Singin’ in the Rain

Released: March 27, 1952

Studio: MGM

Genre: musical/comedy

Box Office (numbers in millions):

Domestic: 8.82 Worldwide: ?

Adjusted for Inflation:

Domestic: 27.20 Worldwide: ?

Directing: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly

Screenwriting: Adolph Green, Betty Comden

Starring: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Cyd Charisse

Review:

Certainly “one of Hollywood's best-loved musical comedies,” ^MSN Singin’ in the Rain is “perhaps the greatest movie musical of all time.” ^LM Kelly stars and co-directs with Stanley Donen, a Lifetime Achievement Oscar-winner. The musical “boasts a terrific Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown songbook [and] a very funny script by Adolph Green and Betty Comden.” ^TV

The story is “a satire on the panic that gripped Tinseltown when the motion-picture industry changed from silent films to sound.” ^VD “Vaudeville, silent film actor/dancer Don Lockwood (Kelly) and co-star actress Lina Lamont (Hagen) are at the height of box-office popularity, but with the advent of sound, shrill-voiced Lina’s first talkie The Duelling Cavalier with swashbuckling Lockwood is laughable before studio preview audiences.” ^FS As “the silent-screen triple threat (‘She can’t act, she can’t sing and she can’t dance’)” ^TV “whose voice could shatter glass,” ^LM Hagen gives “the performance of a lifetime.” ^LM

Lockwood’s “aspiring ingenue girlfriend Kathy Selden (Reynolds) is recruited to rescue their first film – remade as a musical re-titled The Dancing Cavalier, with Kathy secretly dubbing over Lina’s voice. The voice-dubbing deception is ultimately exposed, and love blossoms.” ^FS

The movie features some of the best singing and dancing ever put to film, mostly through Kelly’s work, but also because of Reynolds and O’Connor. The title song with Kelly singing and dancing around light posts in the rain, is “one of the most famous scenes ever filmed.” ^VD “If there’s a stretch of celluloid more joyous than Gene Kelly’s triumphant splash through the title song, we haven’t seen it.” ^TV Kelly wasn’t feeling as joyful as the scene looks; he had a fever of 103 degrees. ^MSN In addition, “Donald O’Connor’s "Make ‘Em Laugh" is pure choreographed delirium,” ^TV but the original “footage had been accidentally destroyed and had to be reshot.” ^MSN