The Spoiler Alert: Singin’ in the Rain
The Essentials: Rating: Unrated | Category: Comedy, Musical, Romance | Directors: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly | Writers: Adolph Green, Betty Camden |
It’s been a personal goal of mine to try and make my way through the AFI Greatest American Films of All Time list. One of their top movies is Singin’ in the Rain (#4 to be exact). This movie is from 1952 and yet, it still tops the AFI List of Greatest Movie Musicals, their general list, AND is prominently featured during The Great Movie Ride at Disney’s Hollywood Studios (to me, it’ll always be MGM, the studio coincidentally responsible for this movie). So with that in mind, I chose it as my next assignment and watched it in Business Class on my flight to Peru. Get comfy.
Plot: As famous as this movie is, the only thing I knew about it is that Gene Kelly is in it, and he sings and dances in the rain. But otherwise I had NO CLUE.
It’s the 1920’s and the plot centers around how silent movies are on their way out and Hollywood is moving into “talking pictures”. Gene Kelly plays Don Lockwood, a silent movie star in a tabloid relationship with his frequent co-star, the beautiful but crazy Lina Lamont (read: he ACTIVELY hates her). In a meet cute, he meets Kathy Selden (played by the ENCHANTING Debbie Reynolds, whom our generation might best remember as the mom who wants a wedding in the also great In & Out), an aspiring actress herself, and the two soon fall in love.
Meanwhile, the studio has decided Don’s latest silent movie needs to be a “talkie”, which is fine for Don, but a major problem concerning Lina because she has the worst voice in the world. As in, she’s only a star BECAUSE of the SILENCE part of her movies. The studio won’t even let her do interviews.
Kathy gets hired to dub Lina’s singing voice for the movie, and the studio plans on grooming Kathy to be a star in her own movies, but Lina’s jealousy over Don and general craziness start to cause trouble. After some chat with her lawyers, she decides she doesn’t want the dubbing revealed, and the studio has to bend to her will. However, it all hilariously culminates at the live movie premiere where Lina is asked by her adoring public to SING IN PUBLIC. I’ll admit I thought this was going to go the way of The Lizzie McGuire Movie when they shut off Paulo’s microphone and forced him to sing and he was revealed to be terrible, but instead of forcing the public to hear Lina’s terrible voice, the studio head, Cosmo, and Don, having had enough of Lina’s crazy, REVEAL HER by pulling the curtain and showing who’s really singing. It’s a pretty great moment.
What did I think: The word that keeps coming to mind to describe this movie is “lovely”. Seriously. The plot itself was a lot of fun, the dialogue was very clever and quick, the songs and dancing were super entertaining, and everyone just looked like they were having so much fun!
The biggest thing that occurred to me as I watched this movie is that they get to the point. For example, during Don’s wooing of Kathy, there’s no “will they or won’t they” scenes that would happen in a movie today. There’s no unnecessary misunderstandings, waiting three days to call, a montage of pining for each other. Literally within minutes of seeing her again after their first meet, Don is setting up romance and singing. He likes her. She likes him. Let’s do this! Thus we get that stuff out of the way and the plot moves quickly and with more substance. More time is devoted to dealing with Lina, the ultimate triple non threat who turns out to be a threat in other ways.
Incidentally, Lina (played by Jean Hagen) is a hilarious villain. She has such confidence. You think she’s just this dumb as a brick hollywood diva, but it turns out she’s a mean but smart Hollywood diva. Or at least smart enough to know when she needs backup in the form of her lawyers. Her antics really keep the movie going once the romantic drama is settled.
What I did not know: The songs “Good Morning”, “Gotta Dance”, and “Make ’Em Laugh” are from this movie! I had heard those songs before and knew they just existed, like, in musical land, but never realized this was where it was from. It was a fun discovery. Also, Gene Kelly looks a lot like Billy Zane.
What I could live without: This only happened once, but there was a musical sequence that was just Gene Kelly dancing. Like, in a dream. I will admit to being a little bored by that. And I think it’s a staple of the old timey movie musical to have a scene like that. But the rest of the movie more than makes up for a few minutes of zzzzzz.
A thought to ponder: As I was watching this movie, something occurred to me about the song and dance numbers: The camera angle is wide, featuring all of the actors in big shots, and factor in that technology wasn’t as advanced at the time. This leads me to believe that it’s HIGHLY unlikely that Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’ Connor had dance doubles. They SERIOUSLY had to be triple threats back in the day to make movies like this. They had to sing and dance. There was no hiding it. If you couldn’t ACTUALLY sing and dance, sucks to be you. It’s not like today where, for example, Natalie Portman gets a dance double for Black Swan. That’s not to say that Natalie Portman didn’t work her ass off in that movie, and she definitely did have to dance. But let’s face it, if Natalie Portman’s face is needed, she really only has to nail a move ONCE and they’ve got it on camera and the double could do some fill in work. But Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds had to do every song and dance move themselves until it was right. Her feet were BLEEDING after filming “Good Morning”. It’s even more impressive considering Debbie Reynolds had no dance training at the time (There’s a great list of more fun facts about Singin’ in the Rain on Moviefone.com here!). She reportedly said,
The two hardest things I ever did in my life are childbirth and Singin’ in the Rain.
Donald O’Connor had to be hospitalized after filming “Make Em’ Laugh”. And reportedly Gene Kelly had a 103 degree fever while singing his iconic number. It makes me wonder if actors were overall more talented back then. Was more demanded of them? How many people would actually be actors today, or how skilled would they push themselves to be if the general public still demanded movie musicals? The only people with jobs might be Catherine Zeta-Jones and Grease era John Travolta.
Final note: Watch this movie. It’s old yes, but it’s short! And there are so many little funny moments and lines that time will fly. How can you not enjoy a movie full of zingers like this?
A+.
Originally published at medium.com on February 1, 2016.
