Singin' in the Rain

Today's pair is held together not by plot but by time.

Singin' in the Rain is set in 1927 — the year silent cinema was dying and sound was being born. On 6 October 1927, two days from now, Warner Bros. premiered The Jazz Singer in New York, the film that effectively ended the silent era. Today's first film is what Hollywood, a quarter of a century later, had to say about that afternoon: a musical comedy that explains how an art form can become obsolete inside a single season.

Once Upon a Time in the West is about the same thing with the word "sound" replaced by "railroad". The West did not end in a gunfight; it ended when the railroad arrived, the land acquired a price, and somebody was willing to pay for a patch of dirt with water on it. And by 1968, when Leone made it, the Western itself had run its course — so the film is both a Western and an elegy for the Western, a film that buries its own genre.

So the two are not an arbitrary grab. Both are about a world being dismantled by a new technology: one with laughter, one with silence; one in 103 minutes, one in 165.

The second reason is more concrete. The archive holds sixteen films across sixteen countries or territories and nine decades — and it contains no musical and no Western at all. Those are the two largest genre holes on the list, and today closes both. To be clear, today's choice is genre-driven, not region-driven: both films are rooted in the United States (Once Upon a Time in the West is an Italian-American co-production), and regional coverage does not change today. I am not going to dress that up as something else.

The third reason is internal to the archive. The 1927 slot already holds Metropolis — German silent cinema at the technical and aesthetic limit of what it could do. Singin' in the Rain is about the year that world was switched off. The 1968 slot holds 2001: A Space Odyssey — also 1968, also a film whose entire scale is established by an opening passage with almost no dialogue. The ten-minute wait that opens Once Upon a Time in the West and the Dawn of Man sequence are the same grammar.

1927 年，好莱坞。Don Lockwood 和 Lina Lamont 是 Monumental Pictures 最卖座的一对银幕情侣——在银幕上。私下里，Don 受不了她。

Don 的底子是杂耍和歌舞，Cosmo Brown 是他从少年时代就在一起的搭档，现在给他写曲子、救场、出主意。一场首映礼之后，Don 被一个姑娘当众指出「你们那套表演早就过时了」——那是合唱队出身的 Kathy Selden。

然后，有声片来了。

片厂老板 R. F. Simpson 宣布：下一部要拍有声片。问题立刻变成了一个人的问题——Lina 的声音不能听。

于是有了一个办法：让 Kathy 站在幕后，替 Lina 说话。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film set in motion by a song written in 1929

Arthur Freed was one of MGM's most powerful musical producers, and a lyricist himself. He and the composer Nacio Herb Brown had written a large catalogue of songs from the late 1920s onward, including "Singin' in the Rain", written in 1929 for The Hollywood Revue of 1929.

Freed's idea was to build a film around that catalogue. And because most of those songs were written during the silent-to-sound transition, the story was set back in that period. The songs came first; a period was then found for them. The only wholly new song in the film is "Moses Supposes", with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by the musical director Roger Edens.

That origin defines what the film is: not an original screenplay about Hollywood, but Hollywood looking back at its own songbook — and the object of that backward glance happens to be the year sound arrived.

Two directors, two kinds of body

Both the direction and the choreography are credited to Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen. Kelly was a dancer, and his passages are athletic and weighted (the "Broadway Melody" ballet); Donen was younger, a choreographer who had moved to the director's chair, with an instinct closer to that of a comedy director.

The division shows most clearly in "Make 'Em Laugh": a solo number for Donald O'Connor with no leading lady, no romance — just a body fighting gravity, a wall and a floor.

Two corrections about the rain

The title number is one of the most mythologised passages in cinema.

First, there was no milk in the water. The story is widespread and it is false: the raindrops were made visible by backlighting, which was simply very difficult to shoot.

Second, it is not one take. The equally widespread claim that Kelly performed the whole number in a single unbroken shot is also a myth — the sequence took two to three days to film.

What is true: Kelly was running a fever of 103°F (39°C) while shooting it, and the water shrank his woollen suit during the take.

Three performances holding up one film

Donald O'Connor was smoking four packs a day. After one of the film's most demanding dance numbers he was bedridden in hospital for several days.

Debbie Reynolds was not a dancer but a gymnast when she played Kathy. Kelly humiliated her over her lack of dance training, and she was miserable about it — until Fred Astaire found her crying under a piano on the set, learned why, and showed her one of his own rehearsals to demonstrate that even professional dancers go through the same grind. The "Good Morning" number was shot from eight in the morning until eleven at night, and her feet were bleeding when it wrapped. Years later she said: "Singin' in the Rain and childbirth were the two hardest things I've ever had to do."

Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont is modelled on Judy Holliday's Billie Dawn in Born Yesterday — a voice both stupid and shrill.

A film about who speaks for whom

It looks like a romantic comedy. Underneath it is a film about the ownership of a voice.

Kathy speaks for Lina; Lina then swallows Kathy's work, her voice and eventually her person, and converts them into her own asset. The studio organises the trade; the audience is complicit in it.

And there is a third layer inside the production itself: Kathy's own singing is dubbed by Betty Noyes — Debbie Reynolds' vocals were recorded by someone else. Better still, in the scene where Kathy dubs Lina, the voice used is Jean Hagen's own speaking voice, not Reynolds': Donen felt Reynolds' Midwestern accent did not suit the scene.

A film about dubbing, with three layers of dubbing inside it.

"Make 'Em Laugh" and Cole Porter

The newly written "Make 'Em Laugh" is strikingly similar to Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" (from The Pirate, 1948 — also produced by Freed). Donen's own verdict was "100% plagiarism". Porter never sued.

A classic nobody expected

The film premiered at Radio City Music Hall on 27 March 1952 and went into general release on 11 April. MGM treated it as a routine musical project and it was only a moderate success; nobody expected it to become anything.

What canonised it came later. Comden and Green recalled meeting François Truffaut in Paris, who told them he had seen the film so many times that he knew it frame by frame; he and Alain Resnais would return to a small Paris cinema to watch it repeatedly, sometimes for months on end.

Where it stands now

• In 1989 it was one of the first 25 films selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry
• American Film Institute: No. 10 on the 1998 "100 Years...100 Movies"; No. 5 on the 2007 tenth-anniversary edition; No. 1 on "Greatest Movie Musicals" (2006); the title song No. 3 on "100 Years...100 Songs" (2004)
• Sight & Sound critics' polls: No. 3 in 1982, No. 10 in 2002, No. 10 in 2022
• Rotten Tomatoes: 100% from 64 reviews, average 9.3/10. Metacritic: 99/100 from 17 critics

Two Oscar nominations, neither won

At the 25th Academy Awards (1953) the film received two nominations — Jean Hagen for Best Supporting Actress and Lennie Hayton for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture. Neither won.

The awards came elsewhere: Donald O'Connor won the Golden Globe for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy, and Comden and Green won the Writers Guild of America award for Best Written American Musical.