Film Fridays: Singing In the Rain (1952)

The first time that I've seen this movie was during my Sophomore year of High School when I took a class called the History of the Motion Picture and this movie was the only musical that he shown to the class; I enjoyed watching it the movie then and now but I have never looked into the movie as a historical textbook before, so without further ado, Singing In the Rain as a history textbook for Film Friday.

Kelly with a surprised looking
Reynolds asking her to drive him
towards a party.

Singing In the Rain is about a movie production company's aided and difficult task of transitioning a silent film into sound. The movie takes places in 1927 Hollywood when the Jazz Singer was released; however, a helpless fan favorite, Don Lockwood (Kelly) aids the help of anyone driving a car towards a party, which got him to meet a local chorus girl named Kathy Selden (Reynolds). After the party, Don searched everywhere for Kathy to make it up to her. He then finds her working as a chorus girl for a movie. Don makes it up and the pair began to fall in love.

Kathy Selden: "I was starstrucked!"

Hagen as a French duchess.

The movie depicts the struggles faced by production companies during late 1929 when they tried to use their actors' actual voices to make the difficult transition happen but the actors either had abnormal quirk to their voice, just like Lina Lamont. So they had to make the difficult decision of sending actors home, and replacing them with who can talk without an accent to their voice.

"Round tones," said a diction coach to Lina. "Round tones."

Kelly telling Hagen that his not
interested in them being a couple.

In the movie,  Monumental Pictures decides to send both Don and Lina to diction classes to improve their vocal abilities, which allows them to produce more rounder tones when sounding their consonants and vowels; however, they saw no improvement in Lina's voice so they had to close down production for The Dueling Cavalier, which left Don to pack his things and auction all of his stuff until his best friend, Cosmo Brown gave him the idea of using Kathy to dub Lina's voice.

Cosmo Brown: "She can't act, she can't sing, she can't dance. A triple threat."

Gene and Donald finds Debbie's
Kathy Selden working as a
Chorus girl for Monumental.

In reality,  the producers of the movie saw that Debbie's voice wasn't working for the scene so they went with Jean Hagen's acting voice and with Betty Noyes' singing voice to dub over Debbie's. That wasn't the only rough thing that Debbie Reynolds had to go through. She was insulted by Gene Kelly for not being able to dance well enough when for a fact, Gene wanted Debbie to play the part of Kathy Selden; unfortunately, for Gene, Fred Astaire found her crying underneath the piano and helped her with her dancing. Gene later said that Debbie was built like an ox.

Lina Lamont: "I can't make love to a bush!"

In the movie when Lina's microphone picked up her heartbeat; the same thing happened to Debbie when the producers of Singing In the Rain wanted to hear her lines more clearly. The microphone picked up her heartbeat during one of the dance numbers mirroring the incident with Lina Lamont.

I think that the transition from silent to talkies was a difficult thing to do because of the technology that they had back then. Till this day, I found it heard to believe that Debbie was dubbed by two different people because I was so sucked into the world of Singing In the Rain that it didn't really matter who actually did what to me. I also though that the movie itself is a history textbook for someone who barely knows how much it costed and the struggles that people went through to turn a silent film into a talkie. It was also a struggle to cut people who didn't have the right voice for a talkie.

Sources

1. http://www.filmsound.org/ulano/talkies4.htm
2. http://news.moviefone.com/2012/03/27/singin-in-the-rain-60th-anniversary/
3. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0045152/trivia?ref_=ttcnn_ql_1
4. Donen, Stanley, dir. and Gene Kelly, dir. Singing In the Rain. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1952. Film.