…Your Best Shot: Singin’ In The Rain
I’ve seen this week’s selection in Nathaniel’s “Best Shot” series, Singin’ in the Rain, after my childhood ended, way after I suppose I should have seen it. I’ve even seen high school-level re-interpretations of its choreography A Clockwork Orange before the real thing. This rewatch is my third. That apparently is a paltry number compared to the people in the special features section who would watch it once a year ever since they were teenagers. But then again I first saw it in 2008 so I might be on my way to their pace.
That first time was when I rented the DVD because I didn’t have cable and wanted to watch whatever was on TCM that week. I watched it as my only comfort in living in my old basement apartment – I think it was flooded. The second time was in a class in college that I wasn’t even enrolled in, a friend commenting that it’s one of the timeless comedies, the genre, as a rule, having a short shelf life. While rewatching this week’s selection in Nathaniel’s “Best Shot” series Singin’ in the Rain, I picked up on a few things, or I remembered things that I otherwise would have forgotten. There’s Kathy Selden’s (Debbie Reynolds) reaction to silent actor Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) putting his hand on her shoulder.
I don’t want to be the party pooper here but the movie has as least one musical sequence that perfunctorily ends with ceasing action followed by the characters laughing at each other for singing and dancing so committed. But my favourite shot is part of a sequence that plays a dance number out more seamlessly, and I feel like I have to apologize because it’s a boring answer because it’s in the titular sequence. The shot strangely reminds me of, pardon my over-analyzing, this mini-lecture I attended about the Three Stooges and a return to primitivism. But instead of a bourgeois dinner turned into a food fight, the arc is from Don practicing civilized forms expression, singing and dancing, to jumping on a puddle like a kid. Like its slapstick predecessor this is about the joy of release. This is also Rob Marshall favourite shot although I don’t know what that says about me.
Unlike the drawn pencil dreamlike aesthetic Kelly’s Oscar-winning vehicle An American in Paris in 1951 – which I actually like, mind you – this movie’s palette are more solid and bright. A few scenes like those come to mind, like the musical montage, making us wonder what it Busby Berekely would have done with colour, and Don’s dream images. But this sequence, which seems dour on paper, when Don takes a gamble after being present in the worst preview screenings of one of his movies, when it’s raining in Los Angeles, a sequence where gray and black dominate, is just as happy as the scenes with brighter colours in them. It’s also those elegant colours complemented by Kelly’s smoothness that make the scene work.
Singin’ in the Rain is also playing in every Cineplex Theatre in Toronto at 7PM because of some 60th anniversary thing, co-presented by TCM. The sound you will be hearing is me lamenting my work schedule and slow, impending bankruptcy, stopping me from being in this event.
Okinawa Assault 