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Scandal sparks Les Girls (1957). Sybil (Kay Kendall), a glamorous dancer, has just put out a popular tell-all, “Barry Nichols and Les Girls,” about her days working under the title dance-troupe leader’s (Gene Kelly) tutelage. It comes complete with stories of affairs, noxious envy, and suicide attempts — everything you would want from an ostensibly sensational book like this. The film opens with Sybil being taken to court by one of her former coworkers, Angele (Taina Elg), for libel. In the book, Sybil outlines juicy details of a torrid love affair between Angele and Barry. This jeopardizes Angele’s current engagement, for one thing. And even if it didn’t, it isn’t fun being the target of the kind of fabrication tailored specifically to (as Angele alleges) juice up a biography that otherwise might be pretty dry. 

Each woman will have a chance to defend themselves in front of a jury. So will Barry, though puzzlingly not Joy (Mitzi Gaynor), the third “member” of the eponymous trio whose perspective may actually be the most reliable, since she appears to have the least amount of skin in the game. It’s hard to really believe anybody. Sybil’s story makes logical sense, but the diva-like relish with which she narrates from the stand fans suspicions of embellishment. Angele’s account, which frames Sybil as an insane drunk, is the brand of buggy suggesting she’s exaggerating things to make herself look saintly by comparison. 

Les Girls structurally takes after Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950). In that movie, we see a rape and murder unfold from the individual — and markedly different — perspectives of the key people involved. What Les Girls hasn’t recreated, though, is Rashomon’s grip on the viewer. It fails as a juicy piece of show-business soap opera; the way it narratively presents itself feels overly fussy when the grand reveal is, at the end of the day, whom the blandly written Barry character is having an affair with. It also fails as a musical, which the film remembers it’s supposed to be so sporadically that when musical numbers appear it’s like they’re trying to meet a quota. There are a few, though — like one where Gaynor and Kelly play-act on stage as a biker hunk and poodle-skirted innocent in love for an evening — that momentarily give this nonetheless beautifully shot movie some life.

Other parts aren’t half-bad, either. Les Girls is good in the early scenes when the title trio is just hanging out, more concerned with maintaining their practically sororal friendship than anything like professional or personal back-stabbing. (The three lead actresses find comic harmony together.) And the tragically late Kendall gives a great, game-for-anything performance that always sizzles even when some of the jokes she’s forced to endure don’t. Still, this musical, historically significant for being Kelly’s last under an MGM contract originally ratified in 1942, feels less like a victory lap for the storied dancer-actor than a winded last few steps toward the finish line, gesturing at the verve for which his younger self is beloved without convincing us that he still quite has it.