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Singin' in the Rain (1952)
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Released just one year after An American In Paris, this film was
somewhat overlooked at the time (just two Oscar nominations to Paris’s eight,
with no awards on the big night) but has since surpassed the earlier film to become widely
hailed as one of the greatest movie musicals ever made, and certainly as Gene Kelly’s
finest cinematic achievement.
Singin’ In The Rain's plot borrows a great deal from its
predecessor. Kelly plays a silent film actor instead of a painter, but again he is
struggling to free himself from the predatory blonde who threatens to compromise him
artistically (Jean Hagen here, Nina Foch in An American in Paris). Again he is
chasing an elfin, spirited young brunette he meets briefly and with whom he becomes
infatuated (Debbie Reynolds picking up where Leslie Caron left off), and again spending
his free time with the piano-playing best friend, who provides romantic advice and comic
relief (Donald O’Connor in for Oscar Levant). As before, the songs are mostly
pre-existing numbers – written in this case by producer Arthur Freed – and
dusted off in order to be given the full song-and-dance treatment.
What sets this film above An American In Paris, though, is that
it feels like it was made out of whole cloth rather than just being a showcase for its
dancers. Remove the dance numbers from American in Paris, and you are left with
little more than a fairly pedestrian love triangle story, but Singin’ In The Rain
is much more ambitious. Equal parts love letter and satire, it is a self-referential,
musical portrait of the birth of the Hollywood musical.
Kelly and Hagen are Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont, the golden couple of
the silent era. They are adored by the movie-going public and touted by the gossip
columnists as a hot-and-heavy young couple, although behind the scenes he can hardly stand
her. They keep up the pretense for the sake of their careers, but they face a real problem
in 1927 with the release of The Jazz Singer and the advent of ‘talkies.’
The problem is that while Hagen is beautiful, and a talented silent actress, she has a
squawky, nasal screech of a voice that makes Fran Drescher sound like Kathleen Turner. As
the studio prepares to throw big money behind the pair’s first talkie, Hagen’s
vocal style, coupled with the fact that she is apparently too ditzy to follow simple
instructions like “Talk into the mike,” threatens to sink not just her own
career, but Kelly’s as well.
Enter the brunette. Around this time Kelly has a brief encounter with a
young stage actress, whose disdainful comments about silent film acting hit him where it
hurts, creating in him a desire to become a ‘real’ (i.e. sound) actor. It turns
out that she has a lovely voice, and Kelly works to convince the studio to dub her vocals
over Hagen’s Brooklynite squealing in order to make her a star, and save his picture
from public ridicule.
The plan succeeds, and along the way, Kelly, Reynolds and O’Connor
are given half a dozen joyous, jazzy musical numbers that are so brilliantly executed, and
so grounded in the film’s showbiz milieu, that one cannot help but surrender
to them. Most famous of all is the title number, in which an enraptured Kelly sloshes his
way through a downpour without a care in the world. Perhaps the most perfect expression of
Kelly’s genius, the routine makes effortless use of props (an umbrella, a hat) and of
environment (a lamppost, a curb, an awning, a drainpipe, a puddle), and is all tied
together by Kelly’s infectious grin and swooning, crooning vocal. But not too far
behind come such showstoppers as “Make ‘em Laugh”, in which O’Connor
condenses the whole history of slapstick comedy into one breathless exercise in musical
masochism; “Moses Supposes”, in which the guys turn a humdrum diction lesson
into a dazzling, goofy tap routine, and “Good Morning”, in which the three leads
march through Kelly’s huge house, riffing with all available staircases, furniture
and raincoats. O’Connor, it should be pointed out, is a wonderful dancer –
matching Kelly step for step through some of the most hair-raising long-take tap routines
ever committed to celluloid. Reynolds is given fewer chances to dance, but her chemistry
with Kelly feels genuine, and she shows some character in her first scene, but this
feistiness dwindles as the movie progresses and she is required to become more virtuous.
The climactic fantasy, “Broadway Melody Ballet,” echoes a
similar sequence at the climax of An American In Paris, but this time it feels less
integrated into the film as a whole. For the earlier film to take the characters inside
the world of paintings for their final pas de deux seemed entirely appropriate. But
here, the fifteen-minute fantasia detour into the evolution of the Broadway musical is
less welcome, jamming on the brakes just as the story is building to its climax.
The climax itself is well-intentioned, but surprisingly cruel. As with An
American In Paris, the character who comes out of this film badly is the blonde. Both
Hagen and Foch become increasingly villainous as their films progress. In an apparent
attempt to justify her harsh treatment at the hands of the heroes, the script turns
Hagen’s Lina Lamont from a harmless ditz into a vicious harpy in the film’s
final ten minutes. As she stands backstage, spewing threats, insults and self-aggrandizing
vitriol to all within earshot, it is hard to shake the feeling that the film is going a
little far in trying to make the audience hate her. Perhaps the scriptwriters felt that
simply possessing a voice unsuitable for sound was insufficient reason for a character to
be punished, nevertheless it is the one moment when this otherwise warm-hearted film
forgets its hero’s filmmaking credo: “Dignity, always dignity.”
- Ben Stephens
