Film - Jonathan Romney gets a glorious feeling from a re-released classic
The best gag in Singin' in the Rain - released in a new print on 24 November - comes at the end of a legendarily extravagant production number. Film star Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) describes to his bewildered producer the grand finale he has in mind for his new movie. Entitled "Broadway Melody", it features an eager young hick who arrives in New York, crowing "Gotta dance!". He rises through the ranks of musical comedy to become a star, but has his heart broken by a nightclub vamp (Cyd Charisse).
We don't hear Kelly describe it: we see the entire routine, with its multitude of singers and dancers in lurid motley. The sequence runs through several different visual styles and dance styles, from humble burlesque to the ethereal dream ballet performed by Kelly and Charisse - who, with her long, floating chiffon scarf, looks less like a woman than an animated plume of smoke. The whole sequence is among the finest flowerings of the MGM musicals unit under Arthur Freed. And, after all this, what does Kelly's producer have to say? "I can't quite visualise it - I'll have to see it on film."
The entire sequence, you might say, is a shaggy-dog story about the power of the cinematic imagination. It is just one of Singin' in the Rain's self-reflexive gags about musical comedy real and imagined, the other joke being that this sumptuous routine, supposedly intended for a 1927 black-and-white film called The Dancing Cavalier, is in vivid 1952 Technicolor - and so a fabulous impossibility.
Singin' in the Rain is one of the great Hollywood musicals not just because it has the best dance routines and some of the best songs (the film was designed as a showcase for the repertoire of the composer Nacio Herb Brown and lyricist/ producer Arthur Freed), or because it has one of the most athletic sequences (Donald O'Connor's "Make 'Em Laugh") and one of the most erotic moments (Charisse rubbing Kelly's glasses on her stockinged thigh). It is a classic because it has so much to say about its own genre. The film is a potted - and entirely biased - history of Hollywood, which shows how the silent drama evolved to become an ideal, all-encompassing form of total cinema: the MGM musical.
The script, by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, revolves around a turning point in film history. The silent-screen duo of Lockwood and the snooty diva Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen) find their careers threatened with the advent of sound. One of the best comic sequences revolves around attempts to record voices in the studio: a whole routine is created out of a piece of technological detail. When Lockwood and Lina's creaky sword-fighting romance is transformed at the last moment into a musical, Lina's voice, a hideous Melanie Griffith squeak, is replaced on the soundtrack by the mellifluous croon of ingenue Kathy (Debbie Reynolds).
The happy ending comes when Kathy, the unpretentious, cheery soubrette, is revealed as the real singing star, and the showy Lina as the impostor. (Bizarrely ironic is that Reynolds's singing voice was, in reality, dubbed by Jean Hagen.) Singin' in the Rain thus offers a history of change in Hollywood, from the elaborately poised artifice of one era to the "natural" exuberance of another - from the lofty distance of silent stars to the casual, self-mocking accessibility of Kelly, Reynolds and the quintessential goofball-next-door, O'Connor. The insistence on naturalness is all the more remarkable given that this is one of the most elaborately artful musicals, and one that constantly flaunts its artifice: for example, in the scene where Kelly leads Reynolds on to a deserted sound stage and, throwing various switches, lights her for romance.
This is also a film that treats its audience with respect, sharing its in-jokes with a movie-literate audience that knows its Hollywood history and genre conventions. The most curious thing in it is the story of the film within the film, a Dumas-style melodrama called The Dueling Cavalier. Don and pals decide to turn it into a musical - "It may be crazy, but we're gonna do it!" - and change the title to The Dancing Cavalier. Cavalier indeed - one genre becomes another at the drop of a hoofer's hat. We never find out what the film's director thinks of this - the harassed martinet trying to make The Dancing Cavalier conveniently drops out of the picture. Rooted though it is in actual Hollywood lore and history, Singin' in the Rain is pure fancy, in one sense: it imagines a world in which whatever you dream can appear spontaneously on the silver screen, as in the "Broadway Melody" sequence.
This is a utopia in which, far from director's artifice or producer's scheming, the sheer gusto of the stars puts pictures on screen: here, quite literally so, as Kelly co-directed with Stanley Donen. And in this case, the stars essentially are the people - regular folks such as the Kelly, Reynolds and O'Connor characters - who love to stay up late and talk the whole night through and don't mind getting a bit wet doing their hoofing. It may be pure fantasy, but it is of a deeply democratic bent - a manifesto against distant stars, and in favour of the endless procession of out-of-town rubes and their eternal "Gotta dance!". The MGM musical had barely another decade left in it, but it was a great dream while it lasted - and Singin' has certainly lasted as one of the liveliest, smartest and most brilliantly self-referential films ever made.
Singin' in the Rain is on at the UGC Haymarket, National Film Theatre and Clapham Picture House in London
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