Singin’ in the Rain

Abstract This new film guide from Oxford traces the film’s genesis, analyzes the music and dance that make Singin’ in the Rain Gene Kelly’s best-known work, and examines some of the modern scholarship and new artworks the film has inspired. Singin’ combines a streamlined 1920s storyline with vivid characters, memorable wisecracks and comedy, romance, riveting dancing, memorable music, gorgeous sets, props, and costumes, and virtuosic camera work. But this supposedly simple, safe modern fairy tale is not simplistic. It is a social satire with a point of view on human nature and morality—what screenwriter Betty Comden called “a deep thread of real feeling.” The continuing success of Singin’ in the Rain is based on a contrasting but palatable combination of Comden and co-writer Adolph Green’s biting and irreverent satire (a residue from their Revuer days) and co-directors Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s superbly musicalized and deeply nostalgic Hollywood history lessons. Script drafts, production reports, and other sources reveal how commercially appealing romantic nostalgia, bolstered in the conservative climate created by the Cold War and blacklists of workers deemed politically suspect, largely effaced the progressive political views, forged in the late 1930s, of the film’s creators.