Daddy Long Legs (1955)

Daddy Long Legs (1955) is a Hollywood musical comedy film set in France, New York City, and the fictional college town of Walston, Massachusetts. The film was directed by Jean Negulesco, and stars Fred Astaire, Leslie Caron, Terry Moore, Fred Clark, and Thelma Ritter, with music and lyrics by Johnny Mercer. The screenplay was written by Phoebe Ephron and Henry Ephron, loosely based on the 1912 novel Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster.

In 1953, shortly after completing the M-G-M film musical The Band Wagon, Fred Astaire, along with many other stars at the studio, was released from his contract by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer due to the advent of television and the downsizing of film production. Astaire's association with the studio that had "more stars than there are in heaven", had begun back in 1933 when he made his film debut (on loan from RKO) opposite Joan Crawford and Clark Gable in Dancing Lady. His next picture for the studio, Broadway Melody Of 1940, was made seven years later. He was then put under contract to
M-G-M in 1944 and, despite a brief retirement period in 1946-47 plus two loanouts to Paramount Pictures, he remained there for nine years.

Daddy Long Legs was Astaire's only movie musical at 20th Century-Fox. It was also the only time he co-starred with Leslie Caron (who, at the time, was still under contract to M-G-M, but was lent to Fox for this production). The film was one of Astaire's personal favorites, largely due to the script, which, for once, directly addresses the complications inherent in a love affair between a young woman and a man thirty years her senior. However, the making of it was marred by his wife's death from lung cancer. Deeply traumatized, Astaire offered to pay the production expenses already incurred in order to quit the project, but then changed his mind.

This was the first of three consecutive Astaire films set in France or with a French theme (the others being Funny Face and Silk Stockings), following the fashion for French-themed musicals established by ardent Francophile Gene Kelly with An American in Paris (1951), which also featured Kelly's protégée Caron.

Like The Band Wagon, Daddy Long Legs did only moderately well at the box office. According to Audrey Hepburn, it was at this time that Astaire was seriously considering retiring from musical films. He changed his mind when he was offered the opportunity to co-star with Hepburn the following year in Funny Face.

Synopsis

Wealthy American Jervis Pendleton III (Fred Astaire) has a chance encounter at a French orphanage with a cheerful 18-year-old resident, Julie Andre (Leslie Caron). He anonymously pays for her education at a New England college. She writes letters to her mysterious benefactor regularly, but he never writes back. Her nickname for him, "Daddy Long Legs", is taken from the description of him given to Andre by some of her fellow orphans who see his shadow as he leaves their building.

Actors