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It was never expected to become immortal and the best Hollywood musical of all time. 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. Adolph Green and Betty Comden, assigned to conceive a suitable story, stayed up all night, rejecting idea after idea, before coming up with the simple premise of showing how Hollywood coped with the coming of sound. The 'Good Morning' sequence echoes their moment of creation, except that the inspired idea in the film is to have Kathy, the ingenue (Debbie Reynolds), dub the voice of the star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) who sounds like a Brooklyn foghorn.
There is a wonderful cynicism throughout "Singin' in the Rain", with everybody either kidding themselves or pretending to be something they are not. The tone is perfectly set at the start when Don (Gene Kelly) tells a gushing radio interviewer the career path to the top he and his friend Cosmo (Donald O'Connor) followed. "Dignity. Always dignity" Don says but flashbacks reveal a less than glamorous grind up through pool halls, burlesque shows, and vaudeville slapstick. Kathy pretends she's a serious actress, then is discovered leaping from a cake in a skimpy chorus-girl costume. Lina believes the studio press office handouts that she and Don are an item. The studio boss RF Simpson (Millard Mitchell) convinces himself talkies will never catch on, and rues his words.
The musical numbers are wonderful, especially O'Connor's brilliantly acrobatic "Make 'em Laugh", Kelly's "Broadway Ballet" with Cyd Charisse, and of course, the title song, the most famous and sublime of them all. Come on with the rain.
Read a review of the DVD.
