Rating: 
Summary: Biographer Alvin Yudkoff provides an excellent coverage
Review: Film students will find this biography of Gene Kelly provides new insights on the man, based on new research and interviews with people who knew and worked closely with the danger. From Kelly's early Depression year dance schools to his fame on the Broadway stage and his move to Hollywood, biographer Alvin Yudkoff provides an excellent coverage.
Rating: 
Summary: A mixed bag
Review: I agree with many of the other reviews of this book, there has been no author that has really captured the life of Gene Kelly. I truly wish that Kelly's wife, who was working on a book with Gene at the time of his death, would write about this complex genius. However, this book does a "pretty good" job at telling us about Gene Kelly.The best part of this book is the early years in Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania. The author goes in great detail about the early years, but after "Singin' In The Rain"(1953), he condenses the next 45 years into 40 pages. I think Gene's life deserved a more thorough examination. Gene did some magnificant work after 1953, such as "Invitation To The Dance" and "Xanadu" (which the author despises), not to mention Mr. Kelly's many works for charity. There is also some blaring errors like the mention that Vera-Ellen attended the 1985 AFI show for Kelly. She could not have because she died in 1981 and from the 1960s on was a recluse. But again, all in all, the bio is not that bad. To be honest, it would do until a better one comes along. Hopefully one will, because the memory of Gene Kelly deserves better...
Rating: 
Summary: Average Joe made good
Review: I dislike 'chummy' biographies, the kind where the biographer latches on to a phrase or two that was probably a chance observation or private joke, then over-uses it to show his subject's funny, human side. In A LIFE OF DANCE AND DREAMS by Alvin Yudkoff, that term that so annoyed me was 'cloop,'a description of seedy nightclubs the Kelly's sometimes worked in, which combined the words 'club' and 'chicken coop.' Ad nauseum. There is a running account of Kelly ungraciously sitting through still another ceremony of recognition of his accomplishments while celebrity friends like Shirley MacLaine and Jimmy Stewart praise him to the appreciative audience. Kelly's mind wanders, he fidgets and daydreams, and often begins to speak or stand out of turn. We are privy to what he is 'really' thinking while tired clips of his films are shown. He comes across as crass, and I suppose he must have been. Much time is spent prattling about "The Game." The Game was apparently the hottest event in Hollywood at one time. Stars like Sinatra would often fly in for a mad evening of cut-throat charades at the Kelly house, risking ridicule from the host if they didn't play well, followed by hard-core volleyball once the sun rose. Who knew? So we hear that Kelly was overbearing and forced his way into every aspect of productions he worked on, had a black-listed communist for a first wife and skipped the country to his beloved France, for tax purposes, but he was an exceedingly nice guy, especially to Judy Garland-lug of a hard-working Irish Catholic boy form Pittsburgh that he was. His life seems full of resentment despite his easy smile, and whether accurate or not, it is NOT interesting reading. It took a long time to finish this book. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, let alone a fan.
Rating:
Summary: Waste if time; waste of money
Review: I should start by saying I didn't read the whole book. That's because I found it insulting that we were to believe this was a true biography. I resented the author passing off what he thought Gene Kelly must have been thinking during the AFI awards, I disliked the author painting Gene Kelly as mean-spirited and shallow. It was maddening to have the beginning of every chapter fractured with this conjecture. I considered this a total waste of money. Although I freely share my books with others, this book has been consigned to the role of doorstop.
Rating:
Summary: Learned About Gene Kelly
Review: I'm glad I read this book. I've admired Gene Kelly's dancing and his movies, and I learned enough from this book to really enhance my appreciation the next time I watch his work. I enjoyed the glimpses provided by this book of Broadway, Hollywood, and politics of his time. It was fun to get to know some of the famous characters Kelly encountered, and imagine what the evenings might have been like at Gene and Betsy Kelly's open houses. That having been said, the book clearly could have been more. In most of the text, I felt like I was observing Kelly from a distance, seeing interesting pieces of him that begged for more elaboration, more insight. I had a hard time trusting the device the author used to get us closer to him, Gene's internal dialog while at the awards show, because it seemed to go beyond what the author could have known about him, based on the rest of the text. And the writing itself could have used closer editing: I found unclear sentences, erratic paragraph transitions, and the same Gene Kelly quote repeated in the space of about ten pages. Not having read anything else substantial about Gene Kelly, I would recommend this book as a good way to learn a lot about him.
Rating: 
Summary: Another "Dutch"?
Review: I'm going to second (third, fourth, etc.) the comments about the technique used in this book. To pretend to know what Gene Kelly was thinking during the AFI awards night is misleading at best. There was quite an uproar with the Reagan biography "Dutch" because its author inserted himself in the book and fictionalized conversations, etc. I kept thinking about that as I read this book. It's true, as some others have stated, that Yudkoff probably based these "thoughts" on things Kelly said in other interviews or contexts. That doesn't excuse the his attempts to claim these were Kelly's actual thoughts, reactions, and emotions. I truly think this is an unforgivable technique. Another customer reviewer mentioned the style used in a Masters/Ph.D thesis (and was happy it *wasn't* used here). My thought is that anyone writing such a thesis would never have been allowed to create thoughts and conversations to illustrate his/her points/assumptions about his/her subject. Why was Yudkoff allowed to do so by his editor(s)? I also have to agree with others who believe that more time should have been given to the latter part of Kelly's life. Or, alternatively, the author should have dropped the last few pages and stated from the outset that the book deals only with a specific period of Kelly's life. If Kelly could somehow read this book, I wonder what his reaction would be to having the last forty years or so of his life dismissed as being so unimportant and bereft of significance that they warranted a mere thirty pages. The lack of direct quotes from the author's own interviews, and especially the lack of quotes from people closest to Kelly, makes me wonder what support Yudkoff had for this book, and, more importantly, WHY he got that reaction from them. On the plus side, I learned things about Kelly that I never knew, including that I've missed a lot of his movies. The information about his childhood and dance background certainly makes me appreciate him even more. But I think that I'll look for Hirschhorn's biography to read what I hope is a more objective work.
Rating:
Summary: THE BOOK WHO COULDN'T DANCE
Review: I'm up to page 185, and fully intend to finish the whole book, but I thought I'd look it up here at Amazon.com to see if I could learn anything about the author's credentials -- the paperback offers none -- and, also, see how other readers had felt about the book. For me, it started strong with the Pittsburgh material and New York days, the formative years of Kelly's life with which I was so unfamiliar. But the deeper I've gotten into the book, the more I've discovered such careless mistakes (see the other Reader Reviews) that I can't help but worry about the veracity in the earlier passages as well. (Incidentally, one whopper which no one else has mentioned is that Yudkoff completely reverses the production sequence of THE PIRATE and EASTER PARADE, which in turn leads to many misstatements of fact.) I was willing to tolerate the infamous AFI interior monlogues -- at least, unlike Reagan's biographer, Yudkoff didn't attempt to pass himself off as one of Kelly's dancing partners -- but by this point in the book I'm finding myself very annoyed with all the sloppy mistakes. And now, thanks to the Reader Reviews, I see that Yudkoff is going to leave me in the lurch after 1952, which is frankly infuriating. And, yes, disappointing. POSTSCRIPT: I kept on reading, and it got even worse. Yudkoff's description of the title number in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, incredibly, is erroneous in its description. It's one thing for Yudkoff to fudge the descriptions of the dances in LIVING IN A BIG WAY, an obscure -- though not IMPOSSIBLE to view -- Kelly movie, but to blow the facts on his most famous number in his most famous film...!
Rating:
Summary: POSTSCRIPT
Review: This is a postscript to my review titled "The Book Who Couldn't Dance." For me, the last straw comes on Page 218, when Yudkoff botches his description of the "Singin' in the Rain" number. It's one thing for Yudkoff to botch the numbers in LIVING IN A BIG WAY, which after all is a fairly obscure film -- though NOT impossible to view -- but to botch the most famous Kelly number in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, the most famous Kelly film of all time?! Well, how can you trust ANYTHING in the book after that?
Rating:
Summary: POSTSCRIPT
Review: This is a postscript to my review titled "The Book Who Couldn't Dance." For me, the last straw comes on Page 218, when Yudkoff botches his description of the "Singin' in the Rain" number. It's one thing for Yudkoff to botch the numbers in LIVING IN A BIG WAY, which after all is a fairly obscure film -- though NOT impossible to view -- but to botch the most famous Kelly number in SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, the most famous Kelly film of all time?! Well, how can you trust ANYTHING in the book after that?
Rating:
Summary: Strange but true . . . sort of
Review: This is a rather strange little tome that succeeds to some extent almost in spite of itself. It has a cheap look and feel. It is not especially well-written, and it contains many, many factual errors. But it nevertheless turns out to be a fairly interesting read -- especially once Gene hits the big-time on Broadway and in Hollywood. (The first -- and dullest -- part of the book contains way too much detail about Gene's life and times running his chain of dance studios in Pittsburgh, PA, and the surrounding 'burghs. This part may be of some regional interest to those from the Pittsburgh area, but otherwise it can easily be skipped by the reader.) In any event, the author takes the high road throughout, focusing almost exclusively on Gene's many professional successes (and, of course, a few major failures) as he climbed the ladder to 1940s and 1950s superstardom. A bit more information about Gene's family life, particularly with his first wife, actress Betsy Blair (who was blacklisted as a Commie sympathizer during the Red scare of the '50s, and had to leave the United States to find work -- which this book doesn't mention, by the way, and who, also by the way, a few years ago wrote a wonderful and heartfelt memoir of her exceptional life -- including the periods before and after her marriage to Gene -- entitled "The Memory of All That," that is well worth reading) and his three children, might have added some additional interest. But it would also appear Gene may have had a few . . . ummmmm . . . pecadillos (concerning his attraction to "barely legal" young ladies -- one of whom, the aforementioned Betsy Blair, he married when he was over thirty and she was just 18) that are best left to the imagination, so the author's discretion in terms of Gene's personal life may be a blessing in disguise. Anyway, this is not a bad book for what is it, and it may come in handy as a ready-reference the next time "For Me and My Gal," "Cover Girl," "An American in Paris," "Singin' in the Rain," "Brigadoon," and many other film's graced by Gene's one-of-kind talent appears on TV. But if you want a true taste of Gene's genius, get ahold of a copy of the DVD entitled "Gene Kelly: Anatomy of Dancer."
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