The scene everyone remembers lasts a little over four minutes: Gene Kelly, umbrella furled, swinging around a lamppost and stamping through puddles while the rain sheets down and the orchestra soars. It is routinely voted the happiest moment in the movies. What audiences cannot see is that Kelly was performing it while running a fever of around 103 degrees Fahrenheit, that the downpour registered on camera only because the crew lit it carefully from behind (the enduring story that milk was mixed into the water is a myth), and that the constant soaking left him genuinely ill. The most spontaneous-looking number in Hollywood history was a feat of professional endurance dressed up as a man too happy to care about the weather.
Singin' in the Rain was released by MGM in 1952, co-directed by Kelly and Stanley Donen and produced by the great Arthur Freed. Its reputation now sits at the very summit — for many critics the greatest of all film musicals — but on release it was only a moderate hit, overshadowed by Freed's earlier An American in Paris, which had swept the Oscars. Its climb to canonical status came later, as audiences realised how ingeniously it worked.
A jukebox with a story
The songs were not written fresh. Almost all came from the back catalogue of Freed himself and composer Nacio Herb Brown, tunes they had produced for MGM musicals in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The title song dated to 1929. Screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were handed this pile of old numbers and told to build a plot around them, and they made a shrewd choice: set the story in exactly the period the songs came from, during Hollywood's panicked transition from silent films to sound after The Jazz Singer in 1927.
The plot follows silent idol Don Lockwood (Kelly) and his glamorous but grating co-star Lina Lamont (Jean Hagen), whose shrieking voice and thick accent are a disaster once microphones arrive. The studio's solution is to have aspiring actress Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds) secretly dub Lina's dialogue and singing. The film is, in other words, a comedy about the fakery of voices — which makes its own production history gorgeously ironic.
Dubbing all the way down
The irony runs several layers deep. In the story, Kathy's fine voice is used to fix Lina's terrible one. In reality, the beautiful voice was frequently not Reynolds' at all. For the song Would You, Reynolds was dubbed by singer Betty Noyes. And in the scene where Kathy supposedly dubs Lina's speaking voice, the voice you actually hear was Jean Hagen's own — Hagen had a lovely natural speaking voice and was recorded dubbing over Reynolds dubbing Lina. The actress playing the woman with the awful voice was lending her real voice to the woman supposedly fixing it. The film's joke about who is really singing was quietly true of the film itself.
Debbie Reynolds was nineteen and, by her own cheerful admission, not a trained dancer when she was cast opposite two of the most demanding hoofers alive. Kelly was a notoriously exacting perfectionist, and the rehearsals were punishing. The Good Morning number, performed by the three leads, was drilled so relentlessly that Reynolds' feet bled inside her shoes. She later said that making the film and giving birth were the two hardest things she ever did. There is a well-worn story — she told it often — that a weeping, exhausted Reynolds was found hiding under a piano by none other than Fred Astaire, who was on the lot and offered a few kind words about how hard dancing really is.
Four packs a day and a nervous collapse
The film's other showstopper belongs to Donald O'Connor. His Make 'Em Laugh routine is a demented cascade of pratfalls, wall-runs and backflips, and it nearly destroyed him. O'Connor, a heavy smoker reputed to get through several packs of cigarettes a day, threw himself so completely into the physical comedy that he was bedridden for days afterward. Then came the twist worthy of the film's own plot: the footage was ruined, and the whole exhausting number had to be shot all over again once he recovered.
Kelly's rain sequence has generated its own thicket of legend. The 103-degree fever is the durable core of the story — he was unwell and pushed through. The milk-in-the-water story, though endlessly repeated, is a myth — co-director Stanley Donen said as much for decades: plain water is nearly invisible against studio lighting, so the crew instead lit the rain from behind to catch it and make it read on film. The set had to be built with an overhead sprinkler rig and the surrounding street backlot deliberately flooded. What looks like a man dancing through a real cloudburst was a meticulously engineered illusion, staged and re-staged, performed by someone who by rights should have been in bed.
That, finally, is the film's secret. A picture about the artifice behind the glamour of the movies — about the dubbing, the fakery, the manufactured magic — was itself a triumph of concealed labour, sweat and sickness passed off as effortless delight. The joy is real precisely because the effort was so total.
Quiz nuggets
- Singin' in the Rain was released by MGM in 1952 and co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.
- Kelly reportedly performed the title number while running a fever of around 103 degrees; the rain was made visible on camera by backlighting, not by milk mixed into the water, a persistent myth co-director Stanley Donen denied.
- The songs, including the 1929 title tune, came mostly from the back catalogue of producer Arthur Freed and composer Nacio Herb Brown.
- In the film's dubbing scenes, Jean Hagen's real voice was used to dub Debbie Reynolds dubbing Hagen's character Lina Lamont.
- Donald O'Connor's Make 'Em Laugh number left him bedridden for days and had to be reshot after the footage was ruined.