50 new things in 2023, part 2/50
Jan. 10th, 2023 01:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitThis week's new thing was a movie again, 1952's Singin' in the Rain, with Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, and Jean Hagen. I've been meaning to watch this for years, but kept not getting around to it. (Even today, I meant to watch The Green Knight, but Amazon Prime wanted to make me pay $7.99 to "buy" it, and if I'm going to buy it, I'm going to buy a physical copy that I'll really own.)
Anyway. Singin' in the Rain is an experience. It feels strikingly modern sometimes, with its nested narratives (at one point, during the "Broadway Melody" number, I lost track for a while of which narrative we were in), its abstraction such as the use of colored screens and dreamlike spaces, its meta, its highlighting of its own artificiality. I think it's subversive of 1950s norms, too, in a way that both looks back to the daring comedies of the 1930s and forward to the future. Cosmo Brown, Donald O'Connor's character, is as queer as he could possibly be in 1952, and while Debbie Reynolds's Kathy makes a chaste and virtuous (and clever and talented and genuinely appealing) love interest, there's an absolutely smoking hot dance between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse that blows the supposedly central love story out of the water. (Also, the central love story isn't really the het couple, it's the queer trio of Don, Kathy, and Cosmo, which the movie makes no attempt to transform into two het couples.)
Certainly you can feel the 1950s around the edges, like when we see our heroes sitting down to a late supper of white-bread sandwiches and big glasses of milk (Lockwood's house has a bar but there's not a drink in sight). Or, less amusingly, an on-set scene where we see a "jungle cannibals" scene being filmed with white actors in blackface, or in another on-set scene where a singer declares that one of the things that sets his beautiful girl apart from others is that she's only 16. But still, the heart of this movie is somewhere else, somewhere really quite strange, and I love that. I'm not knowledgeable about musicals, so one of my few points of comparison is my beloved White Christmas, which is roughly contemporary. White Christmas feels of its time in a way that Singin' in the Rain mostly doesn't.
The dancing is fantastic, of course, with the standouts being the title number, the Kelly/Charisse dance mentioned above, Donald O'Connor's amazing dancing + pratfalls in "Make 'Em Laugh," and the sheer wackiness of "Moses Supposes." The comedy element isn't, with a few exceptions, all that strong, but Jean Hagen is amazing as Lina Lamont, and I ended up being a lot fonder of Lina than I think I was supposed to be.
I might watch some other Gene Kelly musicals next, to compare.
Anyway. Singin' in the Rain is an experience. It feels strikingly modern sometimes, with its nested narratives (at one point, during the "Broadway Melody" number, I lost track for a while of which narrative we were in), its abstraction such as the use of colored screens and dreamlike spaces, its meta, its highlighting of its own artificiality. I think it's subversive of 1950s norms, too, in a way that both looks back to the daring comedies of the 1930s and forward to the future. Cosmo Brown, Donald O'Connor's character, is as queer as he could possibly be in 1952, and while Debbie Reynolds's Kathy makes a chaste and virtuous (and clever and talented and genuinely appealing) love interest, there's an absolutely smoking hot dance between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse that blows the supposedly central love story out of the water. (Also, the central love story isn't really the het couple, it's the queer trio of Don, Kathy, and Cosmo, which the movie makes no attempt to transform into two het couples.)
Certainly you can feel the 1950s around the edges, like when we see our heroes sitting down to a late supper of white-bread sandwiches and big glasses of milk (Lockwood's house has a bar but there's not a drink in sight). Or, less amusingly, an on-set scene where we see a "jungle cannibals" scene being filmed with white actors in blackface, or in another on-set scene where a singer declares that one of the things that sets his beautiful girl apart from others is that she's only 16. But still, the heart of this movie is somewhere else, somewhere really quite strange, and I love that. I'm not knowledgeable about musicals, so one of my few points of comparison is my beloved White Christmas, which is roughly contemporary. White Christmas feels of its time in a way that Singin' in the Rain mostly doesn't.
The dancing is fantastic, of course, with the standouts being the title number, the Kelly/Charisse dance mentioned above, Donald O'Connor's amazing dancing + pratfalls in "Make 'Em Laugh," and the sheer wackiness of "Moses Supposes." The comedy element isn't, with a few exceptions, all that strong, but Jean Hagen is amazing as Lina Lamont, and I ended up being a lot fonder of Lina than I think I was supposed to be.
I might watch some other Gene Kelly musicals next, to compare.
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Date: 2023-01-10 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 09:05 pm (UTC)I am literally writing about Jean Hagen as we speak.
(Singin' in the Rain was the first movie I saw, at the age of four. Cosmo Brown was formative.)
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Date: 2023-01-10 09:42 pm (UTC)The thing that really impressed me about her performance was that she's very funny, but at moments there's this real edge of vulnerability--she's scared for her livelihood, her life. The film is sort of cruel to her (though she's cruel first, and brings it on herself); I wish the story had hadn't had her take against Kathy, so that there could have been a happier ending for her.
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Date: 2023-01-11 02:40 am (UTC)Agreed. It probably took me years to notice, but she's as much of a real person as anyone else in the film, which being comedy operates on a sliding relation to reality to begin with. She has an ego that would sink the Olympic, but all that stuff about her contract means she really isn't dumb or something.
The film is sort of cruel to her (though she's cruel first, and brings it on herself); I wish the story had hadn't had her take against Kathy, so that there could have been a happier ending for her.
I don't read comprehensively in the fandom, but I believe this is one of the problems that Singin' in the Rain fic tries to work out.
(I do love this story, which is unsurprisingly Cosmo-centric. I also like this set of vids.)
I mean to respond regarding other Gene Kelly musicals—The Pirate (1948) is bonkers and I recommend it for Gene Kelly in hot pants alone. I'm not actually wild about the overall effect of An American in Paris (1951), but passages of its dancing are justly famous and Oscar Levant is epically passive-aggressive about everything. I haven't seen Brigadoon (1954) in decades, but my memories suggest the dance numbers between Kelly and Charisse are lovely and everything else is sort of evanescent saccharine. I love It's Always Fair Weather (1955), which flopped commercially because it is emotionally messy and ultimately downbeat in ways that would not become mainstays of musical theater until the '70's; it also contains the magnificent Dolores Gray and Kelly dances on roller skates. I don't seem to have very strong feelings about his other musical films or I would be able to call more of them to mind. I also like him non-musical, which is rarer.
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Date: 2023-01-10 09:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-10 10:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-01-12 09:44 pm (UTC)