Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds is convinced "The Artist" borrowed heavily from her hit movie "Singin' In The Rain" but failed to live up to the 1952 film's high standards.
Debbie Reynolds, who starred alongside Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor in the popular musical, has now spoken out about the similarities between the two pictures, insisting she enjoyed "The Artist" but felt it failed to shine in the same way as "Singin' In The Rain".
She tells the New York Post, "I thought The Artist was a very good film, with talented personalities. But while they took the basic premise of Singin' in the Rain, it's not in colour, and it doesn't have Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor. And its musical numbers aren't as good..."
"When we made the picture, nobody had the slightest idea that it would someday be listed among the greatest films of all time. We just thought it was a big, splashy MGM musical." Unlike "The Artist", "Singin' In The Rain" failed to win a single Oscar, but it was named fifth in the American Film Institute's (AFI) list of the 100 greatest movies of all time. Source: www.imdb.com
"Singin' in the Rain" is a canonical self-reflexive film which combines an informed self-consciousness with an argument about its own legitimacy as art. The film's argument is structurally evident within one of the film's more famous self-reflexive sequences, "You Were Meant for Me," and it is intended as a preliminary move in an exploration of new academic genres in film theory that hypertext might allow. -from "Singin' in the Rain: A Hypertextual Reading" by Adrian Miles (1998)
-Kathy Selden (Debbie Reynolds): What do you have to be so conceited about? You're nothing but a shadow on film... just a shadow. You're not flesh and blood.-Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly): Oh, no? [moves amorously towards her]
-Kathy: Stop!
-Don: What can I do to you?, I'm only a shadow.
Jack Purcell, author of “Plato’s Theory of Film,” writes: "Within modern cinema, it could be argued that, in its entirety the cinema is an illusion. The stages, the actors, the dialogue, the events, etc. are not what they seem to be. They represent nothing. Cinema is simply a space of fantasy, of complete illusion." The images cast on the screen by the film projector are mere shadows or illusions of what is real. True reality is not depicted; only one person’s vision of reality or of how reality could be or should be is presented. The viewing audience is led to believe – or at least asked to suspend disbelief – that what they are seeing is real. But alas, it is only a shadow on film. Andre Bazin writes in “The Ontology of Photographic Image” that through the creation of film comes “the creation of an ideal world in the likeness of the real, with its own temporal destiny”.
As Godard once said, “The moment the camera is turned on, the lie begins. But leave the camera on long enough and the truth will be revealed.” The images are mere illusions; some might even say a lie. But behind those illusions and lies is often some semblance of truth. The idea of exposing the “behind-the-scenes” truth was a central one to many early musicals, especially those of the early 1930s produced or directed by Busby Berkeley. These films make a story of the conflicts, drama, and struggles of putting on a Broadway show or musical review. These films were central not only to the development of the musical genre, but also to the development of talking pictures.
In the early 1950s, screenwriters Betty Comden and Adolph Green were hired by MGM to write a film that revolved around the old standards of Arthur Freed, and to name it after his classic “Singin’ in the Rain.” What came of their labor was the film that Roger Ebert has called "the greatest Hollywood musical of all time." The audience is aware from the start that the stories being spun are shams, and eventually the characters are made aware as well. The narrative illusions that the film exposes are Don Lockwood’s supposed rise to stardom as told to gossip columnist Dora Bailey, and Kathy Selden’s story to Don about being a stage actress. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly’s "Singin’ in the Rain" (1952) can be examined on two levels: first as an entertaining film, and second as a work of art. The film holds a comfortable place high on countless “best films of all time” lists, and was named the greatest American movie musical of all time in 2005 (AFI.com).
Tim Dirks writes in "The Greatest Films of All Time": The narrative images on the screen belie every embellished, fabricated word – in reality the pictures and descriptions are terribly disjointed. ("Singin' in the Rain"’s theme is the “out-of-sync” disjunction of words / sounds / movie images from reality – what can be believed in the magical world of film? Can we believe our eyes and our ears?) Like critic Peter Wollen, Dirks highlights the fact that this film is about exposing the truth of Hollywood. It causes us to question what we see and hear, and to ask if those sights and sounds can be trusted. If film is an illusion, then what is the reality behind that illusion?
Marilyn M. Ewing’s “’Gotta Dance!’ Structure, Corruption, and Syphilis in Singin’ in the Rain” concentrates on the “Broadway Ballet” number. This highly stylized dance number seems to be an interruption in the story line, but adds another dimension to the satirical nature of the film. ‘The Broadway Ballet’ functions as a map to the film industry’s dark underbelly.” According to Ewing, Gene Kelly uses the “big dance number” – a generic standard – to make a statement about the darker side of Hollywood. In this beautifully choreographed number, he exposes the ugly truth about the corruption that played a very important role in the early days of the movie industry. The bright lights and colorful costumes and exuberant dancing are but mere illusions that hide a darker, more sinister reality. Kelly, like the freed prisoner, turns our heads to see the truth regarding this corruption.
Richard Dyer’s piece entitled “Entertainment and Utopia” points out the idealism of musicals. According to Dyer, musicals paint an emotional picture of cultural idealism. They do not give us a structure, political or otherwise, for utopia, but the feelings of it. In the world of musicals, utopia is nothing political, but rather a “glorious feeling”. Another article in George M. Cohan’s anthology, Jane Feuer’s “The Self-Reflective Musical and the Myth of Entertainment” discusses the “mythify[ing] of [the genre’s] own entertainment values”. In this essay, Feuer writes about the self-reflective nature of many musicals – referring specifically to Singin’ in the Rain – and how such films give “every appearance of commenting critically on their own formal status as musicals,” but really rely on the myths of “spontaneity, integration, and the audience” to satisfy their contradictory nature.
"Singin’ In the Rain" exposes the illusions and artifice of the filmmaking industry, as well as the deceptions of the leading characters. In this film, sight and sound are shown to not be reliable; honesty can be found only in dance. The first artifice exposed in "Singin’ in the Rain" is the visual image. The film takes place in the late 1920s when the visual image ruled the silver screen, the era of the silent film. Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont are performing a love scene during the filming of The Dueling Cavalier. Their melodramatic faces exude romance and passion, but Don is whispering anything but sweet nothings into Lina’s ear.
While a major storyline in this film is the dubbing of Kathy’s voice over Lina's (Jean Hagen), the film does not expose only the deception of sound on the silver screen. This exposure of illusion extends beyond of the film-within-the-film to the lives of the main characters. Upon meeting each of the two romantic leads, Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden, we quickly learn that neither is who they say they are. Don lies to impress the crowd outside Grauman’s Chinese Theater; Kathy lies to impress Don – or at least to deflate his ego.
We first meet Don at the premiere of The Royal Rascal, the latest offering from Hollywood’s “It” couple, Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont. Gossip columnist Dora Bailey asks Don to treat the crowd lining the red carpet with the story of his rise to fame. He begins by reciting his lifelong motto, “Dignity, always dignity.” Don tells of fine schools, apprenticeships, and touring symphonic concert halls, but we see him tap dancing for pennies as a child, being booed off the stage at amateur night, and touring the likes of Oat Meal, Nebraska and Coyoteville, New Mexico. His big break with Monumental Pictures came when a stunt man is knocked out cold on the set of a silent film. His rise to stardom is nothing like his story to Miss Bailey, and is anything but dignified. Instead of telling his adoring fans the truth, he lies to them because the truth is not very “dignified.”
While this introduction appears to be a big star lying to hide the indignity of his rise to fame, if this scene is contrasted with the “Broadway Ballet” number in the second half of the film we see that there is actually a hint of dignity in Lockwood’s background. Through tap, ballet, and modern dance, the “Broadway Ballet” tells the story of a young hoofer arriving in New York looking for his big break. After several auditions for talent agents, he finally lands a gig at a speakeasy. This leads to performing in vaudeville shows, in 'Ziegfeld’s Follies', and finally on Broadway.
However, all along the way he keeps crossing paths with a mobster and his moll. This, according critic Marilyn Ewing, points to the corruption and mob influence in Hollywood at that time. The hoofer has to sell himself to that system to get his foot in the door. All of his success is tainted by that first move, and that corruption follows him throughout his career.
Kathy (Debbie Reynolds) lies about her line of work, too. She isn’t an up-and-coming stage actress, but a dancing girl from the Coconut Grove. Her lofty claims of being a stage actress are exposed as a lie when she jumps out of the cake as part of the song-and-dance troupe at R.F. Simpson’s party. Like Don just a few moments earlier, Kathy’s lies, like Don’s before hers, cause us to question the truthfulness of what is heard. And if the veracity of sight and sound is in question, is there anything in this film that can be trusted? The answer, according to Peter Wollen, is dance. Through watching dance, we can know we are not being lied to. Honesty is best expressed by the characters in this film through dance.
Only dance can be trusted to express romantic intentions and the “glorious feelings” that accompany those intentions. After a brief separation, Don and Kathy are reunited on the Monumental Pictures back lot. Together again, Kathy confesses her earlier lies and Don confesses his feelings for her – or at least they attempt to do so. Both are at a loss for words when it comes to telling the truth. So Don takes her into an empty sound studio, “sets the stage” with “a rosetrellised bower, flooded with moonlight… [and] five hundred kilowatts of stardust.” The fairy-tale romance between Don and Kathy is but a shadow of real-life romance, or to use Plato’s words, a shadow of the “Form” of romance. The second illusion created and perpetuated by "Singin’ in the Rain" is that of the happy ending.
We are able to vicariously experience the feelings of being in love as we watch characters on the screen fall in love. We can get caught up in the emotions of a fairy-tale romance because it is not our own heart that will be broken if the relationship fails. The narrative structure of film is important to its escapist qualities. Conflict and the resolution of conflict is central to most narratives, and as Thomas Schatz writes, “If there is anything escapist about these narratives, it is their repeated assertion that these conflicts can be solved”. It is not only the escape out of life’s problems that encourages our belief in the illusions of film, but also the escape into something better.
Film critic Mark Bourne writes in his review of the 50th anniversary release of the DVD: “This 1952 romantic comedy transcended being simply the best of the MGM Technicolor musicals to become one of movie-making’s most pleasurable essential classics.” What makes this such a special film are the multiple layers upon which it can be enjoyed and appreciated. It is, at first glance, a great Hollywood musical. Just slightly below the surface, it is also a satire of the difficult transition that Hollywood experienced as its films learned to talk. Then on a much deeper level, this film asks us to consider questions about the nature of both film and reality.
"Singin’ In The Rain" is full of Hollywood inside jokes and references to infamous snafus committed on the back lots of many of the studios. While much of the comedy is derived from this satire, there is a more serious side to it as well. The film criticizes the intrusion of the government into the affairs and beliefs of those in the industry, as well as the influence the mob had gained over Hollywood. Some have read the “blacklisting” of Kathy Selden in the film (Lina’s harsh treatment of her, and everyone’s attempts to hide Kathy from Lina) as a reference to the 50's anti-communist crusade (according to Peter Wollen).
Marilyn Ewing writes about the entire “Broadway Ballet” being a satire of the corruption and mob influence in Hollywood. The young hoofer has to “sell out” in order to get his first job. Peter N. Chumo II asserts that the moll and her ‘very sexual dancing’ seem to transform the hoofer. She removes his glasses and hat, the ‘unglamorous’ parts of his wardrobe, and it is after meeting her that he ascends to success. The implication seems to be that she seduces the honest rube and turns him into a corrupted cynic, which is what allows him to thrive in the big-city world.
Yet as Ewing notes, the scene is far from extraneous but is actually thematically integral to the movie as a whole. This insistence that musical numbers serve the story is what elevates Gene Kelly’s movies – the ones over which he had some measure of creative control, anyway – over most other artists’ musicals. Character and theme are just as important as the plot, and it is those story elements that the Broadway ballet enhances. Far from having a ‘tenuous link’ to the rest of the picture, the ballet offers insights into Lockwood and underscores one of the film’s central themes. Ewing does an excellent job of highlighting one element of the theme developed by this sequence: the ‘hypocrisy of Hollywood.’
Where Ewing takes her analysis too far is in the specificity she sees in the hypocrisy presented in the ballet. She writes that the Broadway ballet ‘ostensibly celebrates the entertainment industry [and] seems at first glance to be a sincere testimonial to the joys of being a performer,’ but notes that to clearly consider the events of the sequence is to come to a far uglier conclusion; as the gangster and the moll both flip coins, and coins are dirty and resemble syphilitic lesions, the moll has syphilis, and so we can see her as having spread venereal disease to the hoofer. Ewing further notes that the moll (Cyd Charisse) is supposed to resemble Louise Brooks, who was, by her own admission, rumored to have syphilis.
Far below the entertaining surface of the film, and below even the comical and more serious sides of the satire, is the philosophical layer of this film. In Socrates words: "At first, when any of them is liberated and looks toward the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows… what he saw before was an illusion. This new experience of the reality of his existence is a painful one. The light is overwhelmingly bright, and the thought that all he had once known was an illusion is disturbing. But the more he gazes, and the more he questions, the clearer his vision and his understanding become." -“You’re Nothing but a Shadow on Film” - Plato’s "Allegory of the Cave" and "Singin’ in the Rain"- by Ryan Blanck (2007)
