Brace yourselves, folks, this is going to be a long one.
 |
| But like dancing in a downpour, it's worth every second. |
What's the Story?
Well, I suppose summing up the film would be a good place to start. Normally I'm not one for detailed plot recaps, but considering this isn't a review so much as a tribute, I'll make an exception. If you haven't seen the movie, I'm about to spoil the entire thing. Also, if you haven't seen the movie, what are you waiting for? Go watch it right now. Go ahead, I can wait for an hour and forty-three minutes. You won't regret it.
Ready? Let's go!
Singin' in the Rain (Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, 1952) is set during the late 1920s, just as movies with synchronized sound are being unveiled. At first, not many people in the industry take the new technology seriously; to them "talkies" are little more than a novelty, on par with Smell-O-Vision. However, once The Jazz Singer becomes a smash success and the public starts clamoring for more talking pictures, Hollywood studios must struggle to adapt.
The film centers around one studio in particular, the fictional Monumental Pictures. The studio is home to famed silent duo of Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont (Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen). The great big publicity machine drums up a romance between the two stars, but while Lina believes it the love is real, Don frankly can't stand his partner. Not only is Lina airheaded and unbelievably vain, she also has a voice that sets the dogs howling.
We first see Don and Lina at the premiere of their most recent film, The Royal Rascal. Asked to recount how he got to this point in his career, Don starts spinning a yarn. Stating that his motto is "Dignity, always dignity," Don claims to have been brought up on high culture, seeing Molière on stage and going to prestigious music conservatories. His narration is malarky, however, as the flashback shown tells a decidely less classy tale.
Don and his best friend Cosmo (Donald O'Conner) spent their youth dancing in saloons and sneaking into movie theaters before taking up the vaudeville stage; the film's first number, "Fit as a Fiddle", shows them performing for crowds and getting a less than positive reception. The pair eventually travel to Hollywood--and get jobs playing mood music for Monumental Pictures, with Don on violin and Cosmo on the piano.
Don's break comes when a stuntman gets knocked out while filming a fight scene for a western. Don volunteers to fill his spot, and soon is performing all sorts of death-defying stunts for Monumental Pictures. Lina, however, refuses to give Don the time of day--until studio head R.F. Simpson (Millard Mitchell) hears about Don's stuntwork and pairs him up with Lina for her next picture. Now she's clearly into him, but Don turns her down and walks off, at which point the flashback ends and The Royal Rascal starts.
Once the film is over, Don and Lina take a bow on the stage. Don does all the talking, much to Lina's chagrin. She complains about not being allowed to talk to the audience and refers to Don as her fiancé. Don tries to tell her in no uncertain terms that the cooked up romance is fictional, but Lina's in her own little world. The cast and crew take separate cars to the after-party at R.F.'s house, in order to escape the fans and keep Lina away from Don.
On the way, however, Cosmo's car gets a flat tire, and Don is swarmed by fans who literally start tearing his clothes apart. He manages to climb atop a trolley car and jump into a passing vehicle. The woman driving (Debbie Reynolds) panics, thinking that he's a criminal. A police officer reveals that the man is Don Lockwood, and all is set straight. The woman offers to drive Don towards his destination, and introduces herself as Kathy Selden.
Things get messy, however, when Cathy starts to disparage movies in general. "If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all," she tells Don. To Kathy, it appears that screen acting is "dumb show", a series of exaggerated facial expressions. Don does not take this well, and when he presses her, Kathy says that she's an aspiring stage actress soon to make her way to New York. The two argue all the way to the end, and Don leaves the car feeling quite stung.
At the party, R.F. shows the guests a demonstration of a talking picture. The crowd is divided on how to take the technology; some say it's wonderful, while one actress calls it "vulgar". It's at this point that R.F. reveals that Warner Bros. is making a whole movie with synchronized sound, The Jazz Singer. The party festivities restart, however, and a giant cake is wheeled in to celebrate the success of The Royal Rascal.
Of course, this is one of those cakes out of which a chorus girl pops, and who should be in the cake but Kathy Selden. "Well, if it isn't Ethel Barrymore?" says an amused Don. Kathy's embarrassed, but there's no time for that; the girls must sing the prophetic second number, "All I Do Is Dream of You". Don seems impressed and tries to talk to Kathy, but she's pissed. Lina's also miffed that Don's paying attention to Kathy. Long story short, Lina gets a pie in the face and Kathy runs out before Don can talk to her again.
We cut to a busy day at Monumental Pictures, where it seems a year's worth of films are being made on one lot. Don still has Kathy on his mind; not only does her talk about his acting still burn, but he feels bad that Kathy lost her job as a chorus girl. Cosmo tries cheering him with a comedic song-and-dance number, "Make 'Em Laugh", in which he becomes a one man slapstick show, encouraging comedic acting and literally dancing up the walls of a set before collapsing from exhaustion.
Filming starts for the next Lockwood and Lamont picture, The Dueling Cavalier. While filming a romantic meeting between their characters, Lina mentions how she had Kathy fired from her job. Don is furious, but filming must continue, and so Don confronts Lina while his character is gently carassing hers (oh, the benefits of silent filmmaking). The director, Roscoe Dexter (Douglas Fowley), declares the scene perfect, but R.F. has some big news and orders filming stopped.
It turns out that The Jazz Singer has become a massive hit, and the movie-going public is demanding more talking pictures. R.F. has Monumental Studios converted for sound filming, despite the reservations of the cast and crew. With that, talkies come to dominate the movie landscape, and if the montage that follows is anything to go by, flashy musicals are the style of choice to take advantage of the new technology of synchronized sound.
The montage culminates with the song "Beautiful Girl", sung by an uncredited Jimmy Thompson. It turns out that Kathy is a dancer in the sequence, and R.F. decides to hire her for another picture. Don and Cosmo walk up to them, at which point Kathy is ready to reject the offer. Don, however, reveals that he's been looking all over for her, and that he does not care if Lina hates Kathy with a fiery, ditzy passion. R.F. hires her, though he says Lina can't find out she's working for Monumental.
Don and Kathy walk the lot together, and Don discovers that Kathy is in reality a fan of Lockwood-Lamont films, having seen at least eight or nine of them. The two starting hitting it off, and Don's got something he wants to say. However, he can't spit it out without the proper setting, so he takes Kathy inside a soundstage and literally sets the stage for his grand romantic gesture. What follows is the song "You Were Meant for Me", establishing the pair as a romantic couple.
Meanwhile, Monumental Pictures is preparing for their move to talkies. Among other things, their silent actors needed to take lessons from diction coaches. These lessons involve reciting tongue twisters, leading to the next tune, "Moses Supposes". But speaking properly seems to be the least of the studio's worries; getting everyone wired for sound is a nightmare. In particular, Roscoe is pulling his hair out that Lina cannot grasp the concept of talking into a microphone.
The production is a mess, and so is the final product. Suffice to say, the preview for The Dueling Cavalier is an unmitigated disaster. The sound mixing is atrocious, the dialogue is clunky and, worst of all, sight and sound become unsynchronized; characters appear to speaking the dialogue of others. The audience begins to walk out, with some swearing off watching another Lockwood and Lamont film again. How bad is it? Lina enjoyed it.
Don, Cosmo and Kathy have a post-mortem at Don's house, which he claims will be up for auction in the morning. Kathy and Cosmo try cheering him up, reminding him off all the (terrible) things he could when his career ends. Cosmo evens jokes about them going back in vaudeville, which leads Kathy to suggest that turn The Dueling Cavalier into a musical. This finally breaks Don out of his funk, and upon realizing that it's already 1:30 in the morning, the trio break out into "Good Morning".
However, Don remembers one major hurdle to that plan: Lina. The musical idea now seems dead in the water, but when Debby brings up the synchronization problems in the preview, Cosmo gets a bright idea: have Kathy dub over Lina's voice. Don's a bit reluctant, as Kathy would surely not get credit for that, but Kathy insists, seeing it would only be for one picture. Once more, the gang are back in the hunt, and the movie might be saved yet.
After Don takes Kathy to he pad, he waves off the cab and starts walking (and dancing) in a downpour, which leads into, you guessed it, "Singin' in the Rain", a perfect representation of being over the moon. The next day, Don and Cosmo pitch the musical idea and the dubbing idea to R.F., who's on board--though, again, Lina must be kept in the dark. They plan to incorporate modern musical numbers into the script, and settle on The Dancing Cavalier as a title.
Don and Kathy get straight to work on recording vocals to dub over Lina, including the big romantic song of the The Dancing Cavalier, "Would You?" Then Don and Cosmo unveil a sequence for the modern section of the picture: a dancer tries to make it big on Broadway while becoming infatuated with a mobster's lady, played by Cyd Charisse. The sequence is set to a combination of "The Broadway Melody" and "Broadway Rhythm", and the scene concludes with R.F. claiming that he can't quite visualize it.
Production is finally over, and Don is eager to have Kathy's name placed in the credits. Lina, however, catches wind of this from a fellow actress, Zelda (Rita Moreno), and uses the terms of her contract to not only keep Kathy from getting recognition, but also to make Kathy continuing dubbing for her in perpetuity. R.F. doesn't want to give into Lina's demands, but the threat of breach of contract suit is too much, and he gives in.
Opening night for The Dancing Cavalier comes, and it's a home run. The audience is particular impressed with Lina's wonderous pipes. When Don and Lina go out to take a bow, Don, Cosmo and Kathy hear about Lina's plot, and everyone who's not Lina begs R.F. to renege on his word. When Lina goes onstage to talk to her adoring fans, the boys come up with a plan to reveal whose voice the audience actually heard that night.
Given her terrible voice, it's no surprise that Lina's speech gets the audience laughing, and she runs backstage to get "help" with her singing. The boys convince Kathy to dub for Lina again, though she's clearly unhappy and tells Don she never wants to see him again. Kathy whispers to Lina that she'll be performing "Singin' in the Rain" in A flat, and off "Lina" goes. It appears that Ms. Lamont is going to have her way after all.
Just kidding--Don, Cosmo and R.F. raise the theater curtain to reveal Kathy singing at a microphone--and for the hell of it, Cosmo runs on and starts singing as well. Kathy tries running down the aisle and out of the theater, but Don has the audience stop her and tells them that's the girl whose voice they loved. The film ends with Don and Kathy singing "You Are My Lucky Star" to each other, fading into a billboard advertising the next Lockwood and Selden picture...Singin' in the Rain.
What's the Draw?
The first time I saw Singin' in the Rain, one thing above all else struck me: it's very, very funny. Settng aside the film's broader context, watching Kelly and company on screen is a laugh-a-minute experience. Whether it's the use of slapstick comedy (e.g., Kathy throwing the pie into Lina's face) or the constant quips from Cosmo, Singin' in the Rain is a movie which is constantly delivering jokes, rarely giving the audience time to recuperate from the previous gags.
Yet if humor were the only thing drawing me Singin' in the Rain, I can't imagine it having the rewatch value that it has for me. After all, any form of humor, no matter who delivers it, will eventually get stale. And while I still do laugh while watching the film, it's been more chuckling than out loud guffawing as time goes on. But this doesn't mean my enjoyment has diminished over time--in fact, I'd say that my appreciation of the film has increased instead.
In a way, Singin' in the Rain was a perfect to start the process of absorbing classic cinema: it's about cinema. Let's not forget that the narrative of the film centers around a pivotal moment in the history of Hollywood, and the process of making a movie drives the plot and characters forward. It's a film which looks back on earlier films and the people behind them, so as I've seen more and more cinematic pieces, the more relevant Singin' in the Rain becomes.
The movie reflects on a bygone era of filmmaking, which is something that the film industry has always been fond of doing--look at The Artist for a recent example. But Singin' in the Rain is a bit different in that it's not an entirely celebratory work. It pokes fun at the conventions of the Hollywood machinery during the late-silent, early-sound era. It's a movie that loves movies, but there's a recurring notion of whether the film industry of the time has any artistic credibility.
When Kathy tells Don that seeing one movie means seeing them all, the movie treats it as a serious possibility, and much of the film spends time addressing that notion. At the start of his article "Dance, Flexibility and the Renewal of Genre in Singin' in the Rain", Peter N. Chumo II highlights the sequence directly before "Make 'Em Laugh", in which the audience sees the Hollywood machinery in full swing:
The silent films from Monumental Pictures recycle the same plot lines and generic conventions so that each new production is already old. The assembly line-like sets which Don and Cosmo walk on their first day of work (generic jungle film, football movie, western) attest to the formulaic nature of such filmmaking. One question this film poses, then, is indeed, "Why bother to shoot this picture?" Can an original film be produced, and if so, how? (39).This sort of problem is one that fascinates me personally, and I find it uplifting that the answer seems to be, "Yes." But, ah, there are complications, for not only is Singin' in the Rain a movie about movies, but also it is in part a movie made of movies. Both the narrative within the film and the context in which the film was made involve the recycling and appropriation of other filmic elements, which results in a well-made but somewhat confusing "movie-loaf".
It is fair to conclude, then, that what constantly brings me back to Singin' in the Rain is the desire to fully untangle its web of references, critiques and borrowed elements, both internal and external. Trying to reconcile the characters' desire for originality with the recycled nature of the movies parts is a challenge indeed. It's a sort of puzzle, one in which picture become progressively less clear the more I dig into it. But that doesn't mean I can't try to clear things up.
What Exactly is Going On?
It is perhaps easiest to start with the context and production of Singin' in the Rain, then applying what is gathered to the film itself. And I can think of no more obvious entry point that the songs of the film, this being a musical and all.
Famously, Singin' in the Rain was a movie built around its soundtrack. Taking a bunch of Arthur Freed songs in the MGM vault, the filmmakers were instructed to write a movie around those tunes. And these weren't previously unreleased songs, either, but songs that had been in previous musical films. "The Broadway Melody" was from the Best Picture-winning film of the same name, "Would You?" appeared in the movie San Francisco, etc. One could call it a jukebox musical, and I wouldn't say he'd be off the mark.
In fact, only two songs in the book were written specifically for the film. One was "Moses Supposes", a largely frivolous number which largely consists of iterations of a single tongue-twister. The other is "Make 'Em Laugh", but its original in the loosest sense of the word; it's virtually identical in topic and structure to the Cole Porter number, "Be a Clown". Thus, even in its stabs at originality, Singin' in the Rain recycles previous material.
How, then, does one reconcile the manner in which Singin' in the Rain was made with its story about originality and the creative process? It may be a matter of working with one's predetermined boundaries. After all, the production team did not consciously choose to use recycled songs for the film; the songs were presented as a framework. The job of the filmmakers, then, was to create an original production given those arbitrary constraints.
In many ways, this mirrors the conception of The Dancing Cavalier within the movie. Since the movie is set to be released in six weeks, Monumental Pictures has to incorporate the available elements from The Dueling Cavalier. When Don, Cosmo and Kathy first hatch the musical plan, Kathy suggests that they can keep much of the story from the first picture, just with some needed edits. Similarly, when Don and Cosmo present R. F. with the idea, they mention how they'd be able to reuse the costumes.
It is not hard to imagine that the story to Singin' in the Rain, "work with what you have", could be an unconscious metaphor for the process of filmmaking at a Hollywood studio, with details mandated by the executives at the top. That said, Singin' in the Rain borrows a lot more than its musical numbers. The filmmakers toss in elements of various other films as well, even when these elements are tangential or completely unrelated to the central narrative.
The movie which Singin' in the Rain references most often is, unsurprisingly, The Jazz Singer. Given the subject of Singin' in the Rain, some allusions wold be expected, but the frequency would suggest that the film is preoccupied with it. An explanation which Carol J. Clover presents for this phenomenon is that Singin' in the Rain is concerned with the degree to which black dancers have influenced the dance numbers, and that these references are manifestations of this anxiety (728-9).
Clover raises some good points, and if The Jazz Singer were the movie's sole infatuation, she would likely be correct. But Singin' in the Rain is stuck on other films and genres as well, which suggests that a one-to-one relationship is not at work. For instance, gangster films feature prominently in the story as well: Kathy first assumes when Don jumps into her car that he's a man on a wanted poster, while a "Scarface" clone is an important figure in the "Broadway Melody" sequence.
As with the references to The Jazz Singer, allusions to gangsters could be spliced from the footage and have no impact on the story. What, then, is the film trying to accomplish by incorporating elements of other pictures? What is the endgame of tying in the dawn of synchronized sound films and a mainstay of Hollywood genre movies into what is really a jukebox musical that can stand independent of either's presence?
The best explanation that I can give is that Singin' in the Rain is ultimately a defense of the Hollywood system. Even though it pokes fun at the rabid fanbases that the star system built, the frequent disconnect between an actor's public persona and her actual personality, and especially the formulaic nature of studio production, Singin' in the Rain argues that a quality, original film can still be made with the confines of that system.
In tying in blockbusters, genre references and songs previously used in glitzy Hollywood productions, Singin' in the Rain tries to show that the formula can still create golden pictures. After all, it's not as if Monumental Pictures never thought of musicals, or that the French aristocratic setting is a new idea, or that really anything in the film hadn't been tried before. But through all that, an engaging and moving piece of cinema can still be made.
In fact, that's what is most striking about Singin' in the Rain. For a movie that is frequently piercing in its critiques of 1920s Hollywood, the story it tells is rather life-affirming: no matter what constraints one is given (the numbers to use, the time available, the actresses to incorporate), art can and is made all the time. As someone who admires the artistic process and who desires to enter into a creative field, its a message that, however overly optimistic, bears repeating.
Works cited:
Chumo II, Peter N. "Dance, Flexibility, and the Renewal of Genre in Singin' in the
Rain." Cinema Journal 36.1 (1996): 39-54. JSTOR. Web. 24 June 2012.
Clover, Carol J. "Dancin' in the Rain." Critical Inquiry 21.4 (1995): 722-747. JSTOR.
Web. 24 June 2012.
Singin' in the Rain. Dir. Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Perf. Gene Kelly, Donald
O'Conner, and Debbie Reynolds. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952. DVD.
No comments:
Post a Comment