From the archive: "Singin' in the Rain"

"An' I caayyn't stan' 'im."

– Lina Lamont (it's really hard to type out her awesome nasal whine)

I'm a fan of musicals, let it be known. I grew up with Mom's record collection, which consisted primarily of anything Julie Andrews was ever in - "My Fair Lady," "The Sound of Music," "Camelot," "Mary Poppins." We would tape musicals off the TV (aw, tapes; aw, VHS) and I'd watch them endlessly, just to get the songs right.

So it's more than a little odd that until this movie group, I had never seen "Singin' in the Rain," widely considered to be one of the greatest musicals ever. We queued this one up at Lana's place four (four!) years ago. It has resided safely in my top 10 ever since.

My favorite trivia bits

• Gene Kelly had a terrible cold the day he was scheduled to shoot the actual singing in the rain sequence - something like a 103 fever. The director was all set to send him home, but Kelly didn't want to waste the already prepared set. So he performed this joyful, incandescent, lighter-than-air tap dance when he must have felt like utter shit. And he did it in precisely one take. Then he went home. One take. A masterpiece. A-freakin-mazing.
• Fun fact: the rain in that sequence was a mix of water and milk so it would show up better.

Seriously, look how high they get off the ground!

•  Know who else was amazing? Donald O'Connor, who played the sidekick, Cosmo. Not only does he have these creepy bluer-than-blue eyes, but his bones seem to be made of rubber. He performs this gravity-defying song-and-dance bit for "Make 'em Laugh" where he literally tosses himself about the room, does back flips off walls with no wires or digital effects, and often in one looooooong take. Oh, and he was a four-pack-a-day smoker at the time. Insane. After they shot that scene, he went to bed for a week out of exhaustion. Then, naturally, the film was ruined in an accident, so he had to shoot the whole damn thing again.
• Nother fun fact: That song, "Make 'em Laugh," sounds almost exactly like Cole Porter's "Be a Clown" - in both melody and lyric. Seriously, somebody could have been sued, it was that similar.
• Cyd Charise was the amazing dancer in the Broadway Melody sequence - when she died last year, I read a story that she told about the difference between dancing with Gene Kelly and with Fred Astaire. When she danced with Kelly, she came home covered in bruises from being athletically tossed around. When she danced with Astaire, there wasn't a mark on her.
•  Gene Kelly was, by many accounts, quite the tyrannical bastard during this film - and others, as I understand. He yelled at poor little 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds all the time and made her cry. He worked her so hard during the "Good Morning" dance routine that blood vessels in her feet burst. Donald O'Connor said he was terrified of making a mistake and getting yelled at by Kelly.

The scene that caused bloody feet. Jerk.

 
Seriously, there are tons of great bits of trivia like this, particularly for this film. And now I run into a problem. A lot of the backstage info adds up to one unavoidable fact: Gene Kelly = jerk. I don't want it to be this way. I love Gene Kelly. "Brigadoon" ("It's bloody Brigadoon!") was one of the early movies we taped from TV, and, c'mon, he's this cute, athletic, super talented Irish kid from New York. I want to love him. Then I go and find out that he was a mean, demanding boss who made his co-stars cry and stuff.

This has happened to me before. In college, I was most chagrined to discover that Robert Frost was a raging, competitive, rotten-to-his-kids asshole. But he's also one of my favorite poets. I have a hard time reconciling these two facts. I want my favorite artists to be cool people. I want them to be the kind of people I would want to work with (if they weren't you know, dead and stuff). The class where I found out about Robert Frost's bastard tendencies was an American Lit survey course that I have come to refer to as the Mean Old Bastard class. Almost without fail, every one of those great writers was not someone I would want to hang out with. (Gwendolyn Brooks excepted.)

Is it too much to ask that someone with enormous talent also be a nice guy? Or are they only capable of making great art by being bastards? 

Here's the requisite exception: You know how earlier I said Gene Kelly made Debbie Reynolds cry? She went and hid under a piano to do her crying because, c'mon, she was 19! Know who found her there and cheered her up? Fred Astaire. So at least one great artist was also a nice guy. 

On knowing things

Movie trivia is kind of my thing, as I might have mentioned. And there is a lot to know about this movie - that list above ain't the half of it, folks.

Sometimes, the trivia bolsters my movie-watching pleasure. Knowing about Kelly's fever or O'Connor's exhaustion makes those scenes even more incredible - knowing the human, breakable being behind those superhuman moves. But other times - the Gene Kelly is a Bastard Times - the trivia detracts. Looking for film flubs or flimsy sets - this can pull me out of the imagined world of the movie and take me backstage to where the sausage is made. And backstage is a cool place, yes, but it's like knowing the magician's tricks.

I wish I had seen "Singin' in the Rain" when I was a kid, before I knew anything about it. I still feel some wonder, some marvel at the talent on the screen when I see it now, but I don't get lost in the movie the way I could as a kid.

Nevertheless, every time this movie shows up on the TCM schedule, I drop everything and let it play. No flipping, no distractions. Gotta dance, people.