Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952
[14 votes]
"I don't pretend to be objective where Singin' in the Rain is
concerned; it was the first movie I saw with the girl I'd eventually
marry. The very fabric of it mirrors that moment, from the iconic title
dance number that captures the delight of romance in bloom, to a plot
that's all about the growing pains of adjusting to something new. It's
also a wonderful valentine to cinema history, brought to life as
something very close to pure joy in movie form. Even if you're not
falling in love *at* the movies, this is a story that captures falling
in love *with* the movies." ~ Scott Renshaw
“Singin'
In the Rain is likely
my favorite movie. I say "likely" because I don't know that I have a
favorite movie, but if I did, this would be it. I've had a hard year, beset by
self-doubt and depression, and I've watched the film twice during that period,
both times as a panacea to what ails me. Like no other movie ever made, it
makes me happy. The thing is, I can't quantify that, really. I can't point to
this element or that and say ‘this makes me happy,’ when the exact same element
in another movie does not make me happy. I mean, I can say that Gene Kelly's
smile in this movie makes me giddy (because it totally does, hubba hubba), but
why doesn't his smile in, say, Cover Girl
or Inherit the Wind have the same
effect? I don't know. There's some kind of weird alchemy at work in this film,
and I don't know how to write about it, really. But I'll try. I'll try.
“The most
amazing thing in is not Donald O'Connor's ‘Make 'Em Laugh’ number, but the fact
that O'Connor, a four pack a day smoker, did it twice. The first time through,
the actor was so wrecked that he spent a week in bed afterward. An accident
ruined the footage and O'Connor was pressed into doing it again. By all
accounts, this was a hard film to make. Debbie Reynolds once said that making Singin' in the Rain and childbirth were
the two hardest things she'd ever done. Do you want to know the difference
between Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire? Astaire looked effortless. With Kelly, you
could see the hard work involved. And Kelly was a stern taskmaster and the
making of Singin' in the Rain was by
all accounts an unpleasant experience. Even Kelly himself was famously beset by
the flu when he shot the famous sequence where he sings the title song in the
middle of a downpour.
“Singin' in the Rain is, for want of a
better word, the ‘movie-est’ movie I know, a froth concocted of smoke and
mirrors and celluloid. What's more, it knows that it's built from ‘a bunch of
dumb show’ and it revels in it. It's set in the world of movies, it's about
movies, and its formal playfulness comes both from the conventions of the
movies and at their expense. While it's an enormous entertainment it's also a a
shrewd deconstruction of the movie musical and of the movies themselves. This
does everything that the French New Wave guys wanted to do, a decade before the
fact. It's a serious head trip if you start probing very deeply into it.
"You're just a shadow on the wall!" Kathy Selden shouts at Don
Lockwood, which is the movie equivalent of Rene Magritte's The Treachery of Images. Ceci
n'est pas une pipe.
“Of all
the directors who came up through the musical dream factory at MGM, Stanley
Donen was perhaps the most forward-thinking. When Vincent Minnelli kept on
making the same kind of studio movies he'd always made into the post-New Wave
60s, Donen adapted. Or didn't, really. He was already an archetypal ‘New Wave’
director. Look at the arbitrary dazzle in the ‘The Wedding of the Painted Doll’
montage that precedes ‘Beautiful Girls:’ it's both razzle dazzle for its own
sake and a catalog of images culled from the musicals of the early talkies. The
way it brings these to bright technicolor life threatens to fry the retinas and
the whole thing is deeply weird, but Donen knows exactly how long to let it
hold the screen. This sequence is a bridge through time as the talkies take
over the film's fictional movie studio, but its baroque gaudiness is there for
no other reason than because the filmmakers felt like doing it. But that's the
least of the film's meta-cinematic pranks. The fact that Jean Hagen dubbed
Debbie Reynolds's voice when Reynolds, as Kathy Selden, dubs Hagen's voice as
Lina Lamont is one of the best cinematic in-jokes ever put on screen.
“Speaking
of Lina Lamont, Jean Hagen's performance in Singin'
in the Rain is a comedic masterpiece. Much as I like Gene Kelly and Debbie
Reynolds, it's the supporting characters that really make me smile when they're
on screen, and Jean Hagen is first among them. It's weird: after I showed my
partner Singin' in the Rain for the
first time--she had never seen it when we'd met--Lina Lamont became the most
quoted character in our household. Every so often, she still randomly exclaims ‘I
can't make love to a BUSH’ in her version of Lina's distinctive voice. I
occasionally find myself saying things like ‘I make more money than Calvin
Coolidge...put together!’ or ‘If we bring a little joy into your humdrum lives,
it makes us feel as though our hard work ain't been in vain for nothin'.’ It's
infectious. She's one of the great movie characters and she's a huge part of
why the movie works. I don't know why Jean Hagen never became a bigger star.
She mostly worked in television after Singin'
in the Rain. Still, I suppose she has her claim on immortality. There are
plenty of big, big stars that have never made a movie--or a performance--as
good as Singin' in the Rain.
“Of course
the movie has flaws. It has a pretty huge flaw at the end, when everything that
makes Singin' in the Rain work comes
to a screeching halt as Kelly embarks on the ‘Broadway Ballet’ that takes up,
like, 12 minutes of the film's running time. Kelly liked these kinds of
mini-ballets, and after seeing how such things were incorporated into The Red Shoes, he started doing them
himself. In truth, Singin' in the Rain
drops the ball on this. The Red Shoes
ballet is central to the narrative of that movie. ‘The Broadway Melody?’ No.
Still, it has its pleasures. For all the love I have for Kathy Selden and Lina
Lamont, it's the sight of Cyd Charisse wearing a Louise Brooks bob who fires my
lust. This movie did make a star out of Cyd Charisse, even though she didn't
have a single line of dialogue. Watching her made over by Kelly and Donen as
Madonna and whore is one of the film's indelible pleasures. And even if this
part of the movie is a white elephant--and I think it absolutely is a white
elephant--the filmmakers seems aware of this. The ‘Fit as a Fiddle’ montage
could give the end of the film lessons in irony, given that it punctures the ‘dignity,
always dignity’ the Broadway Melody number tries so hard to encompass. I like
to think it was Donen who had the idea of puncturing the whole thing right out
of the break when, after this huge phantasmagoria unfolds before our very eyes,
Millard Mitchell's studio head says ‘I just can't see it.’ So not a fatal flaw
by any means.
“The film
more than compensates with other pleasures. There's an antic, Monty Pythonish
feeling to the ‘Moses Supposes' number, while there's surprisingly deep wells
of emotion in both the ‘Should I’ serenade in front of a huge cyclorama (again
puncturing the illusion of the cinema), and again when the film shows us the
hurt Kathy Selden feels at the end of the film before Don Lockwood redeems it.
And the title song, too. It's one of the best evocations of infatuation, of the
blooming of new love, that I've ever seen in a movie, and it presents it
without schmaltz or embarrassing bathos or poesy. It's actually funny. Mostly,
it's exhilarating and that seems just
right.
“So what
is it about all of this that makes me not just happy, but giddy every time I
watch Singin' in the Rain? As I've
said, I don't know, but I've had a LOT of emotional reactions to the movie.
I've laughed myself silly watching it, I've been wracked by sobs after the end,
and during almost every viewing, my heart has risen a little in my chest such
that I could feel it beating just below my collarbone. In some regards, I can't convey what it is that makes me
love this movie so much because how does one describe color to a blind man? I'm
comforted that others love the movie as much as I do, but their experience of
it is theirs and mine is mine, and that's something to treasure.” ~ Christianne Benedict
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