Singin' in the Rain (1952)

Directed by

Gene Kelly, Stanley Donen

Genre

comedy film, musical film, romantic comedy film

Country

United States

Runtime

1h 43m

Rated

G

Rating

8.1 of 10 from 3,542 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Hollywood movie stars deal with the shift from silent films to talkies in the late 1920s. A silent film actor and his friends navigate the changes while putting on musical numbers.

lightheartedwhimsicalupbeatplayfulenergeticnostalgicbreezyjoyful

What happens

Singin' in the Rain is a 1952 American musical romantic comedy film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, starring Kelly, Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, with Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchell, Douglas Fowley, Rita Moreno and Cyd Charisse in supporting roles. It offers a lighthearted depiction of Hollywood in the late 1920s, with the three stars portraying performers caught up in the transition from silent films to "talkies". Arthur Freed conceived the idea of the film based on the back catalogs of songs written by himself and Nacio Herb Brown. Because many of the songs had been written during the transition from silent films to "talkies", writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green decided that was when the story should be set. When the story morphed into that of a romantic hero with a vaudevillian background surviving the transition period in Hollywood and falling back onto his old song-and-dance habits, Kelly, who was chosen for the lead along with Donen, responded enthusiastically to it. After a premiere at the Radio City Music Hall, the film was released nationwide on April 11, 1952. Film historians note that Singin' in the Rain was not initially expected to become a classic, as MGM treated it as a routine musical project during production. The film was only a modest hit when it was first released. Today it is frequently cited as the greatest musical film and one of the greatest films ever made. It topped the AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals list, ranked as the fifth-greatest American motion picture of all time in its updated list of the greatest American films in 2007, having ranked as the tenth greatest in the original 1998 list, and Kelly's rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" ranked third in their list of the greatest film songs. In 1989, Singin' in the Rain was one of the first 25 films selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in its list of the 50 films to be seen by the age of 14. In 2008, Empire magazine ranked it as the eighth-best film of all time. In Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 list of the greatest films of all time, Singin' in the Rain placed 10th. Previously, it had ranked third in their 1982 list and tenth in their 2002 list. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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