There is no movie musical more fun than Singin' in the Rain, and few that remain as fresh over the years. Its originality is all the more startling if you reflect that only one of its songs was written new for the film, that the producers plundered MGM's storage vaults for sets and props, and that the movie was originally ranked below An American in Paris, which won the best picture Oscar. The verdict of the years knows better than Oscar: Singin' in the Rain is a transcendent experience, and no one who loves movies can afford to miss it.
The film is above all lighthearted and happy. The three stars--Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds--must have rehearsed endlessly for their dance numbers, which involve alarming acrobatics, but in performance they're giddy with joy. Kelly's soaking-wet Singin' in the Rain dance number is the single most memorable dance number on film, He is wrote in a British Film Institute monograph. I'd call it a tie with Donald O'Connor's breathtaking Make 'em Laugh number, in which he manhandles himself like a cartoon character.
Kelly and O'Connor were established stars when the film was made in 1952. Debbie Reynolds was a newcomer with five previous smaller roles, and this was her big break. She has to keep up with two veteran hoofers, and does; note the determination on her pert little face as she takes giant strides when they all march toward a couch in the Good Morning number.
Singin' in the Rain pulses with life; in a movie about making movies, you can sense the joy they had making this one. It was co-directed by Mr.Stanley Donen, then only 28, and Kelly, who supervised the choreography. Mr.Donen got an honorary Oscar in 1998, and stole the show by singing Cheek to Cheek while dancing with his statuette. He started in movies at 17, in 1941, as an assistant to Kelly, and they collaborated On the Town (1949) when he was only 25. His other credits include Funny Face and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
One of this movie's pleasures is that it's really about something. Of course, it's about romance, as most musicals are, but it's also about the film industry in a period of dangerous transition. The movie simplifies the changeover from silents to talkies, but doesn't falsify it. Yes, cameras were housed in soundproof booths, and microphones were hidden almost in plain view. And, yes, preview audiences did laugh when they first heard the voices of some famous stars;
Garbo Talks!
The ads promised, but her co-star, John Gilbert, would have been better off keeping his mouth shut. The movie opens and closes at sneak previews, has sequences on sound stages and in dubbing studios, and kids the way the studios manufactured romances between their stars.
When producer Arthur Freed and writers Mr.Betty Comdon and Adolph Green were assigned to the project at MGM, their instructions were to recycle a group of songs the studio already owned, most of them written by Freed himself, with Nacio Herb Brown. Mr.Comdon and Green noted that the songs came from the period when silent films were giving way to sound, and they decided to make a musical about the birth of the talkies. That led to the character of Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), the blond bombshell with the voice like fingernails on a blackboard.
You must be logged in to post a comment.