Singin' in the Rain on the big screen

Singin’ in theRain (1952) recently received a national limited release in cinemas around the country.  It’s a movie that revives that old-time enthusiasm and appreciation for the entertainer.  We have a lot of celebrities nowadays, but fewer multi-talented and trained-by-experience entertainers.

It’s often called one of the best movie movies ever made, and this may be only in part because  of its clever parody of the crisis in Hollywood when silent movies shifted to sound; in large measure it is because of the musical numbers which serve a dual purpose.  They certainly move the plot along, as is the function of a musical number, but each number is also a stand-alone piece that can be lifted from the movie and appreciated as a pure moment of vaudevillian showmanship.  Many of them are “big” numbers, like “Make “Em Laugh”, “Good Morning”, the “Gotta Dance” sequence, and the iconic title song number with Gene Kelly splashing in the studio soundstage streets.

The cinema audience with whom I watched the movie reacted to the big numbers with murmured, almost awed, “Wow, that was good.”

This, despite the audience not being what I would easily identify as a crowd of old movie buffs.  Indeed, though I do believe most were at least familiar with the movie—I judged that the majority of them were middle aged or senior citizens, with only a few younger parents with children—the overall impression I got was that most had perhaps not seen the movie in a very long time.  They seemed surprised by the plot turns. 

Of course, in any group of movie goers, some people will laugh in places we do not expect them to, and remain silent in other spots that we might think are uproariously funny. 

“Haven’t you seen that movie before?  Don’t you have it?” I was asked before I headed out to the warehouse-cum-gulag-styled-construction cinema, as I am in infrequent visitor there.  As any classic film fan can tell you, when it comes to seeing an old favorite on the big screen, as it’s meant to be seen—no, we really haven’t seen it before.  The colors are captivating.  I never noticed before the movie poster in the background during the scene where Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O’Connor are standing outside the theater—one of them featured William Haines.  Few non-classic film fans today will know who he was.  Did the public remember his film career in 1952 when this film was originally released?  Was this a tribute by the industry he abandoned because he refused to hide his homosexuality?

I noticed wrinkles in Cyd Charisse’s stockings when she drapes one beautiful gam over Kelly’s shoulder.

The most fascinating effect for me were the scenes set inside a theater, where the camera pulls back and we see row upon row of audience.  Watching this scene in a modern cinema that has stadium seating, it looked as if the last row of the movie “audience” was the first row in our cinema audience.  I felt as if were in the same theater as the movie characters, that I was in one of the back rows of the same theater.

I enjoyed the intro and outro by Ben Mankiewicz—which I think are very helpful for general public audiences not as familiar with classic films—and marveled along with the audience, his mention of Donald O’Connor requiring hospitalization after his frenetic “Make ‘Em Laugh” number, O’Connor’s being a four-pack a day smoker at the time.  (The recent passing of Debbie Reynolds also brought soft exclamations of appreciation when her name appeared on screen.)

The information served to underscore the effect the audience had of this being a celebration of the entertainer – someone whose work on screen is not necessarily only a product of special effects or any movie magic we have become accustomed to, i.e. a packaged performance in a modern movie that tries to impress us with “reality.” 

For this film, and this showing, the audience readily marveled at the talent and the exhausting work of the entertainer, not just as part of a splashy show, but as an individual who for that golden, ethereal moment, stands out from the piece.  A show stopper.

“Wow…that was good.”

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Come back next Thursday when we trail the marvelous Jean Arthur in a silly romp through Depression-era Easy Living (1935).

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The RMS Berengaria and the Crash

We’re continuing our Halloween fright fest with something truly scary: the economy. This week marks the 80th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash whose repercussions changed this country and a good part of the world. The above famous headline in Variety, devoted to stage and film, put the matter succinctly and with typical panache. Other papers were grappling with 72-point type headlines that attempted to dramatize numbers of shares sold, points in decline, value lost. Variety summed up the whole nightmare in show-biz terms.

What makes this anniversary special is the similarities people, and pundits, may choose to draw between our current economic challenges and those of eight decades ago. It makes the anniversary more dramatic, to be sure, but perhaps it will give us something more than entertaining intrigue. Possibly, it might give us more understanding about the whole grisly matter, and more empathy for a generation that lost everything.

On Thursday we’ll mark the finale of the fiasco, the so-called “Black Tuesday” event (There was, you’ll remember, Black Thursday, Black Friday, Black Monday, and Black Tuesday) with a look at “The Roaring Twenties” (1939), a fascinating and well-made film that attempts to look back on the event with an objective if nostalgic eye. We may have even better perspective now.

Today, let’s have a brief look at one episode of the 1929 stock market crash that says something about the quirkiness of the Roaring Twenties, and maybe the inevitability of paying the piper, or judgment day, or just the party being over.

In the musical “Funny Girl” (1967), Barbra Streisand, playing the popular comedienne Fanny Brice, goes along with her lover, played by Omar Sharif, on a ship to Europe. He is a professional gambler and intends to ply his trade among the well-to-do on the ship. The ship they travel on is the grand Cunard ocean liner, the RMS Berengaria.

“You are going to Europe so you can play cards on the boat?!” Miss Streisand asks incredulously. A little card playing was the least of a life of excess at sea.

The Berengaria began its life a product of Imperial Germany as the Imperator, but was turned over to Great Britain after World War I for reparations, where it was renamed and reborn as a favorite among wealthy travelers taking the trans-Atlantic route between Britain and the U.S.

F. Scott Fitzgerald noted in the final pages of his 1922 novel “The Beautiful and the Damned”, where his dissipated Lost Generation poster children, Anthony and Gloria Patch, newly wealthy but their souls destroyed, wander the decks of the Berengaria, “That exquisite heavenly irony which has tabulated the demise of so many generations of sparrows doubtless records verbal inflections of the passengers of such ships as The Berengaria.”

Other passengers, like Vanderbilt, DuPont, Astor, and J. P. Morgan may not have wandered the decks in dissipation, but certainly had a reason for choosing the Berengaria over other ships. In August of 1929, a couple of months before the Crash, the Berengaria instituted a new service. A salon on the promenade deck would become a stock brokerage linked by wireless to Wall Street. No more would bored millionaires struggle to amuse themselves with shuffleboard on the crossing. Now, they could continue to trade stocks during the voyage.

I suppose it was a 1920s version of people who just cannot put down the cell phone or BlackBerry.

During the week of the Crash, the Berengaria had left Europe and was heading to New York. When news of the stocks falling spread across the ship, the brokerage room was barraged by the passengers, all trying to get more information, all trying to sell. Helena Rubinstein, the cosmetics manufacturer, sat in a front row leather armchair to watch the prices continuously chalked on the board, and continuously falling. She lost a million dollars in a couple of hours.

Other millionaires on board that trip docked in New York penniless. A kind of voyage of the damned. They were no less helpless than the people who sweated it out in the nervous crowds gathering in front of the New York Stock Exchange, but they had a better view; if they bothered to leave the brokerage salon and take a stroll on the promenade deck.

It makes a dramatic allegory to the Crash of 1929, including the aftermath. The Berengaria’s fortunes faltered during the Great Depression, was referred to as “Bargain Area” and used for cheap cruises to the Caribbean and Bermuda, but failed to turn a profit. By the end of the 1930s, she was retired and eventually scrapped in the mid-1940s.

A poem parodying the outlandish idea of having a brokerage a ship was published in the Spokane Spokesman-Review, and later the Literary Digest August 31, 1929. It is eerily prescient:

We were crowded in the cabin
Watching figures on the Board;
It was midnight on the ocean
And a tempest loudly roared.

We were watching the quotations
With a certain sad appeal:
Some were short in General Motors,
Some were long on U.S. Steel.

And, timidly a tourist
Took a chance on twenty shares --
"We are lost!" the Captain shouted,
As he staggered down the stairs.

"I've got a tip," he faltered,
"Straight by wireless from the aunt
Of a fellow who's related
To a cousin of Durant."

At these awful words we shuddered,
And the stoutest bull grew sick
While the brokers cried, "More margin!"
And the ticker ceased to tick.

But the captain's little daughter
Said, "I do not understand --
Isn't Morgan on the ocean
Just the same as on the land?"

Even the film industry, which ironically did very well during the Depression and proved to be one of the few recession-proof industries (dimes stores was another), suffered a foreboding incident that frightening autumn.

In September 1929 “His Glorious Night” with John Gilbert was released to not only criticism, but howls. The silent-screen lover lost his macho mystique when the audience heard his high, thin voice for the first time. It was indeed an era of new beginnings, new technological marvels, and disastrous endings.

But Mr. Gilbert’s misfortune was Gene Kelly’s gain when the seed was planted for “Singin’ in the Rain” (1952).

By the time that parody was released, the stock market had mostly recovered. It took a couple of decades for those who lost money on their stocks but held onto them to break even. The stock market finally regained its pre-1929 Crash highest level in November 1954 amid a booming economy fueled by consumerism, where the 1929 Crash was starting to fade in memory and fear of it was replaced by either scornful amusement, or total ignorance, for another couple of generations.

“What’s past is prologue” Shakespeare said in “The Tempest.” Come back Thursday for “The Roaring Twenties”. Until then, have a look below at a montage of The Berengaria and the Crash.

Good News (1947)

Good News (1947) presents a 1920s college campus, taken from the 1927 Broadway musical and revived in this MGM treatment. One notable aspect to this film is that none of the featured players is able to sing on key.

In some perverse way, I find this endearing. June Allyson’s and Peter Lawford’s singing limitations are by now legendary, but I especially like Joan McCracken in the comic role of Babe Doolittle. Even her speaking voice is slightly off-key, and that is just cute.

The exception to this vocal limitation among the musical stars of Good News is Mel Torme, but The Velvet Fog’s role as one of the students is so minor that he can’t help them much.

Just when did “Babe”, as in Babe Ruth and Babe Didrikson stop being a popular nickname? Oliver Hardy’s nickname also was Babe. An innocent moniker that must belong to innocent times.

Cute as a button June Allyson is the corn-fed All-American Girl working her way through college in the campus library. Peter Lawford is the handsome Big Man on Campus, and we have our usual cast of brawny but dumb athletes, wealthy kids, poor kids, kids with witty sayings inked on sweatshirts, kids with witty sayings painted on jalopies, and kids with witty sayings on rain slickers.

The big number seems not to go to star June Allyson, but is thrown to Miss McCracken in a zippy rendition of “Pass That Peace Pipe,” where she dances up a storm to a faux-Indian war dance. Such a show-stopper, it is also featured in That’s Entertainment Part III (1994). Some of the tribes she rattles off so impressively are not the names of tribes, but rather are place names. One assumes these words are used to conveniently complete the rhymes, or perhaps the writers did not realize that American Indians had names for things other than themselves. A small point, but file this under my unfortunate fascination with the mundane. Nice touch that her dress, while, with its geometric pattern meant to invoke an American Indian motif and make her stand out from the rest of the dancers, still manages to look like a street dress and not a costume.

A note on the costuming and hair: only some of it seems to accurately depict 1920s styles. The rest is straight out of 1947.

Joan McCracken was featured in a Life magazine article of October 2, 1944, three years before this film was made. She had just made waves with a brief but featured role as a dancer in the enormous Broadway hit Oklahoma, and had captured the media’s attention. It was a breakout role for her, and Good News with her energetic dancing likewise could have been a breakout role for her. Unfortunately, it was to be her only film. With a handful of Broadway credits, and handful of television appearances, Joan McCracken died at 43 years old of heart disease related to diabetes.

Behind the college high jinks, we have a couple of other likewise more sober aspects to consider. First, is that Good News appears to be another in a string of “good old days” examinations of the 1920s that came out of Hollywood in the post-war era. Evidently the Depression, the war, and the new eerie landscape the Cold War was beginning to represent was enough to make the public (at least in Hollywood’s eyes) long for days of sweet innocence and unabashed craziness of a less lethal sort.

Singin' in the Rain (1952) was more successful at this, using parody to cozy up to a time long past, and even Sunset Blvd (1950) discussed with Singin' in the Rain here, though a dramatic turn, managed to cast a light on the supposed glamour of a bygone era a few decades ago.

The second aspect interesting to consider is that Good News would likely have had little appreciation among the modern college student of that time, many of whom were returning World War II veterans. These “kids” had already matriculated on Tarawa, the Battle of the Bulge, Iwo Jima, and all points in between. They were serious students such as college campuses had never seen before, and have not seen since. June Allyson singing “The Best Things in Life Are Free” is sweet, but likely none of these Big Men on Campus would have cared if Tait College won the football game or not.

This was a film for younger kids, high school kids probably, and older people, who were shying away from the more realistic films coming out of Hollywood, and looking for something akin to a family film. Good News, the Broadway play of 1927 might have been current events, but Good News the movie of twenty years later is fantasy, and its message, if it had any, like the singing, was slightly off-key.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

End of the Movie Musical Era

It is an interesting paradox that just as movie musicals were coming into their own in terms of technology (Technicolor, VistaVision, etc.), and achieving an art form status, such as “An American in Paris” (1951), the era folded like a house of cards.

When “White Christmas” (1954) was released, Rosemary Clooney was predicted to have a successful career in movie musicals ahead of her, but instead that movie was the pinnacle of her film career, and she found her success instead in television, recording, and live performances. Vera-Ellen, an astonishingly talented dancer, would make only a couple more films before her career ended, in part due to personal circumstances, and in part due to film coming of age with more realistic styles and themes.

“Singin’ in the Rain” (1952) is lauded as the best movie musical ever made, and though Gene Kelly did some of his best work in the 1950s, the sand was running out of the hourglass. Fred Astaire’s career may have become reborn after his retirement, with films like “The Band Wagon” (1953) and “Funny Face” (1957), but it was also the era of “A Streetcar Named Desire” (1951), “Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957), “Rebel Without a Cause” (1955) and “On the Waterfront” (1954).

Rather like a Fourth of July sparkler bursting forth its last white-hot light before abruptly puffing out and leaving only smoke and darkness, the era of Hollywood musicals was ostensibly over after the 1950s. Blockbuster musicals of the 1960s tended to be Broadway shows transferred to film, with big names for the box office.

“White Christmas” is reported to be one of the most-watched films of the Christmas season. I’m not sure how many people gather annually to watch “On the Waterfront,” as good as it was. Even poor old Blanche DuBois of “Streetcar Named Desire” remarked, “I don’t want realism. I want magic.”

"Singin'" and "Sunset", Two Parodies of Silent Film

The film industry of the 1920s was parodied twice in the early 1950s with intelligence, wit, and great success. Each film, however, showed a different side to the irresistible mayhem of when sound came to screen. One, as shown in Singin' in the Rain (1952) was frothy, silly and fun, and the other, Sunset Blvd. (1950) was biting, cynical, and tragic. They are both masterfully told stories, and they are both true.

In Singin' in the Rain we have a scene which tells all the difficulties of the new sound technology when poor Jean Hagen is wired with a microphone in her costume bodice, which picks up her heartbeat. Her inability to remember to speak directly into the mic later has hysterical consequences for the movie she and Gene Kelly are desperately trying shoot. Conversely, in Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson sits for a moment in Cecil B. DeMille’s director’s chair, waiting to speak with him, and a mic on a boom trails lightly over her head as she visits his busy movie set. She looks up at it, first with wary curiosity, like a woman trying to avoid a large bee at a picnic, then her eyes focus in on the vile reminder of the death knell of her silent screen career. She looks at it with revulsion, and lightly pushes it away.

Singin' in the Rain, called by many the best musical ever made, picks up on the camp of a campy era and splashes us not only with the rain falling on Gene Kelly’s dance number, but a collage of 1920s era styles in clothing, slang, and movie business. The dance numbers are colorful and poke gentle fun at the speech coaches, the stunts, a montage of flappers, college boys, gossip columnists, and Hollywood parties. In one such party, a movie screen in the living room of a film mogul shows the astounded partygoers a demonstration of sound recorded on film. In Sunset Blvd., Gloria Swanson’s own ornate, decaying Hollywood mansion also has a movie screen in her living room where she views only her own silent pictures.

Sunset Blvd. is creepy where Singin' in the Rain is cute, and this is due is great part to Swanson’s riveting performance (receiving an Academy Award nomination), and mainly because it was herself she was boldly mocking. It gives us a feeling of discomfort that she is not merely parodying a long-ago era as Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds are doing, poking fun at experiences lived by other people. Swanson shows us her own youth, her own career down the tubes, the dark side of the bubbly era, and the fallout after the destruction. What is remarkable, too, is that 1950, when the film was made, was only twenty years after the end of the silent film era. Barely time for one new generation to take the reins in the entertainment industry and change it, only to look back with disdain and condescension on what came before. William Holden tells her it is no shame to be 50, unless she pretends to be 25. That is not quite true. As we see through repeated remarks of underlings at the studio, she is regarded as a dinosaur. Her crime really is just being 50 in an industry which will always prefer youth.

Singin' in the Rain is as giddy as a senior class play, and Sunset Blvd. is an obituary. Both these films are useful in examining the post-1920s view of the silent film era.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.