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This is a swell story of how the kids at MGM started out to make a "meat-andpotatoes" Metro musical and accidentally crafted an American classic. Pauline Kael calls it "the best Hollywood musical of all time." Vincent Canby of The New York 'Times says, "Among great moments in film history (the Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin, the last scene of City Lights, and the montage that describes the failing marriage in Citizen Kane, to identify just a few of the more obvious ones), there are at least half a dozez in a film that won no major Academy Awards and wasn't even listed on many Ten Best lists for the year it came out." Academics love it because it is a movie about movies. College students steeped in semiotics loop it through their movieolas searching for cinematic syntax in the "Moses Supposes His Toeses are Roses" sequence. If all this were not enough, Peter Bogdanovich stole a scene from it for his own film. Nickelodeon.
MGM's That's Entertainment only hinted at the seamless beauty of Singin' in the Rain (hereafter SIR ). The title song sequence looks as fresh as an April shower after a quarter century. Most musicals, however, do not wear well because their plots, characters, and dialogues are incidental to the production numbers. Even Fred Astaire's films of the Thirties are weaning to watch when he's not dancing. Only a very few musicals are as well integrated as SIR - 42nd Street, The Merry Widow, Meet Me in St. Louis, An American in Paris, Gypsy, Cabaret- - and none is funnier or more literate. SIR was a terrific idea that worked because of a combination of studio system factors that can never again meld so perfectly or with such exuberant innocence. Yet it was, quite literally, the product of blood, sweat, and tears-almost two years of it. It was also a hell of a lot of fun to make.
SIR was born like a lightbulb going off in Mickey Rooney's head in Babes in Arms, when the kids decide to put on their own show by using all the neighborhood resources and talent. Except in this case the neighborhood was the Metro lot and Mickey Rooney was producer Arthur Freed, the mastermind...