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Sunday, May 26, 2002

By Ron Weiskind, Post-Gazette Movie Editor

A musical about the early days of movies, "Singin' in the Rain" is generally considered the greatest movie musical of all. The 1952 classic ranks 10th on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American movies. Its many spectacular dance numbers include one of the most indelible of movie images: Gene Kelly spinning around a lamppost, giddy in love, kicking up water from the street as he sings the title tune.

	Gene Kelly lets the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place in the great movie musical "Singin' in the Rain." (Associated Press photo)

But for all of its musical attractions -- Donald O'Connor dancing on the furniture and the walls to "Make 'Em Laugh," 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds wishing everyone "Good Morning," Kelly and the sinuous Cyd Charisse in the "Broadway Ballet" fantasy sequence -- the movie also boasts a smart, funny screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.

The movie references and in-jokes -- indeed, its gentle parody of the industry -- give the movie a great deal of its charm. The stars do the rest.

"Singin' in the Rain" is set in Hollywood at the dawn of talking pictures. Kelly plays Don Lockwood, a screen idol whose usual screen partner is Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen). The studio wants fans to think they're an item in real life and, unfortunately for Don, Lina believes it, too.

But sound may kill both their careers. Lina's voice sounds like the horn on a cab in Brooklyn. Don's first glimpse of himself in a sound film makes him think that maybe Kathy Selden (Reynolds) was right.

She's a young stage actress who looks down on movies -- never mind that her current role is popping out of a cake at a studio party.

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She and Don meet cute and bicker but, in the best movie tradition, fall in love. In the end, Kathy becomes Don's new partner -- on and off screen -- and catty Lina becomes a laughingstock. O'Connor keeps making us laugh as Cosmo Brown (a character either modeled after or originally written for Oscar Levant, who, like Kelly, was a Pittsburgh native).

Kelly directed the picture with Stanley Donen. They were members of producer Oscar Freed's production unit at MGM, which turned out some of the other great musicals in movie history.

Kelly and Donen also directed "On the Town," with Kelly, Frank Sinatra and Jules Munshin as sailors on leave in New York City -- a wonderful town, a wonderful movie. Comden and Green wrote it, Leonard Bernstein did the music and Jerome Robbins choreographed it. A sequel of sorts, "It's Always Fair Weather," featured music by a young composer named Andre Previn, who would become an adopted Pittsburgher two decades later.

"Singin' in the Rain" took a different approach. Because it dealt with early movie musicals, it recycled songs that Freed and songwriter Nacio Herb Brown had written for films of that era. Only "Fit As a Fiddle" and the tongue-twisting novelty number "Moses Supposes" were written specifically for "Singin' in the Rain." The title tune originally appeared in "Broadway Melody of 1929."

The '50s turned out to be the last hurrah for movie musicals. The industry -- and society -- changed after that. The studio system died and with it, MGM's musical production units. Baby boomers and the social issues of the '60s made old Hollywood seem obsolete.

The last truly great movie musical might have been Bob Fosse's 1972 production of "Cabaret." It was, of course, not a movie original but an adaptation of a stage play set in decadent Berlin as the Nazis were gaining power. People were singin' but it was a hard rain fallin'.

Kelly, Reynolds, O'Connor and company may have been singin' in the rain, but -- to use the words of a later Broadway musical of an entirely different bent -- they let the sun shine in.