I’m heading out a bit early for the weekend (yes, the Week in Review is on its way), but before I go I want to give a shout out to some of TCM’s Summer Under the Stars programming coming up this weekend. Across Saturday and Sunday, they’re saluting the two greatest male musical stars of all time, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. I’m a sucker for certain of the Astaire/Rogers films (primarily Swing Time, and probably mostly because I think there’s something interesting about the fact that Fred is essentially a gambling cad who spends the entire movie flirting with Ginger but won’t seal the deal because he has a frumpy fiancee at home), but I’m really more into Gene Kelly.

Among the films screening on Sunday that I’d recommend: the Best Picture winning An American in Paris, directed by Vincente Minnelli and scored to Gershwin; It’s Always Fair Weather, which is essentially the Mad Men of mid-century musicals; and Take Me Out to the Ball Game, the last film Busby Berkeley directed without choreographing. Ball Game is more of a curiosity than anything else; rumor has it, Berkeley was too far in the bottle at that point in his career to really take control, and Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s credits for choreography.

The numbers aren’t “good”, exactly, but intriguingly off. Like the one above, where Kelly and Frank Sinatra sing a song where they tell a number of increasingly unlikely brags about making out with girls on the road and then never calling them. The chorus: thanks to Sinatra leading leading her on and leaving the next day, they sing triumphantly, “the sweetest gal at Vassar’s in the cold, cold ground.” Later, Kelly sings about how he “had to go” when he learned that one paramour was “just 11.” Of course, the cads eventually get their comeupance when they meet Esther Williams and Betty Garrett, but the movie’s a little more interesting in these WTF? moments.