NONFICTION - April 14, 1996

DANCING ON THE CEILING Stanley Donen and His Movies by Stephen M. Silverman (Knopf: $35; 390 pp.). This biography floods us with information about Donen’s movies (“On the Town,” “Singin’ in the Rain,” “The Pajama Game,” “Funny Face,” “Indiscreet,” “Charade,” “Two for the Road”) and his work with such stars as Gene Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, Ingrid Bergman and Fred Astaire (whose ceiling-dancing stunt in “Royal Wedding” gives the book its title), but tells us surprisingly little about Donen himself. Silverman, who has also written a biography of filmmaker David Lean, leads us to conclude, accurately or not, that in Donen’s case the career is the man. He quotes screenwriter Frederic Raphael: “What separates Donen from the vast majority of film people, besides the fact that he admires talent in others, is that he never thought it was all that big a deal to become a producer or a director. He simply liked the work.”

Donen, who turns 72 this month, was always precocious, Silverman reports. He grew up as a camera-happy kid in Columbia, S.C. (where his name was drawled “Dahnen”), danced on Broadway in “Pal Joey” at 16 and co-directed his first Hollywood feature at 25. An affable, unflappable pro, Donen succeeded through “a kind of knowing guilelessness” rather than naked ambition, Silverman says. He credits Donen with “changing the face and form of the American movie musical . . . integrating in a naturalistic fashion the elements of song, dance, plot and realistic character motives,” and blames the fade-out of Donen’s career--no movies since 1984--on the decline of the musical and of Old Hollywood elegance in general. Donen demurs. He calls himself a “meat-and-potatoes” director and insists: “Movies should not pretend to be more important than the people watching them. It’s not human, it’s not nice.”