He was forty years old, running a 103-degree fever, soaked to the skin in a wool suit that was slowly shrinking, and splashing through “rain” that was really water mixed with milk so the cameras could see it. And yet, watching Gene Kelly swing around that lamppost and sing into the storm, you would swear he was the happiest man on earth. That is the miracle — and the labor — of Singin’ in the Rain, the film that nearly nobody thought was special when it was made, and that everyone now calls the greatest movie musical ever filmed.
A routine assignment nobody expected to matter
To understand how Singin’ in the Rain happened, you have to understand how little anyone at MGM expected of it. By 1951, the studio’s celebrated “Freed Unit” — producer Arthur Freed’s musical division — was riding high on An American in Paris, which would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Freed needed another musical, and he had a catalog of old songs written years earlier with his composing partner Nacio Herb Brown that the studio wanted to recycle. The idea was simple: build a new musical around the old catalog, the way An American in Paris had been built around Gershwin.
The writing team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green were given the job. Green, by his own later account, was horrified at first — “We thought we were going to be writing The Nacio Herb Brown Story,” he said. But the two writers did something inspired: instead of writing a revue, they wrote a story about Hollywood itself — about the chaotic, humiliating, hilarious transition from silent pictures to talkies in the late 1920s. Don Lockwood, the swashbuckling silent star played by Kelly, discovers that the microphones hidden in flower vases can hear his co-star’s screeching voice; the picture becomes a musical; love conquers. It was satire, valentine, and showcase all at once, and it let the old Freed-Brown songs live inside a story about the era when those songs were born.
Directing was handed to the now-established team of Kelly and Stanley Donen, who had co-directed On the Town in 1949. This was their third collaboration as co-directors, and by now the division of labor was understood: Donen, the ex-dancer with the camera in his blood, handled the staging for the lens, while Kelly — star, choreographer, and co-director — drove the dance, the performance energy, and the relentless perfectionism that would define the shoot.
The fever shoot
The film’s centerpiece — the sequence everything else in movie musicals is measured against — was Kelly’s solo dance to the title song, staged on a rainy studio street on MGM’s backlot in the late summer of 1951. It took a day and a half to shoot. Black canvas was stretched overhead to simulate night, trapping the heat underneath. Kelly was genuinely ill: he had a 103-degree fever and, according to his family, spent the breaks between takes lying in the sunlight to “bake the fever out of him,” as he put it. He did not stop. He did not postpone.
Everything about the number looks effortless, and almost everything about it was technically brutal. The “rain” had to be visible on black-and-white film stock-era cameras, so the crew mixed milk into the water supply — which meant Kelly was dancing in a wool suit soaked in a milky solution that made the fabric shrink around him as he moved. The lamppost swing, the umbrella twirl, the joyous splashing through puddles: it all had to be blocked so precisely that Kelly reportedly finished the shoot with the kind of exhaustion most dancers associate with stage marathons, not a single film sequence.
And yet the joy in the number is real, which is the thing nobody can fake. That is why, seventy-plus years later, when people who have never seen a musical in their lives picture “a musical,” they picture Gene Kelly with a lamppost.
“Moses Supposes,” “Good Mornin’,” and the genius of the trio
If the title number is the film’s soul, the trio numbers are its heartbeat — and they reveal how Kelly worked as a choreographer. “Moses Supposes,” the diction-lesson number Kelly dances with Donald O’Connor, was built around a tongue-twister lifted from nineteenth-century English nonsense verse. Watch it closely: the two men trade steps on top of a piano, in and out of chairs, in perfect rhythmic unison, and the delight is that it looks like two friends showing off for each other. O’Connor, a vaudeville veteran since childhood, was the one dancer alive who could match Kelly’s attack without imitating him.
“Good Mornin’,” the dawn-after-the-party number with O’Connor and 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds, was something else again — a study in Kelly’s perfectionism that has become Hollywood legend. The number runs about four minutes on screen. It took from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. to shoot. Reynolds, who had no professional dance training when she was cast, later said the film and childbirth were the two hardest things she ever did. The final shot — the three of them tipping a sofa backward and collapsing onto it, laughing — took some forty takes, and by the end of the day, Reynolds’s feet were bleeding inside her shoes. When she finally wept, it was Fred Astaire — visiting the set, of all people — who found her under a piano and told her, “You’re not going to die.” She kept dancing.
That is the Kelly method in miniature: work until it’s right, and let the joy you see on screen be the product of agony nobody in the audience ever has to know about.
Donald O’Connor’s beautiful suffering
No account of this film is complete without Donald O’Connor’s “Make ‘Em Laugh,” which may be the most physically punishing comic dance ever put on film. Kelly wanted O’Connor to have a number of his own, and the two of them assembled it from O’Connor’s vaudeville trunk: the pratfalls, the running-up-the-wall backflip (a trick O’Connor had done in two earlier films), the running-in-circles-on-the-floor gag borrowed from Curly Howard of the Three Stooges. The song itself was a near-twin of “Be a Clown,” which Kelly had sung with the Nicholas Brothers in The Pirate four years earlier — a resemblance that has been debated ever since.
O’Connor was smoking roughly four packs of cigarettes a day at the time, and the routine nearly killed him. He finished the shoot with rug burns, bruises, and total exhaustion, and went home to bed for days — only to learn that the original footage had been ruined in processing and he had to shoot the entire number again. (Years later, in a 2003 conversation with critic Roger Ebert, O’Connor suggested some of the more colorful details of that story had been exaggerated — but nobody disputes the number’s toll, or its brilliance.) Watch “Make ‘Em Laugh” once and you understand why Kelly fought to give his co-star the spotlight: it’s a masterclass in making the impossible look improvised.
The songs that weren’t new
One of the film’s quiet ironies is that almost none of its music was new. The Freed-Brown catalog supplied the title song (written in the late 1920s and previously heard in at least half a dozen MGM films), “You Were Meant for Me,” “All I Do Is Dream of You,” “Good Morning,” “Would You,” and “Broadway Melody.” The only songs written specifically for the film were “Moses Supposes” and “Make ‘Em Laugh.” Comden and Green even structured the screenplay around the catalog, building scenes — the “Broadway Melody” ballet-within-the-film, the fashion-show montage, the party sequence — as frames for the old tunes. It was recycling elevated to art.
Behind the scenes, the film also played a sly trick with voices, fitting for a movie about the coming of sound. Debbie Reynolds’s singing in “You Are My Lucky Star” was dubbed by Betty Noyes — who also sang the title-song reprise — a delicious irony in a film where the entire plot turns on whose voice is really coming out of whose mouth.
The lukewarm welcome
And then the film came out, and… it did fine. Not great. Fine. In March 1952, Singin’ in the Rain earned respectable but modest box office and exactly two Academy Award nominations — Jean Hagen for Best Supporting Actress (as the gloriously screechy Lina Lamont, a comic performance for the ages) and one for the musical score. That’s it. The year’s Best Picture Oscar went to The Greatest Show on Earth. Critics admired it; nobody called it a masterpiece. It was, in the industry’s eyes, a successful program picture from the Freed Unit — a good year, not a landmark one.
The film’s reputation grew the slow way: through television broadcasts, repertory screenings, and generations of dancers, directors, and kids with a VCR who discovered it on their own. By the time the American Film Institute compiled its 100 Years… 100 Movies list, Singin’ in the Rain sat at number five — the highest-ranked musical — and on the AFI’s list of the 25 greatest movie musicals of all time, it stands at number one. The British Film Institute’s Sight & Sound poll has placed it among the greatest films ever made, full stop. Stanley Donen, looking back, said simply that of everything he ever made, it was the one he was proudest of.
Why it endures
There are technical reasons Singin’ in the Rain endures — the choreography, the Comden-Green screenplay, the way every number grows out of character and story rather than stopping the plot cold. But the real reason is something Kelly understood better than any dancer before him: joy is a discipline. The film’s famous numbers are documents of suffering transformed — a fevered man dancing in the rain, a teenager with bleeding feet, a chain-smoker doing backflips off a wall — and what reaches the audience is none of the suffering and all of the joy. That is not an accident. That is Gene Kelly’s whole philosophy of screen dance, compressed into 103 minutes.
He once said, in effect, that if Fred Astaire was the aristocrat of dance, he was the regular guy — the one who danced like a shortstop and made it look like anyone with enough love could fly. Singin’ in the Rain is the permanent proof. It was made by a perfectionist who wouldn’t stop for a 103-degree fever, and it feels like it was made by someone who never had a care in the world. That contradiction is the whole of Gene Kelly, and it’s why we’ll still be singing in the rain a hundred years from now.