Singin' In The Rain

The Basic Plot in the Form of a Haiku:

My Basic Ramblings: When I started watching this on Saturday, September 11, I was in a relatively crappy mood.  The disc I had watched before (Suddenly, Last Summer, where if you were to take a drink any time someone said "Sebastian" you'd be dead by the end of the film) started skipping uncontrollably so I couldn't watch it, and I was just generally bummed out.

Then I watched this movie, and felt a bazillion times better.

It's chock-filled with an "aw, gee whiz" feeling that last existed in the world in the late 50's-early 60's. Where else would you find people singing and dancing excitedly about staying up until 1:30 in the morning? (I did this a few times in college, except instead of singing "Good Morning" at Gene Kelly's mansion at 1:30am, my friends and I sang the theme from Fame on the steps of the dining center at 6:30am.)

Singin' In The Rain is the linchpin, if you will, of the honored tradition of lip-synching, which also includes Milli Vanilli, West Side Story and My Fair Lady (go Marni Nixon!)and Puttin' On The Hits, a TV show from my early-to-mid 80's youth. I don't know if anyone else would remember it - its mathematical formula would be:

The best act I remember was a guy singing to "Say Say Say" by Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney.  Half his body (makeup, clothes) was to look like Paul, and half was Michael.  When it came time for one of them to sing, he'd turn that side of his body to the camera. It was pretty cool.

But going back to Singin' In The Rain, you'd think that following that formula, the guy or guys who did the singing for Rob and Fab would have catapaulted into superstardom.  They didn't.  Bummer.

[In typing this review, I remember another lip-synch story - it was in some primary reader I had or something - a school was putting on a Thanksgiving musical or some such thing, and the girl who looked most Indian couldn't sing to save her life, but the best singer didn't look Indian at all.  So they taped the good singer's voice and the Indian-looking girl lip-synched. This is actually very much like the plot of Singin' In The Rain, except you don't have anyone falling in love with the singing girl (which, at the age these kids were supposed to be, would be hideously illegal).]

Even within the movie itself there's lip-synching. Some of Debbie Reynolds's songs were dubbed by actress Betty Noyes, and - here's a complicated one - when Kathy Selden (Reynolds) is dubbing lines for Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), it's not the voice of Debbie Reynolds we hear, but the voice of Jean Hagen.

In Gene Kelly's dreamed dance with Cyd Charrise, she's wearing a dress with a huge, long, 25-foot piece of fabric floating off it. (I'm not exaggerating, either; the liner notes of the laser disc said it was 25 feet long.)  During their dance, this piece of fabric flies and floats in the air, almost a third dancer in the scene. How did they do this? If they used big fans, Cyd must have used some wicked strong hairspray to keep her hair in place; it doesn't budge an inch (compare this to when I'm driving in the car with the window open - my hair turns into a rat's nest). If it's suspended by wires, they must have been really thin wires that could twist with no problem. Anyone know how they did this?

This is the only movie I've seen of Donald O'Connor's, but I really want to see more. He's phenomenal in this movie! "Make 'Em Laugh", when he runs up the wall (like the guy in The Full Monty tried to do and failed), just great.

Then, of course, there's the big number. "Singin' In The Rain." Gene Kelly had a temperature of 103 that day, but you sure as hell couldn't tell by looking at him. (They mixed the rain water with milk, so it would show up better on screen.  Kelly was worried that it would shrink his wool suit.) When Gene Kelly died, one television network (I believe it was ABC) ran this sequence, without commentary, as their remembrance of him. It fit. [Having seen A Clockwork Orange before this movie, I was kinda hopin' that Gene would start beating up the cop at the very end, but that wouldn't have been nice.]

They don't make movies like this anymore - big, honkin', sprawlin' musicals with incredible dancing and singing. They really should.

I would heartily recommend this movie to anyone, and I'll probably end up buying it relatively soon.