Anniversary of the Singin' in the Rain

On March 27, 1952, the premiere of the musical film "Singin' in the Rain" took place in Miami, Florida. The film was directed by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly.

The idea of making the film belonged to MGM producer Arthur Freed. Film production became his profession in the late 30s, after working on the film "The Wizard of Oz", where he was an associate producer. Before working in the cinema, he was a songwriter, composer, director of theatrical vaudeville. By the early 50s, his track record as a producer numbered more than 30 films, mostly musicals. Under his command there was an entire division of the MGM film company. And then he decided to create a musical film based on songs written by him in the late 20s - early 30s, both still unknown to the public, and already heard in other MGM musicals of the 30s, and more than once. For example, the song "Singin' in the Rain", which gave the name to the film, had already been heard in 6 films since 1929.

Screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were given the task to write a script in which the songs selected by Freed could be "interwoven", which initially were not connected by any common theme or idea. Comden and Green rightly decided that, since all the songs they proposed were written in the late 20s - early 30s, the unifying theme could be the process of transformation of silent cinema into sound and the collisions generated by this process. Of the 14 songs in the film "Singin' in the Rain", only two were written specifically for this film. Having decided on the main theme of the future film, Comden and Green coped with the task quite easily, "writing off" the images of the film's characters from real prototypes - actors, directors of silent films - and their real life collisions.

The reception of the film of Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly by film critics and the cinematic community immediately after its release cannot be called cordial. Many critics accused the film of being secondary to Vincent Minnelli's musical "An American in Paris", which was released a year earlier. In early 1953, "Singin' in the Rain" was nominated for a Golden Globe Award in the category of Best Motion Picture - Comedy or Musical, but the Hollywood Foreign Press Association preferred Walter Lang's "With a Song in My Heart". At the Academy Awards, the film by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly received two nominations, but in minor categories, but did not win in those either.

Curiously, the usually peevish film reviewer of The New York Times, Bosley Crowther, as if swimming against the current, the day after the release of the film "Singin' in the Rain" on the screens, devoted a very laudatory review to it, in which he noted:

"Compounded generously of music, dance, color, spectacle and a riotous abundance of Gene Kelly, Jean Hagen and Donald O'Connor on the screen, all elements in this rainbow program are carefuly contrived and guaranteed to lift the dolors of winter and put you in a buttercup mood."

At European festival venues, the film "Singin' in the Rain" received a nomination only from the British Film Academy in the category Best Film of Any Origin. But here, apparently, the traditional chauvinism of the British film academies played a role: they awarded the prize in this category to a rather mediocre, but domestic film by David Lean "The Sound Barrier". And this is despite the fact that this film was awarded the BAFTA Award and as the best British film. As a result, such movie masterpieces as Elia Kazan's "A Streetcar Named Desire", Luis Bunuel's "Los olvidados", Akira Kurosawa's "Rashômon" were left behind.

However, as time passed, the films that film critics and cinematographers preferred over "Singin' in the Rain" began to lose their popularity among moviegoers and be forgotten, and the Donen and Kelly film gained more and more fans. And this was noted in a 1998 review by the guru of American film criticism Roger Ebert, who gave the film maximum 4 stars and included it in his list of "Great Movies":

"There is no movie musical more fun than "Singin' in the Rain,” and few that remain as fresh over the years. Its originality is all the more startling if you reflect that only one of its songs was written new for the film, that the producers plundered MGM's storage vaults for sets and props, and that the movie was originally ranked below "An American in Paris,” which won a best picture Oscar. The verdict of the years knows better than Oscar: "Singin' in the Rain” is a transcendent experience, and no one who loves movies can afford to miss it."

A year after the first review, Ebert confirmed his conclusions about the film with a second review, in which he noted:

""Singin' in the Rain" has been voted one of the greatest films of all time in international critics' polls, and is routinely called the greatest of all the Hollywood musicals. I don't think there's any doubt about that."

The Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov gave a no less flattering assessment of the film by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly:

"The uniqueness of Singin' in the Rain is in the rare cinematography, which, unfortunately, is much less common than it should be, such works differ, tending rather to theatrical or pop convention.... The film (along with such universally recognized masterpieces as "Gone with the Wind", "The Maltese Falcon", "Casablanca"...) is essentially American, reflecting the latent dreams of an entire nation, if not the whole world."

The evaluation of the film-musical "Singin' in the Rain" by ordinary moviegoers is characterized by the following data. With a budget of $2.54 million, the film grossed $7.2 million in the United States in the first year of the demonstration. Modern moviegoers, for obvious reasons, evaluate the film not with dollars, but with ratings on IMDB and Kinopoisk sites. 73% of users of these sites rated the film from 8 to 10. And 25% of users, every fourth, rated the film to the maximum - "ten". Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of the musical film by Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly "Singin' in the Rain" according to FilmGourmand version was 8,252, on the basis of which it took 450th Rank in the Golden Thousand.