Scattered Showers

It's been called everything from "the best Hollywood musical of all time" to "just about the best Hollywood musical of all time," so it seemed like sooner or later, I should cross Singin' in the Rain off the list. But when I did so, I found my opinion didn't completely match with the effusive praise of those reviewers.

Released in 1952, this movie is stamped strongly with the mark of its time. Acting just wasn't the same then. Everyone exaggerates for the camera, speaks unnecessarily fast, and substitutes inflection for emotion. It's the sort of acting that keeps me from watching many movies from the period.

It's an especially odd experience here, because the movie itself is set in the late 1920s, and its plot revolves around the emergence of "talkies" to replace silent films. The movie gets a lot of mileage out of how ridiculous and dated the acting (and other filmmaking techniques) of that era are some 25 years later, yet it itself looks arguably even more ridiculous after twice that span of time.

The storyline is intriguing enough, a light romance interlaced with the tale of performers trying to save their careers as the film industry transforms. But it's really a rough framework just to get from song to song. None of the songs in this movie were actually written for the movie, and it really shows. Rather than finding songs that truly express the emotional content of a scene, the scene is stretched unnaturally to reach the title of a song -- and rarely gets all the way there.

But for all that the film lacks in these critical areas, it simply excels in the actual presentation of the songs. Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor are nothing short of incredible. Nearly every number is full of "how the hell can they do that?!" choreography, all the more impressive by how effortless they make it look. If the movie "proper" must really be shuffled together with unrelated musical numbers, they couldn't have found better than these.

So I suppose this is what the reviewers must mean when they praise this film as the "greatest Hollywood musical." Understandable, but I say it makes it only a great collection of music videos (made decades before the concept existed). This is only one notch above a revue. A true musical is the entire film and not just the songs, and there, Singin' in the Rain was patchwork in its time, and terribly dated today.

I rate it a C+ overall, though I might still give it a guarded recommendation.