The Unfinished Dance was based on Jean Benoit-Lévy's 1937 French film, La mort du cygne (released in the U.S. as Ballerina). In her study of ballet on film, Dying Swans and Madmen (2008), Adrienne McLean writes that MGM bought the rights to La mort du cygne and pulled the original from circulation when they decided to make The Unfinished Dance, which sets the action at the Ballet School of the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Student Meg Merlin (Margaret O'Brien) idolizes ballerina Ariane (Cyd Charisse). When Meg learns that the famous ballerina La Darina (Karin Booth) is joining the company, she mistakenly believes La Darina will replace her idol. Meg's obsessive devotion to Ariane and hatred for La Darina lead to disaster, and she is tortured by the consequences of her actions.
According to O'Brien, her mother, a former dancer, had seen the French film and brought the idea of remaking it to MGM. The 9-year old Margaret trained for six months with Russian ballet teachers, and did her own dancing in the film. Director Henry Koster had experience working with young performers--the German émigré had begun his American career directing Deanna Durbin musicals at Universal for producer Joe Pasternak--and had gone with Pasternak to MGM. Koster thought O'Brien was talented, and liked working with her. His problem was with O'Brien's mother, who sat behind him during takes, and gave Margaret signals when she wanted another take. But overall, Koster was happy with O'Brien's performance. He was less impressed with Karin Booth, a former model who was playing her first leading role after years of playing bit parts. Booth couldn't dance, and Koster had to use a double for her dancing wide shots. For the close-ups, he built a rotating platform to spin her around. Koster also thought Booth lacked acting ability, and her subsequent career appears to support his judgment. She appeared mostly in b-pictures for the rest of her career, and retired in 1959. But in The Unfinished Dance, her impassive beauty and uninflected emoting lend an appropriate remoteness and hauteur to her character.
Cyd Charisse's acting skills were also limited, but she more than made up for it with her spectacular terpsichorean talent. Trained in classical ballet, Charisse danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo while still a teenager. Ballet Russe dancer and choreographer David Lichine gave Charisse her first film dancing role in the 1943 musical Something to Shout About, and MGM signed her in 1945. Lichine was the choreographer for The Unfinished Dance, and his ballets are a great showcase for Charisse. Throughout the late 1940s, Charisse played supporting roles, but most of the films she appeared in featured dance numbers that gave her an opportunity to shine. By the early 1950s, she was one of MGM's top musical stars.
Comedian Danny Thomas made his film debut in The Unfinished Dance, playing O'Brien's guardian. It was a warm and appealing performance, and the two would be reunited the following year in Big City (1948). But Thomas's film career never really took off. When he turned to television in the early 1950s he became a huge star.
Critics compared The Unfinished Dance unfavorably to the French original. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times called it "a big splash of show-off theatre, in which the story is as slickly decorative as are the elaborately staged ballets," and sniped at O'Brien, "trotted out often to poise on her hastily tutored toes to add her particular brand of cuteness to some specially manufactured ballets." Time magazine, after a snarky plot summary that gave away all the film's twists, concluded the review with one more bit of snark: "All ends with little Margaret, wistful as a hand-painted freckle, watching Cyd & company execute what seems to be a ballet interpretation of the Birth of the Universe." Highbrow critics could sneer all they liked, but lowbrow (and even middlebrow) movie fans liked it just fine. Seen more than sixty years later, The Unfinished Dance is definitely not High Art, nor does it pretend to be. It is a high-gloss example of another kind of art, that of the MGM musical, and an opportunity to see one of the era's finest young actresses giving one of her most emotional performances.
Director: Henry Koster
Producer: Joe Pasternak
Screenplay: Myles Connolly, from the story by Paul Morand
Cinematography: Robert Surtees
Editor: Douglass Biggs
Costume Design: Irene, Helen Rose
Art Direction: Cedric Gibbons, Daniel B. Cathcart
Music: Herbert Stothart
Principal Cast: Margaret O'Brien (Meg Merlin), Cyd Charisse (Mlle. Ariane Bouchet), Karin Booth (La Darina), Danny Thomas (Mr. Paneros), Esther Dale (Olga), Thurston Hall (Mr. Ronsell), Harry Hayden (Murphy), Mary Eleanor Donahue (Josie), Connie Cornell (Phyllis).
C-101m.
by Margarita Landazuri
