Singin' in the Rain
Made: 1952
Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen
Director: Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly
Screenwriter: Adolf Green, Betty Comden
Cinemintographer: Harold Rosson
Producer: Arthur Freed
"People? I ain't people!"
I have personally seen Singin' in the Rain more than any other movie in my life time. As a child growing up, my grandparents had many old movie musicals on VHS that my sister and I watched all the time. Some of them like Meet me in St. Louis, Brigadoon, and Showboat (1951) have not stuck with me at all. They are fine movies, but nothing I yearn for or think about on a regular basis. Singin' in the Rain however is pretty much a perfect film and one that has constantly thrilled me over the years. It is not too dated by the times, because it is based in a time frame going from the 1920's to the 1930's (from the perspective of people in 1952). The humorous banter, though very much of its times, holds up extremely well. For that you can thank the producer and screenwriters. The overall tone and sarcasm that prevails through out the movie still rings pretty true, and for that you can thank the director. You can feel the movie winking at you as it goes along.
Unlike like many movies of its time, or even most movies today, there were two directors on the movie. Stanley Donen directed the movie and Gene Kelly directed the dancing, but it is viewed by both men as a collaboration. It is the rare movie that is renowned and loved by both critics and fans; there is some kind of chord it strikes with everybody - I personally think it is the love of making movies that shines through unlike any other. It was accidently great, like Casablanca, North by Northwest, Wizard of Oz, Pulp Fiction, Jaws....movies that were just being themselves but are often remembered as iconic. Singin' in the Rain is a parody of movie musicals in a way , and its satiristic tone often shines through. It uses songs mostly from older movies because they were cheap to grab the rights to AND because they mostly belonged to Arthur Freed musicals from the late 1920's early 1930's (lncluding the song "Singin in the Rain actually"), and rumor is many of the sets and props were borrowed as well. It was a movie made as on the fly as the movie itself plays out to be, a kind of independent, untamed freedom that did not often exist in hollywood at the time. Years later when movies started to move outside of the hollywood system with directors like Cassavetes, Pollack, Scorsese, Truffaut, they no doubt looked to Singin' in the Rain for inspiration.
There are many classic scenes in the movie and most of them have to do with great acting or cinematography. For example the mic picking up the heartbeat of Lena Lamont during the first scene using sound for dialoge in the movies; you can feel the actor and director trying to make new technology work and how they had to change to adapt. Cinematographer Harold Rosson had worked on many silent movies and brought his ability to make films seems like dreams to Wizard of Oz and Our Town, as well as his gritty realism from the more recent The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Red Badge of Courage (1951). The movie is a triumph of willpower for Gene Kelly, who had starred in about a dozen dance themed movies and musicals up to this one, most famously Our Town and An American in Paris. Any scene with Gene Kelly and Donald O' Connor dancing is a joy to behold and it makes one yearn for the day when tap dancing was all the rage. They are often a blur to watch and one can only imagine the hours of practicing that goes in to some of these tap dance routines. It makes the actors and dancers of today look extremely lazy. O' Connor's "Make em Laugh" number is perhaps the supreme movie musical dance number, taking an excruciating toll on the actors' well being during and following the scene (he required weeks of bed rest after it was done - no joke!). Both Kelly and O'Connor are great comedic actors also, followed by supporting roles like a convincing Debbie Reynolds at 18 years old, Millard Mitchell as Simpson the head of the studio making the movie, and Jean Hagen as Lena Lamont, one of the most underrated movie villians. The part was originally cast for Billie Holliday but deemed to small of a roll for such a rising star, so her understudy Hagen nabbed the part. Growing up with the movie, her role is easily seen as the best acting job, especially once you learn that that high pitched squeaky voice is a fake and that Hagen dubbed Reynolds' singing in real life where as in the movie Reynolds was dubbing Hagen. Make sense?
Of course you can't talk about this movie without talking about the songs; all seem relevant and modernized through seeing this film: "Singing in the Rain", "Would You", and "Moses Supposes" are the best of the shorter tunes, while "Gotta Dance/Broadway Melody" and the "Beautiful Girls" montage incorporate abstract techniques bordering on a combination of nonsense and Busby Berkley style images. The longer musical numbers work well along side the shorter ones, creating a seamless interpretation. The longest of these was of course "The Broadway Melody" at about 17 minutes, earlier filmed in the movie of the same title in 1929 which was the first full Hollywood musical. This song is still somewhat of an acquired taste to most. The melody is actually a medley of many of Arthur Freed's musicals weaved together, spliced up in a way that it would take hours to properly talk about. Though an odd detour in the film, one has to remember this is a movie sown together simply by songs, and when viewed as a piece of a song tapestry it really doesn't stand out that much. The screenwriters Adolf Green and Betty Comden actually weaved the story of the movie around the songs, because once the rights to the songs were aquired they were the "story" and the time and place of the picture had to be set up in that way. It seems effortless, just like the best of any art does, but actually took tons of hard work and hundreds of dedicated people to create. Ditto for Kelly's "Singin in the Rain" number, with him splashing in the rain after finding out he is in love, which captures the joy of making the movie as well as O'Connor's "Make em Laugh". Other musicals have tried in beating Singin' in the Rain at its own game, but none really get as close as this film; mabye the closest calls are The Band Wagon (1953), The Producers (1968), True Stories (1986), and Everyone Says I Love You (1996), as far as getting that carefree feeling juuuust right.
Singin' in the Rain is a movie of great humor overall: it is simultaneously sarcastic, hilarious, witty, and poignant. My favorite scene is personally the "yes, yes, yes" and "no, no, no" being slowed down when the sound gets out of sync with the video on a first screening of the new "talkie" The Dueling Cavaleer. That scene is truly one of the funniest in any movie ever made. All above, the film is one of the most enjoyable movies to watch for people of all ages. As a child, I enjoyed the humor and the stunts but as an adult I enjoyed the visuals and what went into the development and making of the movie. I wanted to learn more about who made it and why, and became fans of the careers of Stanley Donen (who went on to direct Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954) and Charade in (1964)) and producer Alan Freed (who basically invented the hollywood musical along side Busby Berkley in the 1920's). It is a very overdone and overcrowded movie, with jabs being thrown everywhere about the excess of musicals of the 1930's while also praising their beauty and style, a style that puts music to images: the original type of music videos. All of these things culminate in a great ending in which is a singer is falsely singing behind another, which is symbolism for how the movies work in the first place. Movie musicals especially do this, through lip synching. It's a movie within a movie about the movie buisness. It is convincing in its false world and all the false modesty it conveys, but as we see in Singin' in the Rain the surface is all show - only true love is real.