Gene Nelson: (Almost) The Next Gene Kelly

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Most Hollywood musical comedies are too schmaltzy for my tastes, so until recently I didn't even know who Gene Nelson was. But many of these movie musical comedy performers from the 40s and 50s were wonderfully skilled and talented, and a great example is Gene Nelson, a highly athletic dancer and, later on, a highly successful TV and film director. Nelson was an engaging and charismatic performer, but what I especially like when I think of him in terms of physical comedy is the way he incorporated our physical world into so much of his choreography—furniture, props, pianos, walls, stairs —pretty much everything that surrounds him, whether nailed down or not. It was all an excuse for improbable dancing, leaping, bouncing, and swinging.

Originally, this post was supposed to feature a single video and take me less than an hour to put together, but instead I had a hard time narrowing it down to only these six clips. And that's just to get you started! He did A LOT, and between 1950 and 1953 was in ten movies! So yeah, there's more on YouTube, including one with Ronald Reagan (before he was president).

The first clip is his brilliant stair dance from Tea for Two (1950), starring Doris Day and Gordon MacRae. (No, I haven't seen the movie.)

Most song & dance performers had a few hat moves and cane manipulations in their repertoire; it went with the territory. But once again, Nelson excelled. This clip is from The West Point Story, also from 1950.

Also from 1950 from the movie The Daughter of Rosie O'Grady we get this eccentric dance with June Haver, choreographed to George Botsford's 1910 Chatterbox Rag. Years earlier, when Haver was already a known quantity and Nelson a minor player, she had helped him gain more recognition in Hollywood, introducing him to her agent, who was also the agent for none other than Gene Kelly.

Mention should also be made of his great leaping ability. He loved to jump onto grand pianos, as in this clip from a 1954 appearance on Colgate Comedy Hour.

Our fifth clip is an amazingly singing acrobatic dance sequence from She's Working Her Way Through College. (1952) This is said to have been in rehearsal for three months and taken four days to shoot. 

I thought I had never seen Nelson before, but that was only because I didn't realize he was Will Parker in the 1955 movie version of the classic musical, Oklahoma! The choreography for the show was by Agnes DeMille, and was considered to be groundbreaking because of her ability to tie in the dance with characters, emotion, and plot. Here's Nelson singing the quite funny song, Everything's Up to Date in Kansas City. Singing AND dancing AND rope spinning.

Although touted by many as the next Kelly (or the next Astaire), Nelson never rose to that level of stardom. Serious injuries in the mid-50s curtailed his dance career, but it was also a period when musical comedy became less a staple in Hollywood. Times were changing. And despite his amazing talent and finely honed skill, he was not as funny as Gene Kelly (who was not as funny as Donald O'Connor). He was perfect for light comedy —adjectives such as charming and delightful spring to mind— but maybe too much so. Did he lack gravitas, or was it just because that was how he was cast? Ultimately he was more leading man material than comedian... but then nobody's perfect.

Here are some quick bio factoids gleaned from Miller Daurey's excellent Hey, Dancer! podcast. (see notes below)
👉🏻 Nelson's father was a ballroom dancer, a roller skater, and an acrobat.
👉🏻 When he was twelve and living in Santa Monica, Nelson saw Fred Astaire in Flying Down to Rio and got hooked on dance.
👉🏻 During high school, he enrolled in the Marco School of Dance in Hollywood, where Judy Garland, Anne Miller, and Rita Hayworth had studied.
👉🏻 He also got hooked on skating and got so good that he was hired for the Sonia Henie Hollywood Ice Revue. He was the first person to ever do 13 Arabian cartwheels on ice.
👉🏻 In World War II he joined the army and was in an all-soldier revue show when Irving Berlin was in the audience. (You can't make this stuff up.) This led to Berlin casting him in his show This is the Army, touring for over two years and appearing in the film as well.
👉🏻 Movie acting gigs led to him almost being cast for the lead in Easter Parade, but Fred Astaire came out of retirement and the rest is history.
👉🏻 But the movie roles gradually got bigger and bigger, leading up to Tea for Two.

👉🏻 Before shooting Oklahoma!, he took a bad fall and suffered a herniated disc. He taped up his back and kept going on. A few years later, he fell from a horse and crushed his pelvis, which curtailed his dance career, though he did make a successful comeback at the age of 51 in Follies on Broadway.

👉🏻 Meanwhile he carved out a long and highly successful career as a television director, including directing 21 episodes of The Donna Reed Show, 18 episodes of The Mod Squad, and eight episodes of The Rifleman.

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• You can view Miller Daurey's bio video of Nelson here. Very well done and entertaining. And I highly recommend his Hey, Dancer podcast, which you can find here.  As of this writing, there are 71 episodes, including documentaries on such significant dancers as Ben Vereen, Gregory Hines, Ann Reinking, the Nicholas Brothers, and Irene & Vernon Castle. 

S.Z. "Cuddles" Sakall

• The actor S.Z. ("Cuddles") Sakall, who you see in the Tea for Two clip, may be familiar to you as the waiter in Casablanca (1942); see a clip of that here. Sakall and Nelson were part of Warner Bros. "repertory" company and also appeared together in Lullaby of Broadway and The Daughter of Rosie O’Grady. The Hungarian actor was well-known in Europe and in his younger days had written a lot of comedy, including music hall sketches. He fled Hitler and made a career in Hollywood, often playing befuddled or eccentric types. IMDB has a good bio of him.

• Though hardly a great movie, This is the Army is free if you have Amazon Prime.
• Nelson got the full bio treatment just a couple of years ago from Scott O'Brien in his book Gene Nelson— Lights! Camera! Dance! (No, I haven't read it.) Coincidentally, O'Brien was a student at San Francisco State University in the 60s, I turned down a full-time teaching job there in 1987, and a year or two later Gene Nelson joined their faculty.