Movie of the Week XVIII

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

I am a little hesitant to write about this movie, not because it isn’t great (it is!) or because I don’t love it (I do!), but because it is so well known. I have attempted to talk about lesser known movies rather than classics that people might have seen before, like Casablanca or Gone with the Wind or The Wizard of Oz (all 1939, which makes that year a pheonomenon of movie awesomeness.)

If you have ever seen a classic movie musical, chances are it is Singin’ in the Rain. That movie is usually ranked as the best movie musical of all time, and it just as frequently lands highly on the best movies of all time lists. I don’t want to over-hype it, although it would be hard to be disappointed with it no matter what I said. It really does live up to its reputation. It is one of those movies that I think I must have dreamed, that I would not have dared to imagine. The cast is fantastic: Gene Kelly (sort of a jerk, apparently, but magic onscreen):

a young young young Debbie Reynolds (she was 19):

the hilarious and extremely talented hoofer Donald O’Connor:

Jean Hagen (no, that is not the way she actually talked),

and Cyd Charisse (!).

The plot is real, not fluff to transition from one song to another. The costumes and sets are beautiful; it is funny and clever and satirical. Almost every number in the film is a classic. Who hasn’t seen Gene Kelly singin’ in the rain? Or at least this iconic image of him?

Someone said that the "Singin’ in the Rain" number is joy made visible. I agree. But “Good Morning” is fantastic, perhaps my favorite in the movie, and "Beautiful Girls" is a wonderful pointless number that includes a fashion show, so what is not to like?

So I won’t try to sell you on this film (more than I already attempted) but instead will give you some odd tidbits about it.

The movie was written around a song catalog. Arthur Freed, a producer of musicals at MGM, asked Betty Comden and Adolph Green to write a screenplay incorporating his catalog of songs, most of which were from the late ‘20s and ‘30s. All of the songs had appeared in movies before, so there is nothing new in Singin’ in the Rain. Can you imagine if a musical was released featuring the songs from Chicago, Moulin Rouge, and High School Musical? It would be weird, I think. But the songs in Freed’s catalog weren’t so tied to a plot; they are more like vaudeville numbers of classic standards than a plot driven “Cell Block Tango.” "Singin' in the Rain," for instance, was in one of the first feature length "talking pictures," Hollywood Revue of 1929 (you guessed it, 1929).

The plot of the movie is inspired by the original moment of the songs--the late 1920s and early 1930s, which was the transition from silent movies to "talkies." The plot revolves around two silent movie stars (Gene Kelly and Jean Hagen) who suddenly find themselves having to talk onscreen.

Gene makes the transition fairly seamlessly (besides some stupid improvised dialogue that he could get away with when there was no sound recording) since he is a talented singer/dancer/actor, but Jean has more trouble. Her voice is screechy and nasal and unpleasant. So, like many real actors in the 1920s, Jean’s career seems to be over since she cannot make the switch to sound movies. This is an image from an early scene in the movie when Gene makes sure that Jean never speaks. She keeps trying to talk to the audience at the movie premiere and he keeps jumping in before she can start. No one knows that she has a terrible voice, and Gene doesn't want anyone to find out.

The film is a movie about movies and Hollywood, so there are lots of inside jokes and references to real Hollywood history, which makes it fun for weirdos like me. For example, the movie opens with one of Gene and Jean's silent films. Gene and Jean are playing a romantic scene when suddenly be-capped and be-feathered men with swords attack the castle. Gene does some acrobatic fighting and wins the day, returning to Jean's embrace.

The funny thing is that Gene's fight choreography is almost exactly the same as what he did in The Three Musketeers (1948) five years earlier. He does the same leap off a balcony, the same backward bend, the same stabbing with his rapier. He is parodying the earlier role. Funny.

Stanley Donen (first Gene Kelly's assistant then an excellent director) and Gene Kelly directed the movie, so they are able to play around with Gene Kelly's movie past, besides choreographing some exceptional dances.

Gene meets Debbie, who insults his acting style, saying it is just "a lot of dumb show." He is intrigued by this young woman who doesn't seem charmed by his movie star persona. Later, she pops out of a cake, Gene talks to her again, Jean (who loves Gene) sees the conversation and becomes very jealous. It ends with some cake throwing.

Debbie runs away, Gene tries to find her, Jean makes sure he doesn't...and then sound arrives in Hollywood. Suddenly Gene and Jean's careers are threatened. They try to make a movie with sound but it is terrible.

A favorite scene occurs when they are trying to hide a microphone on set so that they can hear Jean Hagen. They try hiding the huge silver microphone in a bush, then on her shoulder, then on the bodice of her dress where they pick up the sound of her heartbeat. Here is the seamstress sewing a bunch of flowers on her dress to hide the microphone.

Jean's voice is too awful for talkies, so they decide to use Debbie's voice and have Jean lip sync. And the movie rolls on from there...

Debbie was just a baby, 19 years old, set to dance with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor, two incredible and incredibly demanding (in Gene’s case) pros. She did not have a lot of dance training and certainly nowhere near Gene and Donald’s experience.

There is a lovely story that after a particularly horrible rehearsal with Gene (he was not terribly understanding) Debbie hid under a piano on an empty soundstage and cried, convinced that she could never learn the steps, never mind perform them next to the great Gene Kelly. Well who should find here there but Fred Astaire? He danced with Debbie for a while that afternoon, helping her perfect the moves. After that she was confident enough to continue.

I don’t know how true that story is, but I like to believe it. Years and years after the movie, Debbie Reynolds said that "making this film and surviving childbirth were the two most difficult experiences of her life."

Jean Hagen modeled her voice and performance on Judy Holliday, the actress that the producers wanted for the part. Judy Holliday was not available to do the movie, but she recommended Jean Hagen, who had been her understudy on Broadway in "Born Yesterday" (which Holliday did a film version of in 1950). Hagen and Holliday had also acted together in Adam’s Rib (1949). There is Hagen on the left and Holliday on the right.

Hagen did an impression of Holliday playing the role of the shrill, uncouth, uneducated woman in Born Yesterday. It is uncanny how much Hagen sounds like Holliday...Hagen got the part in Singin' in the Rain, for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Interesting: When Gene performed the "Singin’ in the Rain" number, he had a 103 degree fever. It think that they filmed it at night because they needed so much water to make the "rain." They couldn't film when people might be watering their lawns or something and risk losing their "rain." To make the puddles and raindrops show up better on film, they mixed milk with the water to give it a nice sheen.

Ironic: the movie is about illusion and faking voices and stealing other people’s talents and work. So, it is interesting that the lovely deep speaking voice that Debbie Reynolds’ supplies for Jean Hagen in "The Dancing Cavalier” is actually Jean Hagen’s real voice and not Debbie’s at all. The “Would You?” song and the "You Are My Lucky Star" song are not sung by Debbie Reynolds but a contract singer at MGM, Betty Noyes, who was not credited for her work. So Jean Hagen lip syncs a song that Debbie Reynolds lip syncs and is really sung by someone else.

The movie scoffs at and eventually condemns such trickery, but at the same time it reinforces it. It reveals movie tricks onscreen in the plot but simultaneously uses and conceals the same tricks--as in the first "Lucky Star" number when Gene Kelly uses all the wind machines and lighting and fog tricks in a soundstage to serenade Debbie Reynolds. Guess how many articles and books have been written about that? A lot.

Weird: Donald O'Connor's big solo number, "Make Em Laugh," is almost an exact copy of Cole Porter's "Be A Clown" song which Gene Kelly and Judy Garland performed in The Pirate (1948). It is such blatant plagiarism that it is sort of a joke. Still a funny number, though. Much better than the "Be A Clown" one.

I really like Donald O'Connor in this movie. He gets to sing and dance and be funny. The role was written for Oscar Levant, (Gene Kelly's sidekick in An American in Paris (1951)) but I am glad that O'Connor got it. The "Moses Supposes" number is particularly excellent, and I can't imagine Levant doing it. He would have been playing the piano instead of dancing, I guess.

Speaking of dancing, one of my very favorite dancers is in this movie. Cyd Charisse is excellent excellent excellent. She wears a famous green dress and slinks around with Gene Kelly in a wonderful dance.

She was taller than Gene (not that hard) and if you watch closely you will see that she never stands at her full height. Her knees are bent or she is on the floor or he is lifting her. He didn't like his partners to be taller than he was.

Despite this height issue, I think they dance wonderfully together. They are both athletic and strong and Cyd has a lovely graceful quality, too. Fred Astaire called her "beautiful dynamite." Perfect.

They have another dance in a dream sequence. This one is far more balletic--no more slinking or kicks. I don't know how they managed to perform the dance with what must have been a crazy powerful wind machine going. Cyd's white train is always in the air, and sometimes almost completely vertical. Yet they stay on their feet and dance without looking like they are caught in a tornado.

Cyd Charisse said that Gene was a very powerful dancer--her husband could always tell if she was working with him on a movie because she would come home with bruises from his athletic choreography and strong grip. Ouch.

So there it is. Thanks for reading, and do watch it if you get a chance.

Goodbye.

Last Day...Nove Straseci

Hello everyone...it has been a while! I have been oddly reluctant to post this one, since it is my last batch of pictures from the Czech Republic. And I have been oddly reluctant to even think about the whole experience. I miss some of it, especially my boys, and especially my baby boy, but I am also so glad to be home. I am very happy I chose to return to the US, and I don't want to go back, yet it is still a little painful to think about it. Not quite sure why. The whole thing seems very surreal. So besides some strange dreams where I have returned to the house in Nove Straseci and suddenly realize, "Oh no, I am back, help me!" I have not been thinking or talking about it much. I haven't made my photo albums (after Venice they were done in a matter of days) or gone through my souvenirs or anything. It is a harder adjustment to make than I anticipated. Very weird to go from Czech Republic to America, from that family to mine, from being a mom every afternoon and night and weekend for seven months to suddenly being the "kid" again in my parents' house. I am confused. But here is my last day in Nove Straseci.

So my Czech family left for Austria on the morning of December 19th. I cried and Vojtisek cried and Lukas cried. Honzik was pretty happy though, I think. Although I had attempted to tell the boys that I was going home to America and that Mike (my replacement from New Jersey) was going to stay with them, Lukas was still very confused. I don't think Eva had talked to them about it, and although he can talk about monkeys all day long, the "leaving" and "not coming back" were more difficult concepts for his four-year-old-learning-English brain. I started to get teary as Eva and her parents began loading the car for the trip. Lukas looked at me, his little face all confused, and asked, "Why are you crying?" He said it hesitantly but perfectly in English, which made me even more upset. I told him that I wasn't going with them to Austria, and I tried to stop crying so he wouldn't get upset, too. I didn't want to freak him out. Eva told me that after Lukas was buckled in his car seat he saw me and asked his grandparents why I wasn't getting in the car, and they told him I wasn't going with them and then he started to cry even more. Apparently Honzik even cried a little.

It was so hard to say goodbye to my baby Vojtisek. It is probably good that I left when I did, because otherwise I would have smuggled him home with me. I wish he was here. He would love my dogs and my family and I have a bunch of fun things planned that we could do. Like play with bubble bath. There wasn't any there, but I think he would like that. He could even sleep in a crib in my room. Whoa, calm down the crazy.

So, they left. Eva's boyfriend actually stayed with me for a little while and we had tea and we talked a little (always an adventure since his English is not great and my Czech is not even terrible it is so awful.) But that was sweet of him.

I wasn't flying home until the next day, so rather than sit around the empty house all day and miss Vojtisek, I headed to Prague to meet Julie. (See the Flora and Prague posts for the first part of the day). She was awesome enough to come back to Nove Straseci with me and go to the airport with me at 6:00 the next morning. We got to the village around 4:30, so of course it was already dark. And so so cold. It had been snowing all day. We shivered to the main square so I could show her the high school and the cukrarna and the clock tower and the Christmas tree.

The whole place was empty, but that was nice in the dark and the snow. Here I am:

Here is the pink clocktower. It rang every quarter hour. I could hear it from my room. And it wasn't as obnoxious as one might think. I rather liked it. As usual, thanks Julie for the pics of me!

I love this picture. I would love it more if the light in the corner was the moon, but it is a street lamp.

A few pictures were all we could stand in the cold. So off we hurried through the snow to my house. A five minute walk. Here I am on the same block with my house. The house is bright blue and they had a Santa and reindeer light on the porch. Which is funny, since in Czech Land the Jesus Baby brings the gifts.

We drank some tea and got warm in the house. Here is the view from the house to the backyard. How lovely does that tree look all lit up and covered in snow?

And look how great this looks. The grandmother made all of these herself. It is a tradition there to make beautiful Christmas cookies, and the more varieties and the more intricate and fussy the better. They were super tasty.

We had a funny dinner. Salads with all kinds of yummy stuff on them, and a frozen garlic bread thing that we popped in the oven, and my last packet of macaroni and cheese that Brittany sent me from America. And some goat cheese, I think. And some more stuff I am forgetting. Delicious.

While Julie watched High Society--she had never seen it so I was so excited when she suggested it!--I tried to pack. It was tricky to fit everything in. I left a lot of tired clothes there and pressed various things on Julie. Finally, she had to step in and save me from myself. I was rather certain one or both bags would be overweight, but shockingly they let me through at the Prague airport without saying a word.

Oh I have skipped some steps. I wasn't sad to pack or to dismantle the few things I had mantled in my room, or to say goodbye to the house or the village. I was ready to get out of there. I was so excited to be coming home. (Perhaps that is why now I am a bit more conflicted--I didn't "grieve" when I was there...oooh) The driver who had taken me to Vienna (three times) picked us up when it was still dark and dropped us at the airport. We checked my bags and headed for some coffee.

I hated saying goodbye to Julie. I miss her so much. I really don't know what I would have done without her. And I cannot wait for her to come visit! Yay!

I changed planes in Munich, my favorite airport in the world. I couldn't sleep on the long flight across the ocean since I was so excited. They played terrible movies and a show about pandas. I was in the very last row on the plane. Customs was easy but I was worried they would detain me since I was just about jumping around, so excited was I to be home and to see my mom and dad. My bags shot off the carousel but since my flight was a little early and my bags were so fast, my parents weren't at the airport yet. But, hurray, they arrived in a few minutes. What a lovely homecoming!

Then it was Christmas, then I sent in my last two grad school applications, then I started work, then I fell back into life in the US. And now we are up to date. Confused, feeling-like-I-lost/dreamed-the-last-seven-months, missing a little Czech boy, loving free water, ice, and refills, back at home. Up to date.

Last Day...Praha

After our sobering, gorgeous, quiet, COLD visit to the cemetery by Flora, and after our cheerful, cozy, chatty, hot drinks at Costa Coffee overlooking the cemetery, we took the metro to Malostranska and walked across a bridge to the Old Town. We didn't go on Charles Bridge. Shocking, perhaps, but I prefer looking at the graceful stone arches from a distance to walking across it. There are usually too many people, plus they are doing construction on the bridge, so everyone is squeezed even tighter together to avoid the scaffolding and the workers. I usually end up staring at my purse and my companion instead of the statues and plaques lining the bridge.

So we took a plainer bridge that gave us even nicer views of Prague.

Here is documentation of this stroll. Charles Bridge behind me, graffitied looker-thing beside me.

Julie took this stunner of Charles Bridge: (and all the pics with me in them, dekuji!)

I believe this is a performance hall. It is right by the bridge. I thought it looked imposing and solid in the snow.

Here is a tram running by the building. Have I mentioned that Prague has trams? Metro and trams. I usually took the metro since that was easier for me to figure out, but I learned some basic routes on the trams and enjoyed them. It was nice to travel above ground once in a while.

After we crossed the river we strolled alongside it. Here are some views of Mala Strana and the Castle, looking back from whence we came. That whole mass of buildings, from the tower on the far right and the cream colored building beside it, to the two white spires in the middle and the several black spires on the left, is Prague Castle. Often people think that the black building on the left is the castle, but that is just the Cathedral within the castle, St. Vitus. Prague Castle is the biggest contiguous castle complex in the world.

(The recent movie The Brothers Bloom is partly set and shot in Prague, and there is an important conversation with this wrought iron fence and the castle as a background. I saw it a few days after I got home and could squeal "I was just there!")

And I have proof. Here I am. The camera is looking in the direction of the Castle, but I was looking at the most expensive hotel in Prague, the Four Seasons. It has lovely views of the river.
Julie: "Jump, Cam!"

Cam: "Okay!"Nice pink glow sunset by the mini-Eiffel Tower on Petrin Hill. It was around 3:00 in the afternoon, I think, but it is completely dark by 4:30 or so...ouch.

As we walked into the Narodni Trida metro station, we paused like crazy people to take pictures of snowflakes as they landed on us. (Ironically, this metro stop is where a lot of the crazy people in Prague do hang out.) This is my coat sleeve and perfection. Well done, photographer Julie!

It was so cold. But that is alright when Prague looks so peaceful and frosted, and snowflakes land on my arms and Julie is there to photograph it all.

Last day...Graveyard at Flora

The day before I flew home the family left for their Christmas trip to Austria. More on that later. After they headed off, I went into Prague to meet Julie. She had been talking about going to a shopping mall next to a beautiful cemetery...weird, yes, awesome, yes...so we met on the metro and headed to Flora and the Olšany Cemetery. The cemetery dates from the 17th century; an outbreak of plague forced its founding. Yuck.

It was freezing cold, about 15 degrees below zero in Celsius, which is very approximately 5 degrees Fahrenheit. That is really cold for me. Really cold.

Fortunately, it was a beautiful cold day with fat, perfect snowflakes spiraling gently down. Excellent weather for a contemplative visit to a cemetery in Prague.

I shan't add much more commentary; I will let the pictures of the snow and the stones stand alone. Let me just say that the graveyard was big. In fact, it is the largest cemetery in the city. These avenues led off in several directions from one central snowy circle.

All the headstones are different, and most are massive, like the Vysehrad cemetery that Julie and I visited back in July. It was much warmer then.

Headstone break. Hi, Julie!

Headstone break. Julie found some cute bird tracks in the snow.

Lovely and decaying chapel. Like a prompt for a creative writing class. Or the setting or conclusion of a Poe story. Or it is just a hauntingly derelict chapel in a cemetery in Prague next to a shopping mall.

This little blue beamed house was at the entrance to the cemetery. We don't know why.

Here I am, all bundled and yet still very chilly.

After this somber visit we headed directly next door into a shopping mall for a cheerful lunch and coffee/tea break. There is a Costa Coffee on the side of the mall with the cemetery, which is where we had our hot beverages. There is a huge window so you can sip your latte while looking at the graveyard. After we warmed up and recharged we hopped back on the metro (Flora is relatively far east in Prague.) Our next stop was Malostranska. Stay tuned for that adventure.