I quickly realized that this film was the shortest on my winter movie bucket list, at 1 hour 43 minutes, so I jumped at that opportunity. I also knew Singin’ In The Rain was culturally significant, as AFI named it the best movie musical of all time, meaning I was excited to say the least.
The film tells the story of Hollywood’s transition from silent into talking films (so it’s a color version of The Artist?). It follows Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly), a famous movie star who his studio romantically links to Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) even though she is the definition of a Hollywood diva. The worst part is that as the studio tries to transition one of the pair’s newest films into a talkie, they begin to realize that Lina can neither talk (properly) nor act at all. Which brings in Debbie Reynolds' character, Kathy Selden, a showgirl that Don finds himself falling in love with. The studio decides to use her voice to dub over Lina’s, and craziness ensues. Magical musical movie ending, love everywhere, instant classic.
Gene Kelly. I don’t know whether to be more impressed with his dancing, singing, or good looks. He radiates charm and class, and as this was (embarrassingly enough) my first ever Gene Kelly film, I couldn’t take my eyes off him (okay there were other reasons). After the success of Kelly’s 1951 film, An American In Paris, he made his second collaboration with director and choreographer Stanley Donen, Singin’ In The Rain. The MGM musical is a movie musical in the classic 1930s to 1950s sense, where the studios experimented with blurring the lines between diegetic and non-diegetic musical sequences. But while I thought most of the musical numbers would begin like this:
Most of them actually began without any purpose at all. All of the songs are written by MGM producer Arthur Freed and his collaborator Nancy Herb Brown, but they are taken from previous MGM musicals from the 1930s. Which makes sense, because most of them hardly fit into the plot.
For example, the above gif shows a sequence from the song Moses Supposes (also featured in Silver Linings Playbook), which literally takes place as Kelly’s character is taking a diction lesson, and his friend walks in and they start mocking the voice coach by singing the tongue twisters and dancing. Whereas with modern musicals we aren’t actually expected to believe that Anne Hathaway is singing about her troubles in an abandoned attic room after prostituting herself for the first time, these characters legitimately break into song and dance just because they feel compelled to. But the weirdest part is that most of the songs seem to serve no purpose at all.
The gif above is from one of the last musical numbers, Broadway Melody Ballet, which is an imagined musical number from the film Don Lockwood is trying to convert from a silent film into a talkie musical. That woman in the back, she isn’t even in the actual movie, she appears only in this one number! It’s random as hell and I can’t help but love it.
Debbie Reynolds is also excellent as Kathy Selden, the hard-to-get / I-don’t-fall-for-movie-stars type.
Jean Hagen also makes a great villain as Lina Lamont, Don Lockwood’s crazy costar. She ended up being the only actor in the film nominated for an Oscar, but it also got nominated for Best Original Music Score.
Only a 1950s musical could have a musical number as random as “Good Morning.” The characters realize they stayed up until 1AM so instead of saying goodnight, they say good morning… and then they sing it. But it’s frivolous and fun and as Gene Kelly embodies in the following gif, haters gonna hate.
I’d like close by pointing out that Gene Kelly’s wikipedia page says that his last ever project before dying in 1996 was doing the choreography for the 1997 animated masterpiece, Cats Don’t Dance.
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