In an extraordinary career spanning over forty years, legendary director Stanley Donen (b. 1924) has remained a key figure in the transformation of the postwar American cinema, producing iconic films—On the Town, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Charade—that inimitably captured the contemporary zeitgeist and injected a new energy, poise and wit into popular film genres. During the heyday of the classical Hollywood studio system, Donen—whose first studio contract was with MGM’s celebrated Freed Unit—helped reinvent the musical, bringing the genre to new artistic heights in the 1940s and 1950s with such pivotal films as Singin’ in the Rain and Funny Face. With the rise of international co-productions in the 1960s, and following the collapse of the studio hierarchy, Donen brought a European verve and sophistication to American audiences in classic works such as Arabesque and Two for the Road.

Donen began in show business as a dancer, joining the Broadway production of Pal Joey at the tender age of sixteen, dancing alongside the show’s star, Gene Kelly—an artist with whom Donen would famously collaborate on several masterworks of musical cinema including Singin’ in the Rain and It’s Always Fair Weather. Soon after his Broadway debut, Donen struck out for Hollywood, working first as a choreographer on films such as Cover Girl and Anchors Aweigh before establishing himself as a gifted and intuitive director of musicals whose ability to capture the exuberant energy and sheer joy of dancing—and of movement in general—with an elegantly fluid camera made him one of the most sought after Hollywood directors. With the decline of the musical in the late 1950s Donen moved in to the second and equally rich phase in his prolific career, as a free agent based in London  turning out sophisticated and witty films which alternated from his classic comedy of mid-life crisis, Bedazzled, and his exuberant homage to Tinseltown magic in Movie, Movie to the his bittersweet and remarkably adult explorations of romantic—both hetero- and homosexual—relationships in Two for the Road and the underappreciated Staircase.

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to welcome Stanley Donen to Boston to present and discuss two of his most beloved films, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and Two for the Road.