Singin' in the Rain (1952)
Directed by Stanley Donen
In 1927 Hollywood, a silent film star falls for a chorus girl just as he and his paranoid screen partner struggle to make the difficult transition to talking pictures.
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11 films that influenced Singin' in the Rain
What critics say influenced Singin' in the Rain
While Don and Lina are shooting a silent swordplay-and-damsels flick, The Dueling Cavalier, for Monumental Pictures, a new Warner Brothers smash called The Jazz Singer opens -- and the first major studio feature employing sound technology is a screaming success.
The setting is 1927, the official end of the movies' silent era and the beginning of talkies with Warner Brothers' "The Jazz Singer." Kelly is a conceited silent-screen matinee idol, Don Lockwood, whose on-screen love interest is Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), a relationship made in hell as Lockwood can't stand the lady.
Everything turns upside-down when The Jazz Singer and talking pictures hit town like an earthquake.
Then The Jazz Singer opens, and Hollywood is turned upside down.
Set in Hollywood in the late �20s, at the moment when the unimaginable success of Warner Brothers� The Jazz Singer sent the other studios into a desperate furor of nervous activity as they closed down all production of silents and wired their stages for sound, Betty Comden & Adolph Green�s screenplay burlesques the movie business with as much deadly accuracy and outrageous wit as anyone ever has.
Its hard to believe, now, that anyone ever imagined that "talkies" were a passing fad; that it took the success of The Jazz Singer (which was scarcely a "talkie" at all) to convince Hollywood otherwise.
And in "Good Morning" (borrowed from the Judy Garland & Mickey Rooney Babes in Arms), Kelly, O�Connor, and Reynolds express their bottomless joy at solving the Dueling Cavalier problem by dancing over an upended sofa.
Disc extras include audio commentary by Donen, Reynolds, O'Connor, co-star Cyd Charisse, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and others; the new documentary Singin' in the Rain: Raining on a New Generation; a making-of piece; the 1996 PBS documentary Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM, about the producer-songwriter behind Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, Meet Me in St. Louis and countless other musical classics; an outtake of the musical number "You Are My Lucky Star"; and an irresistible collection of clips from earlier movies that featured the songs included in this film (for instance, "Singin' in the Rain," first heard in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, actually appeared in at least 15 movies before getting a movie named after it!).
"The love impulse frequently reveals itself in terms of conflict," says the doctor to Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, and nowhere is that notion more true than in Singin' in the Rain.
Much like “Singin’ In The Rain,” “Bringing Up Baby” maintains a level of energy that is almost impossible to achieve.
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And Jean Hagen, despite not being the filmmakers' first choice for Lina (that was Judy Holliday, whose 1951 Oscar victory for Born Yesterday, priced her beyond what the budget would allow), defines a perfect comic caricature.
MGM originally intended her role as the quintessential dumb blonde for Judy Holliday, but Holliday had just scored a big hit in "Born Yesterday" and became unavailable for the role.
Sure, Fred and Ginger did more technically proficient dancing in Top Hat and Swing Time; and the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, like Footlight Parade, had more spectacular set pieces.
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.
His lengthy resume as a producer of musicals began with an uncredited behind-the-scenes role in bringing The Wizard of Oz to the screen and concluded in 1960 with Bells Are Ringing.
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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.
Another, "Make 'Em Laugh," was essentially a rip-off of Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" from The Pirate.
In fact, only a few weeks before the world premiere, Gene Kelly's previous starring vehicle, An American in Paris, buzzed through the Oscars, winning six of the eight awards it was nominated for, including Best Picture.
General consensus agrees that Singin' got screwed because in the previous year Kelly's other superb musical romance, An American in Paris, swept the Academy Awards with wins that included Best Picture, Best Music, Best Cinematography, and Best Writing, plus an honorary award to Kelly "in appreciation of his versatility as an actor, singer, director, and dancer, and specially for his brilliant achievement in the art of choreography on film."
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.
Disc extras include audio commentary by Donen, Reynolds, O'Connor, co-star Cyd Charisse, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green, and others; the new documentary Singin' in the Rain: Raining on a New Generation; a making-of piece; the 1996 PBS documentary Musicals Great Musicals: The Arthur Freed Unit at MGM, about the producer-songwriter behind Singin' in the Rain, An American in Paris, Meet Me in St. Louis and countless other musical classics; an outtake of the musical number "You Are My Lucky Star"; and an irresistible collection of clips from earlier movies that featured the songs included in this film (for instance, "Singin' in the Rain," first heard in The Hollywood Revue of 1929, actually appeared in at least 15 movies before getting a movie named after it!).