Was There Really Milk in Singin’ in the Rain?
Shooting Gene Kelly’s musical number was terrible for the cinematographer.
By KELLI MARSHALL
Virtually every fan of Singin’ in the Rain (1952) knows at least three behind-the-scenes “facts”:
- Gene Kelly was a hard-ass choreographer and worked poor Debbie Reynolds until her feet bled.
- Kelly had a high fever while filming the title number.
- Set designers added milk to the water so raindrops would show up on camera.
The first two statements are true, or at least true-ish. That third statement though…
Regarding the first “fact,” at age 83, Debbie Reynolds still tells the story about how Fred Astaire found her sobbing underneath a piano, a victim of Gene Kelly’s taskmaster ways. The dancing was so difficult that 19-year-old Reynolds thought she’d surely die.
Coaxing her out of hiding, Astaire assured her she wouldn’t and advised, “That’s what it’s like to learn dance. If you’re not sweating, you’re not doing it right.”
Speaking to the second “fact,” Kelly tells his biographer he had “a very bad cold” on the day of filming and was concerned he’d “catch pneumonia with all that water pouring down” on him. So while fever is not mentioned, the song-and-dance man was, yeah, apparently sick.
The third “fact” above, however, is false. Even though “the milk story” is featured on virtually every site, anniversary tribute, and listicle that mentions Singin’ in the Rain, IMDB trivia included, it is, as Gene Kelly researcher Sue Cadman points out, “a bogus ‘fact’ that has been disseminated as gospel truth.”
Moreover, Gene Kelly himself described what happened in several interviews, including one with American Film (1979):
Shooting the title number was just terrible for the photographer Hal Rossen. He had to backlight all the rain and then he had to put frontlight on the performer. That was as tough a job as I’ve ever seen, because you can’t photograph in rain and see it.
Furthermore, Kelly’s co-director, Stanley Donen, also dispels this “milky rain” business in his Private Screenings interview with Robert Osborne. And Donen explains the same in a Directors Guild Association column “Still Singing”:
When you’re shooting rain, it has to be backlit, or you may not see it very well. There have been a lot of stories about how we put milk in the water so you could see the rain. It’s not true. You have to put the light behind the rain so that the raindrops show. If you put the light in front of the rain, with no light behind it, the rain disappears.
So now you know: the only milk featured in Singin’ in the Rain sits in a glass bottle, right before Kelly, Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor joyfully break into the number “Good Morning.”
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