Singin' in the Rain

Judged on structure. The plot is a single problem, a voice that does not match a face, and almost every number is a cause or a consequence of it. The flashback under “Dignity. Always dignity.” sets the gap between what Don says and what is shown. The hidden microphone and the preview, where the voices slip from the faces, are the disaster the second half repairs. “Moses Supposes” is the diction lesson the talkie forces; “Good Morning” finds the remedy; the dubbing session is the remedy; the curtain at the premiere exposes it. What gives is real in a short film: the Broadway Melody ballet, a pitch the plot does not need; “Make ’Em Laugh”, which adds no fact; the montage, which makes its point several times.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and holds: in a medium that joins a face to a voice by apparatus, the star is a composite, and the industry sells the join while hiding the labour that makes it. The film shows this through sound as much as words, and that is credited in full. At the preview the voices cross, each line coming out of the wrong mouth, and the convention of synchronised sound is seen as a convention; the curtain raised behind Lina shows the hidden voice and the woman who owns it. Beneath lies a harder truth the film does not wholly see: Lina, the one who will not be replaced, is punished for her voice. Held below the gate because the disclosure is comic and contained, and the industry’s joy is affirmed.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Elevation is frequent and of one kind, transport by joy. The title number is the summit: a man in love in a downpour, closing the umbrella, swinging on the lamp post, stamping in the gutter, with Rosson’s light on the wet street, until a policeman’s look returns him to the pavement. Around it the film rises again and again. In “Make ’Em Laugh” O’Connor runs up the wall and through the scenery, elevation by comic body. “Good Morning” sends three dancers across a house at dawn. In “You Were Meant for Me” Don makes romance from a wind machine, a ladder and a coloured light, and the making itself lifts. Held at the figure because the register never darkens and the satiric stretches run level.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The pattern is built, more than the genre requires, and it is the folktale of the false bride: the usurper takes the true bride’s place, speaks with her voice, is accepted by the court, and is unmasked at the feast, here by a curtain raised before the whole house. Kathy comes out of a cake, a fairy-tale emergence, and is the hidden voice made visible; Lina is the stepsister who cannot sing. Around it the film evokes Pygmalion reversed, the lessons failing on the star and succeeding on the lover, and rain as rebirth. The particular stays particular. Held well below the gate because the archetype is carried lightly, known and played as a plot device, and the ballet’s tale of a hoofer’s rise is evoked rather than built.

Score: 7.6 / 10

The inheritance is the backstage musical from 42nd Street (1933) on; the catalogue musical, built around a songwriter’s old songs, which An American in Paris (1951) had done for Gershwin with the same unit; and the Freed unit’s integrated musical, which Kelly and Donen had advanced in On the Town (1949). The turns are real: a musical whose subject is the coming of sound, so that the history of the medium becomes its plot; pastiche of 1929 numbers and of silent swashbuckling inside a 1952 musical; a heroine who wins by dubbing; a joke about the film’s own apparatus. What holds the axis below 7.5 is the stake. This was an MGM musical from the studio’s surest unit, with stars at their height and a writing team and songs already proven, a departure of subject and tone on a path its makers had paved.

Score: 7.3 / 10

Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows: that sound film is a joining of voice and body, and that the join can be made to sing or made to lie. A comedy of the talkies without songs could tell the plot; only a musical, where the voice is lifted into song and the body into dance, can show the joining at its height and at its failure in one film. The numbers that matter are instruments. “Moses Supposes” turns elocution into rhythm; “You Were Meant for Me” shows romance made with studio machines and still felt; the title number is sound and image in perfect accord, set against the preview, where they come apart. The cost: the ballet is a revue set in the plot, form as container, and the montage illustrates rather than knows.

Score: 8.2 / 10

Seventy-four years of return are the evidence. The film has carried a steady literature: on its reflexivity, and on its own false history of the talkies, since its 1927 is largely 1952’s idea of 1927; on Lina, whose voice is her crime and whose humiliation is the happy ending; on authorship divided between Kelly, Donen, the Freed unit and Comden and Green. On return it yields in form, in the rhymes of voice and image: the rain against the wind machine, the curtain against the screen. Held at the figure because the meaning was open at once and has not deepened much, and much of the return is to pleasure in the numbers rather than to new readings.

Score: 7.8 / 10

Field: the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is the fullest realisation of the integrated MGM musical, dance, song, satire and the medium’s own history in one structure, and a musical that made the studio’s machinery its comedy. It perfected a form more than it reorganised what film could do, and the Hollywood musical declined within the decade. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a modest success on release, with two Academy Award nominations, for Jean Hagen and for the scoring, and no wins; a reputation that rose from the 1960s; the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989; the title song turned to horror in A Clockwork Orange (1971); a stage musical; The Artist (2011) and La La Land (2016) in its line. The reach is wide as reference and narrower as redirection.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Weighed on form, presence and fabric across seventy-four years. The form survives whole: one cut, no lost footage, and restorations that repair. Presence has been continuous and as wide as any film of its decade can claim: television in many countries for decades, every home format, revivals and teaching; the title number known to people who have never seen the film; the lamp post a common image; a stage version still performed. The surface most fixed to its moment, the MGM Technicolor gloss and the studio’s idea of itself, is part of the subject, since the film is about Hollywood remaking itself, and its 1927 is costume, which does not date as a contemporary surface would. More than half a century, at the widest presence, clears the bar with room.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Kelly’s choreography and the dancers’ command, O’Connor’s above all, in a comic solo of falls, wall-runs and collisions in continuous shots; the three-person tap of “Good Morning”; Rosson’s Technicolor, lighting a soundstage street at night so that the rain shows; Comden and Green’s script, which turns each technical problem of 1927 into a joke and then into a plot step; Fazan’s cutting, which holds the dances in long shots and lets the preview’s slipping sound play; Hagen’s Lina, a voice made into a character, the best comic performance in the film. Held below the top by costs on whole sequences: Reynolds outmatched as a dancer, the ballet’s dream passage drifting in tempo, plain exteriors and back projection, the montage as filler.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Lina’s screech in the diction lesson and Charisse’s veil, yards long, held in the wind of the ballet’s dream. One law governs both: performance is made, and joy is in the making. Lina’s voice is the made thing failing; the veil, a wind machine and a length of silk, is the made thing succeeding. The flashback, the microphone in the bush, the wind machine of “You Were Meant for Me”, the dubbing and the raised curtain obey the same law, each a showing of the apparatus, and the title number obeys it from the other side, with real water and a man’s delight. The range is wide for a musical. The strain is in the ballet, outside the plot’s world and admitted as a pitch, and in Lina’s ending, where affectionate fakery turns cruel without registering it.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Judged on what a film of 103 minutes holds. The industry, as studio, contract, publicity, premieres and gossip; technology, the microphone and the coming of sound, as history; labour, in the extras, the stunt falls of Don’s way up, the voice that goes uncredited; celebrity and its public; romance and friendship, Don with Kathy and with Cosmo; class and speech, in Lina’s accent and the elocution lessons; art, in the vaudeville past and the ballet’s hoofer. They are integrated: the voice problem is technology, labour and romance at once. What holds the axis lowest: consciousness is held from outside, through song; the family is absent; the state, the sacred and the natural order do not enter, except the rain; history is the industry’s own. A small world, held tightly.

Score: 6.5 / 10