On the Town (1949)
Directed by Gene Kelly
Three sailors wreak havoc as they search for love during a whirlwind 24-hour leave in New York City.
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What critics compared On the Town to
Indeed, the first story (which gives the film its title) continues the Coens’ ongoing fascination with music – which began back in earnest with “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” in 2000 and has rarely been far from the screen since –whether that be the folk of “Inside Llewyn Davis,” the inspired “On the Town”-esque musical number in “Hail, Caesar!” or the songs used in four of the stories here.
In one long sequence, the two leads, played by Mark Ruffalo and Keira Knightley, essentially dance through New York, “On the Town”-style, but the scene is “realistic” because they — and the audience — are hearing vintage Sinatra and Stevie Wonder tracks through the headphones the characters share.
Singin' in the Rain represented Kelly's second of three collaborations with co-director Stanley Donen (they also worked together in 1949's On the Town and 1955's It's Always Fair Weather).
Made towards the tail end of the Arthur Freed production era at MGM that spawned "Meet Me in St Louis", "Easter Parade", "On the Town", and "An American in Paris", it was first seen as a means of using many of the songs that Freed and Nacio Herb Brown had written 20 years earlier when talkies were in their infancy.
He started in movies at 17, in 1941, as an assistant to Kelly, and they collaborated on "On the Town” (1949) when he was only 25.
Song-and-dance man Gene Kelly ("On the Town," "Summer Stock," "An American in Paris") co-directed the movie with Stanley Donen ("On the Town," "Funny Face," "Damn Yankees!"), and Kelly stars in this colorfully lavish spoof of old-time Hollywood, which co-stars fellow hoofer Donald O'Connor and relative newcomer Debbie Reynolds.
Like other Kelly films such as On the Town and An American in Paris, this film has a big set piece that brings the action to a halt for a non-linear, stylized modern-dance sequence with elaborate costumes and stagey props and backgrounds.
Kelly also manages to sneak in one of his patented mid-movie ballet fantasies, the sort of Technicolor marvel that push the limits of what a movie musical could be, later making "An American in Paris" and "Singin' in the Rain" classics of the genre.