Hip-hop Kelly is rained off in US - Sunday Times 14/3/05
John Harlow, Los Angeles
AN acclaimed British television commercial in which Gene Kelly, the singer and dancer, is transformed into a rubber-limbed hip-hop sensation has been barred from American television by his widow.
Volkswagen made the advertisement promoting its Golf GTi car for British television audiences, but it has caught on in America through the internet. The 60-second film has been illicitly downloaded and shown in black music clubs in Los Angeles and New York, prompting local car dealers to call for a US release.
Patricia Ward Kelly, 40, the star?s widow, received a ?significant? fee to let the commercial be shown in Britain and on internet sites aimed at British car enthusiasts. A fierce defender of her husband?s image, she has refused permission for it to be broadcast in America.
Kelly?s first wife, the Oscar-nominated actress Betsy Blair, 81, who now lives in Britain, is believed to have seen the commercial and enjoyed it.
The advertisement, which adapts the most famous scene from the musical Singin? in the Rain with digital tricks and hip-hop beats was shot at the Shepperton studio in west London.
DDB, Volkswagen?s London-based advertising agency, recruited young breakdancers from Los Angeles, dressing them in suits, wigs and blank masks. Then they re-enacted the scene where a love-struck Kelly dances down a drenched street before coming to a halt in front of a policeman. The advertisement places a Golf between the two men.
In the 1952 film Stanley Donen, who co-directed with Kelly, advanced film technology by mixing milk with the ?rain? to make it glisten. In the advert, the film-makers digitally projected Kelly?s face onto the masks worn by the dancers.
Volkswagen has a track record in innovative advertising: four years ago it used Pink Moon, an acoustic song by Nick Drake, a 1970s folk singer from the Midlands. The late singer now sells 50,000 records a year in America and his short, unhappy life is under consideration for a Hollywood movie.
Volkswagen is frustrated at its inability to cash in on the young urban drivers grooving to its film in clubs. ?We would love to show the spot in the United States, the British have been so clever and hip, but it has proven too difficult,? said a Volkswagen executive last week. ?It is a pity, because I am sure Gene Kelly would have loved his reinvention.?
Kelly is not the first dead star to return to the screen in an advertisement: in a 1990 Diet Coke commercial Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney were in a ghostly audience being entertained by Elton John. John Wayne was later portrayed drinking Coors beer and Lucille Ball, of I Love Lucy fame, peddling lottery tickets.
The era ended in 1997 after a digitally enhanced Fred Astaire took to the dance floor with a Dirt Devil vacuum cleaner instead of Ginger Rogers. Roger Ebert, an American film critic, called it ?grave-robbing?.
