Even people who don’t like musicals love Singin’ in the Rain – yet it is the quintessential musical, the apotheosis, conceived as nothing more (and nothing less) than a celebration of the form: “Gotta dance! Gotta dance! Gotta dance!”
The script (by Adolph Green and Betty Comden) was written around some two dozen numbers by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. The title song hails from one of the earliest screen musicals, The Hollywood Revue of 1928, and it was Green and Comden’s inspiration to make that transitional period the fulcrum of their story. Unlike Sunset Blvd, made three years later, Singin in the Rain doesn’t eulogise the silent era, it guys its innocence and exults in the liberating possibilities of sound. It’s an affectionate satire on the foibles and folklore of the movie biz: the vanity of stars, philistine producers and pretentious artists all combining to make something truly magical – at least sometimes.
Featuring breathtaking dance numbers from Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Cyd Charisse and even Donald O’Connor, this film would be considered a classic even if it didn’t include the title number, Gene Kelly’s legendary late night tap dance in the street, one of those sequences that alone would justify the very existence of Hollywood. The film was recently a touchstone and inspiration for Damien Chazelle’s Babylon. In Sight & Sound’s canonical poll, it came in at #10 in 2022.
Sunday’s screening in our PANTHEON series will feature free refreshments and a short introduction by Harry Killas, filmmaker and Associate Professor, Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O’Connor, Jean Hagen, Cyd Charisse, Millard Mitchell
USA
1952
English
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Credits
Producer
Arthur Freed
Screenwriter
Adolph Green, Betty Comden
Cinematography
Harold Rosson
Editor
Adrienne Fazan
Original Music
Nacio Herb Brown, Arthur Freed
Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
Kicking off our 2026 Pantheon series of the greatest films ever made, Lars von Trier's 1996 masterpiece is a devastating melodrama featuring an indelible performance from Emily Watson as the woman whose love for her husband knows no bounds.
Antonia's Line
This month's Pantheon selection spotlights the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, the Dutch feminist filmmaker Marleen Gorris, and her charming, vibrant tale of an emancipated farmer who refuses to conform.
Sansho the Bailiff
The third of the great Japanese masters (with Ozu and Kurosawa), Mizoguchi is a poet of suffering. There's plenty of that here in his exquisite telling of an ancient folktale about the enslavement of a woman and her two children.
The Leopard
Lampedusa's elegiac account of a 19th century Sicilian aristocrat, Prince Salina, fading into history is one of the pinnacles of Italian cinema, an epic which influenced the tempo and gravitas of The Godfather, Age of Innocence and The Deer Hunter.
Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
