Fifties Musical that has it all

Rating: 9/10 (21 September 2006)

The Hollywood musical certainly went out with a bang in the early 1950s with "The Band Wagon" and this film: "Singin' in the Rain" has something for almost everyone, even those who don't care for musicals. Set in 1927, the year "The Jazz Singer" (and the Oscars) changed the movies forever, it is simultaneously an original musical, a period re-creation, and a good-humored satire of everything Early Hollywood-- from the stars' street clothes and PR-driven romances to styles of direction and the alleged differences between the Follies and the burlesque house (both of which supplied Silent-era sets and other rooms besides).
The screenwriters pack the script with references to, and outright impersonations of, period figures: Fairbanks, Gilbert, De Mille, Chaplin and Keaton (O'Connor does them both at once, while wearing a hat that is half of each), Harold Lloyd, Clara Bow, Bebe Daniels, Norma Shearer, Louise Brooks, Pola Negri, Elinor Glyn, Busby Berkeley, and many more. Kelly and O'Connor are amazingly versatile, but the best performance comes from Jean Hagen as the haughty star from Brooklyn whose career is being ruined by the new gadget, the microphone. And Cyd Charisse does some memorable dancing as a flapper with a Lulu haircut.
As if a quality script, music, dancing, singing, choreography, photography, costumes, sets, design, and period details weren't enough, SITR also manages to squeeze in several original and ingenious movies-within-the-movie (bits of a silent swashbuckler, a transitional clunker, and a hilarious "demonstration Talkie"), and some Charleston and Black Bottom.