Rather like a dog walking on its hind legs it deserves a hand just for effort.

"Invitation to the Dance" is a personal film project by Gene Kelly. It consists of several different stories which are set to music and dance and there is no dialog. As for the stories, they are very broad and told through pantomime and dance. They consist of: "Circus"--A story filled with pathos about a clown (Pedrolino from the Italian Commedia dell'Arte--played by Kelly) who is in love with a pretty dancer at the circus. But she barely notices him. So, he does something really stupid and the audience is supposed to be brought to tears. I hate pathos."Ring Around the Rosy"--A rather cynical look at a faithless wife. The husband gives her a bangle for their anniversary and she soon gives it to her lover. He gives it to his model and folks keep passing it around until ultimately it makes its way back to the husband--who, inexplicably, takes it all in stride. Kelly is in this one less than the other segments."Sinbad the Sailor"--A sailor is on leave in a stereotypically olde tyme Arabian village. There he finds a genie--one that looks like a little boy. He has the boy magically don a sailor suit like himself and the two have a merry dance together. Later, they magically transport themselves into a picture book and more dancing ensues amidst a cartoon world. The kid, by the way, was an incredibly good dancer. Of all the segments, this one is probably the most approachable for the average viewer.I can easily see why "Invitation to the Dance" failed at the box office. While the quality of the dancing in this film is among the finest you'll ever see in a movie, there is no real plot. So, unless you are insanely devoted to modern dance, most potential viewers wouldn't bother seeing it in the first place. Then, if you did get someone to watch it who wasn't a dance-o-phile (like me), he would be bored to tears by it (once again, like me). While I can respect all the work that went into it, I cannot see it having much of an audience. This might explain why it so seldom is shown on television

The first two segments of this film may or may not impress you, but do watch the third: "Sinbad the Sailor". Kelly plays an American sailor in an exotic Oriental market. He rubs an old lamp and a genie appears, played by an amazingly talented kid. After a bit of messing around,the genie gets a sailor suit, too. Then they open a book to a picture of a wonderous land. The genie transports them inside and all the rest features the two dancers (mostly Kelly alone) dancing with animation.This segment is much longer than any other live-plus-animation sequence until Mary Poppins excepting, possibly Song of the South whose sequences were nowhere near so complex as this. Kelly dances with an animated dragon (that wraps around him), into a harem, is chased by the Sultan's guards, has a long sequence with one harem girl, and then a very long sequence with the guards. This is amazing work for 1952, especially when you remember that every bit of the animation is hand-painted on cels. Hanna-Barbera (then with MGM doing Tom and Jerry directed the animation. (Kelly also did a famous dance number with Jerry in Anchors Aweigh eight years earlier.) Walt Disney advised. This is swell stuff and any fan of animation should give it a look.

This is the result of many years of effort on the part of Gene Kelly to create an all-dance film. Since he was a major-studio rather than an indie production child, Kelly convinced his home studio, MGM, to finally take on the project.The final results, unfortunately, are mixed. The movie is simply average, with long stretches of off-timed and miscalculated action and uninspired choreography. Were Kelly to have collaborated in the writing, choreographing and direction departments, rather than taking everything on himself, things might have gone better.The project was simply too great a task for Kelly; with other imput he might have made a film with greater perspective and flair. The story in "Circus" is only fair, and there's more pantomime than dancing for Kelly as Pierrot. Unfortantely, Jacques Ibert's music doesn't help either. "Ring Around the Rosy" suffers from disjointed continuity, with awkward bridges and motivations. Too, the fine Tamara Toumanova as the Streetwalker provides a clash of styles when paired with Kelly as the Marine. Physically, their types don't match well, try as they will. Nor was this Andre Previn's finest compositional hour.Finally, Roger Eden's adaptation of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's score for "Sinbad the Sailor" makes for the most effective music in the film. Kelly at last gets to display his distinctive dancing manner, and does some impressive work (at age 44) in the interesting cartoon sequences. It's not Kelly at his best, though, and "Inviation to the Dance" remains an interesting curio, earnest on effort and short on realization. Both dance fans in general and Kelly fans in particular will value this video in their collectiona.