****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras B
starring Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse
screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green
directed by Stanley Donen
click any image to enlarge
by Bryant Frazer Not just the best Gene Kelly film, and not just the best movie musical
ever made, Singin' in the Rain is a genuine national treasure–a single
text proving for posterity what a wondrous thing the Hollywood studio system
could be when it was firing on all cylinders. It's the quintessential studio
picture and smart as hell about its own nature. Unpretentious and unabashedly
entertaining, it's a self-reflexive product of the same filmmaking process
it simultaneously documents and lampoons.
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In Hollywood, even the most sublime masterpiece is originally conceived
as a purely commercial proposition, and Singin' in the Rain got its
start as a convenient way to exploit existing MGM properties. Producer Arthur
Freed was sitting on a catalogue of songs he wrote with Nacio Herb Brown for
musicals released in the 1920s and '30s, and he had the idea of recycling
them in a new project. He put Betty Comden and Adolph Green to work developing
a screenplay that could accommodate the tunes. The project came to be an
easy fit for Gene Kelly, who had already worked with the writers on the movie
version of On the Town. Making it a period piece set during the
transition to sound filmmaking, Comden and Green wrote Kelly as a romantic lead
from the silent era who returns to his song-and-dance roots when the move to talkies
threatens his career. Donald O'Connor plays a hoofer who shares his
vaudevillian history and Debbie Reynolds is the fresh-faced ingénue who crosses
paths with Kelly's movie star at a Hollywood premiere. Upstaging Kelly's
regular screen partner, the squeaky-voiced Jean Hagen, Reynolds eventually
becomes his paramour and protégé.
Though the backstage-romance element–boy meets girl and falls in love, boy's
jealous co-star meddles–is pure formula, the farcical depiction of the
early days of sound recalls a period of real creative and technical
crisis in the industry. Everyone knows it was a make-or-break time for the
biggest stars, with recent immigrants faring especially poorly due to their
accents. But there were serious technical challenges, too: Take a look at the
first all-talking picture, the justly-forgotten Lights of New York
(assuming you can find a copy), and watch characters huddle awkwardly
around a microphone stashed inside a prop, go silent as they cross the set,
and then huddle intimately again around another hidden mic. Singin' in the
Rain engages easily with that aspect of film history, having an exasperated
and elaborately costumed Hagen lean into a shrub that's wired for sound and declare, "I can't make love to a bush!"
That kind of business could seem tedious or self-congratulatory, yet Singin'
in the Rain is rarely not funny. Comden and Green keep their
inside-baseball mostly grounded in character, showing how Don's confident but
nonsensical ad libs fall flat with an audience, or having him and Lina snarl
cutting jibes at one another while they play a tender (but silent in the
finished product) love scene. At a preview screening, the sound goes out of
synch with the picture, resulting in a bit of Dadaist hilarity as the pair's
identities are reversed. Anyway, the day-to-day grind of filmmaking is merely the
sideshow. The main event is, of course, the cascade of smashing musical numbers
that highlight and punctuate the love story.
Among the most celebrated for its
visual sensibility is "You Were Meant for Me," in which Kelly–the
silent star at a loss for words to describe his feelings for the young Debbie
Reynolds–escorts Reynolds to an empty soundstage, where he summons purple
twilight and Hollywood wind and croons, "You were meant for me and I was
meant for you." You can see the mismatch between Kelly's expert moves and
Reynolds's more simplistic, almost childlike pantomime. (A later, more
strenuous performance in the Kelly/O'Connor/Reynolds number, "Good Morning,"
is said to have left her feet bleeding.) Kelly is reputed to have given her a
terrible time over her inexperience, but in truth her immaturity serves the
story well, helping to illustrate the nature of her necessarily imbalanced
relationship with Kelly's character: part May-December romance, part
mentor-student partnership, and part paternal affection.
The overtly sweet stuff is more than balanced
out by some of the most joyfully rip-snorting dancing ever committed to the screen,
owing largely to O'Connor's presence. O'Connor has two showcase numbers, both set to new songs. The show-stopping "Make 'em
Laugh"–lyrically and musically, an unashamed rip-off of Cole Porter's
"Be a Clown"–sees an increasingly manic O'Connor pounding the
ivories, cheerfully abusing his body, and literally climbing the walls. The
equally kinetic dancing for the wonderful "Moses Supposes," an
original Roger Edens composition with lyrics by Comden and Green, isn't nearly
as full-contact, though it puts Kelly in a feedback loop with O'Connor,
resulting in both dancers reaching new heights of sheer exuberance as they
showcase, match, and outdo each other's moves.
In fact, you could argue that what's missing from the lengthy
"Broadway Melody" sequence that closes the picture is O'Connor's
knockabout presence, which might have tugged mischievously at the sleeves of
Kelly's deliberately screen-filling, movie-star performance. The individual
scenes here throw Singin' in the Rain slightly off-kilter, but they're still movie
magic. Kelly and guest star Cyd Charisse, rocking a lush, green flapper dress,
at one point evoke an animalistic lust that transcends the boundaries of
G-rated propriety. A more impressionistic interlude has her wrapped in an
impossibly long scarf, blown this way and that in a stream of colour that
represents a kind of fine-art approach to the dance number. Framed as Kelly's
pitch of a large-scale all-singing, all-dancing musical extravaganza to studio
chief R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell), this balletic section was,
presumably, Singin' in the Rain's bid for greatness following the
Oscar-adorned success of the comparatively dull An American in Paris,
and it's wonderful as it goes–a climactic, near-orgasmic celebration of craft,
creativity, and impeccable athletic form. It is, however, a wee bit
self-satisfied in a way the rest of the movie is not. Fortunately, it gets a
supremely witty punchline, as R.F.'s response to the impeccably staged
film-within-a-film brings Kelly abruptly down to earth: "I can't quite
visualize it. I'll have to see it on film first."
Broadway Melody is only one of multiple films that exist
inside Singin' in the Rain. There's the fictional 1927 Lockwood-Lamont
blockbuster The Royal Rascal, representing the silent era as a time of
innocence and contentment. The gawky, awkward production of The Dueling
Cavalier, growing into the hit talkie The Dancing Cavalier,
represents puberty (complete with vocal changes) and young adulthood. And
perhaps Broadway Melody, with its moments of surpassing beauty, sexual
tension, and crushing heartbreak, is maturity. Of course, there are all those
short subjects sprinkled throughout that use the dancers' superhuman physical
prowess and the transformative environs of the MGM lot to make manifest
the emotions that fill a mere mortal's heart to bursting. I don't mean to
recapitulate the theme of every term paper ever written on the subject, but Singin'
in the Rain is as smart as a picture can be about the special status of
the movies–their function as escapism, wish-fulfillment, and a portal to gaze
voyeuristically upon sheer beauty.
THE BLU-RAY DISC
Speaking of beauty, there's Warner's new Blu-ray release of Singin'
in the Rain to deal with. The original three-strip Technicolor elements were destroyed in a fire, but the studio has pulled together a
stunning 4K digital restoration based on protection elements. Part
of me wants the 1.37:1, 1080p image to be a little sharper, but I've seen Singin'
in the Rain in 35mm and I know there's just not a ton of sharpness to be
had. Indeed, the hint of softness around the edges is part of what gives the
picture its dreamy quality. I've seen complaints online about
"haloing" around dark edges in a few shots, and while I agree that it's
visible and occasionally distracting, this is almost definitely an artifact
of certain optical effects (like dissolves, which necessitate another run
through the optical printer) rather than an indicator of edge-enhancement
techniques. (For one thing, the halos have a soft roll-off as opposed to the
harsh, video-like edges digital filters leave behind.) The deep richness
of colour is exactly right, and film grain dances lightly across the picture.
The transfer is otherwise quite clean of dust and dirt, leading me to believe
the restoration team took a digital dust-busting pass. Fortunately, Singin'
in the Rain looks none the worse for it. The whole thing is encoded to AVC
HD at a generous average bitrate of 37.3 Mbps.
Sound quality is equally terrific, although Warner should know enough
to include a monaural option alongside its new 5.1 DTS-HD MA track.
The soundstage stays mainly up front, with only the tiniest fragments of the
overall mix making it into the rear speakers–and I'm sure that in the vast
majority of home-listening environments, it sounds just fine that way. But
there's plenty of room on this disc, so I can't understand why Warner doesn't
make the purists and tedious pedants in the audience happy by giving us a
lossless mono version we can embrace. What we do have is an exceptionally clear
delivery of Singin' in the Rain's soundmix. Highs are robust, lows
have a bit of oomph, and disparate vocal stylings are faithfully rendered
without ever taking on the brittle quality that can plague older films.
Whatever filtering and sweetening may be going on, it has brought out the best in
the audio without obscuring aural detail.
The no-frills, single-disc configuration of this release I reviewed is
decidedly light on bonus content. The valuable one is an excellent
audio commentary that attended an earlier DVD special edition, the kind of
absorbing introduction to the film's lore that comes in handy when you're
watching a disc that's bereft of extras. It's an omnibus yakker collecting
contributions from Reynolds, O'Connor, Charisse, Donen, Comden and Green, and
more. (For some reason, Baz Luhrmann was invited to speak, which has the
unfortunate effect of forever pegging this otherwise timeless yakker to the
early 2000s.)
New to Blu-ray is the execrably titled "Singin' in the Rain:
Raining on a New Generation" (51 mins., 1080p), which talks to an array of
song-and-dance types–headlined by Paula Abdul, but featuring enthusiastic
young dancers and choreographers from the likes of "Glee" and "High
School Musical"–about the influence of Singin' in the Rain and other
classic Hollywood musicals on their own work. I might be more excited about
this particular extra if it purported to tell me something I didn't already
know (is anyone surprised, exactly, that Gene Kelly is an enduring influence on
successful young dancers?), or if it didn't take up nearly an hour of time on
the disc. Someone even invited Rob Marshall to the party, and he obviously didn't
learn a damned thing from Singin' in the Rain.
All that's left is a
theatrical trailer (in standard-def, so boo). There's more on the
three-disc special edition, an expensive box set that contains a decorative umbrella along with all the standard-def supplements from the previous DVD special edition–but, as far as I can tell, no
more new material, unless you count some printed matter. Plan your purchase wisely.
