2011’s multiple award-winning movie, The Artist, was an homage to the Hollywood of the late 1920s during its difficult transition from silent movies to the “talkies”, and very good it was too. It wasn’t the first movie to find its inspiration from that time, however: 1952’s Singin’ In The Rain, rightly regarded as one of the greatest Hollywood musicals of all time, also tells the story of silent movie stars caught up in that transition to a new era. It also happened to contain one of the most famous dance sequences ever performed: Gene Kelly’s joyous routine as a loved-up dreamer on a rain-soaked sidewalk.
The story of the film’s making is an interesting one and on the surface may well have resulted in a mishmash of songs and ideas; the movie started out as essentially a vanity project for MGM producer Arthur Freed. Freed had spent the 1920s as a lyricist, writing songs for talkies with Nacio Herb Brown. By the 1940s, he was head of his own MGM unit, and wanted to create a musical from his own back catalogue (his song Singin’ in the Rain had in fact already been used in the movie The Hollywood Revue of 1929). Betty Comden and Adolph Green were hired to write the screenplay and, realising that the songs were very much of their era, “it occurred to us that rather than try to use them in a sophisticated, contemporary story…they would bloom in something that took place in the very period in which they had been written”. The transition from silent to sound thus provided the most appropriate — and as it turned out, perfect – vehicle for Freed’s songs.
Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) are a glamourous on-screen couple who are also hyped by the studio as having an off-screen romance, although in reality Don barely tolerates Lina and Lina only convinces herself of the hype due to her own self-importance. They are embarking on a new silent movie but their producer realises late on that he has no choice but to convert it to a talking picture, due to the success of (real-life) movie The Jazz Singer. The production is beset with difficulties, of course, wherefrom much comedy ensues, and Don falls for chorus girl Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds).
Gene Kelly’s famous umbrella-twirling dance scene took three days to film, and despite running a 103°F fever for the whole period, he achieved a piece of cinematic history. Modest as ever, he would attribute the number’s success to the crew, musicians, and composers. Upon the movie’s release in April 1952 audiences flocked to see it and, despite being largely ignored by the Oscars (unlike The Artist), it was a triumph. Get a load of Kelly’s charm and appeal in his famous scene here…
