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Singin in the rain1/8/2024 The romantic overture You Were Meant for Me is given a staging of heart-stopping romanticism, wedged between all the film’s daffy farce. You don’t need musical freshness with that dynamism in the delivery. It’s surprisingly slow to start as a musical: the film’s first full-scale musical number comes nearly half an hour in, with Donald O’Connor’s silly-putty physicality making a stunning gymnastics act of the frothy Make ’Em Laugh – one of only two new songs composed for the film, and a shameless knockoff of Cole Porter’s Be a Clown at that. Squint slightly at the screen, and you can see the sweet, amusing, throwaway B-musical this might have been, given duller casting and a little less directorial care.īut then, just as you’re settling into the film’s sunny, effortless groove – wondering, amid your pleasure, if it’s maybe a notch less masterful than you remembered or had been told – Donen and Kelly hit you with a shot of pure lightning-in-a-bottle magic. The script shuffles warm romantic comedy, breezy Hollywood satire and fanciful Broadway reverie with casual speed, never straining for punchlines or pathos there’s occasionally a jukebox carelessness to the song placements that fits with the film’s general insouciance. Nothing about Singin’ in the Rain announces itself as Art, or even as a grand event: it’s a film so light on its feet as to make its genre-melding entertainment look deceptively easy. Watching it 70 years later, you can see why an industry then preoccupied with prestige and television-beating spectacle took time to give the film due respect. (Even the Globes handed their best musical award to the drab Susan Hayward vehicle With a Song in My Heart instead.) Reviews and box office were good if not phenomenal the Academy, having lavished six Oscars on An American in Paris the year before, gave Singin’ in the Rain a scant two nominations. (In the last four editions of Sight & Sound’s decennial critics’ poll, it has consistently been the highest-scoring musical, twice placing in the all-time top 10.) Upon its release, however, it wasn’t treated as any kind of milestone. Back in 1952, Freed would probably have been surprised to learn that Singin’ in the Rain, rather than An American in Paris, would eventually become the most canonised of all Hollywood musicals – the one routinely cited even by non-acolytes of the genre as one of the greatest films ever made. History, of course, takes time to take shape. When production on the latter wrapped, making Kelly available, the script for Singin’ in the Rain was passed on to him. Their first film as a director-choreographer duo, the sailors-on-leave romp On the Town, had elevated its featherweight material with visual wit and restless movement separately, Donen had brought fleet-footed flash to his direction of the Fred Astaire vehicle Royal Wedding, while Kelly’s stardom had reached a peak with An American in Paris. (Remember Pagan Love Song? The Belle of New York? No?) At the outset, one might have expected the sketchily contrived Singin’ in the Rain to fall firmly on the B-list.īut that would have been reckoning without Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, at that point something of a dream team for Freed and MGM. As a producer, Freed tended to alternate artistically ambitious prestige musicals – just one week before Singin’ in the Rain premiered, he picked up a best picture Oscar for Vincente Minnelli’s ravishing, Gershwin-scored pop ballet An American in Paris – with cheerful, brightly disposable filler.
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