“SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN”: MAKING THE CASE FOR

AUTEURSHIP IN THE HOLLYWOOD MUSICAL

When the credits rolled on MGM’s Babes in Arms (1939), Hollywood was introduced to
one of its upcoming tycoons: Arthur Freed. An adaptation of Rodgers and Hart’s smash
stage musical, its loose film adaptation was an equal success, overturing the Freed
Unit’s lucky strike that would roll on with classics such as Meet Me in St. Louis (1944),
On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi
(1958); all of these established MGM as the reign of the movie musical, and Arthur Freed
one of its undeniable princes.

The secret to Freed’s success was his unit. With the release of The Wizard of Oz and
Babes in Arms the same year, Arthur Freed proved himself to be a great show-business
man. He was immediately granted his own studio unit to reign over, where he would gift
the studio with its greatest trademark. From the early 1940s to the late 1950s, much like
a superintendent, Freed assembled a production line of gifted writers, directors,
designers, technicians, and actors; as Irving Berlin disclosed to Fordin (1996): “His
greatest talent was to know talent, to recognize talent and to surround himself with it.”
And so, with this very talent, MGM assembled singing musical after dancing musical.
Many of them successes, but none sang louder or danced higher into “glorious feeling”
than that classic of classics that is Singin’ in the Rain. The film was a reunion for most of
its creative team who’d assembled previously for 1949’s On the Town. Written by Betty
Comden and Adolph Green, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, with Kelly once
again as its star, Singin’ in the Rain had everything to be a success. However, it proved to
be something far greater than any other film that MGM had ever produced and, may I say,
ever would, as it seemingly “took the art of cinema to new heights” (Wollen, 1992).

Even before its production started, in 1948, the French filmmaker and critic, Alexandre
Astruc penned his manifesto Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde in which he
proposed a new concept to the world of cinema, la caméra-stylo. According to Astruc,
this fairly new artform was “quite simply becoming a means of expression, just as all the
other arts [had] been before it, (...) it [was] gradually becoming a language. [A] form in
which and by which an artist [could] express his thoughts, however abstract they may
be.” With this, Astruc claimed that cinema could accomplish the same that writing could
but had been limited by its connection to narrative and to superficial spectacle; much
like a movie musical. Once cinema transcended these self-imposed boundaries, it could
manifest its ability to address the most philosophical and abstract concerns of its time.

And so, this central concept in film criticism came to be known as auteur theory,
eventually gaining further traction with the influential work of another French critic turned
filmmaker, François Truffaut. In his 1954 essay, Une certaine tendance du cinema
français, Truffaut criticized the state of his national cinema and what he deemed as
cinéma du qualité; a medium ruined by adaptations of classic works valuing faithfulness
to these instead of striving for any cinematic richness or innovation. Most importantly, he
argued for the credit of certain directors as auteurs, advocating for a shift from a focus
on thematic content to the stylistic and personal elements inherent in one’s work.
The movement eventually found its resonance across the Atlantic when American film
critic, Andrew Sarris established in his essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, a framework
for evaluating directors based on three premises, the first one being one’s technical
competence for, as Sarris (1962) went on to expand, “[If] a director has no technical
competence, no elementary flair for the cinema, he is automatically cast out from the
pantheon of directors.” However, Sarris still affirmed that one could even “become a
director without knowing too much about the technical side, even the crucial functions
of photography and editing.” As he so venomously pointed out, “[an] expert production
crew could probably cover up for a chimpanzee in the director’s chair.” The second of
Sarris’ premises was the director’s distinguishable personality throughout their body of
work, which is important when considering Gene Kelly’s oeuvre, being “an area where
American directors are generally superior to foreign directors. Because so much of the
[this] cinema is commissioned, a director is forced to express [their] personality through
the visual treatment of material rather than through the literary content of the material.”
(Sarris, 1962). However, Sarris found the ultimate premise to be the interior meaning in a
director’s body of work, which he considered to be “the ultimate glory of the cinema as
an art” (Sarris, 1962). This meaning, he said, could be deduced through a director’s
personality and material, or what Astruc defined as mise-en-scène. Still, Sarris declared
that to find this meaning would be difficult to traverse through its abstraction: “It is not
quite the vision of the world a director projects nor quite his attitude toward life. It is
ambiguous, in any literary sense, because part of it is imbedded in the stuff of the cinema
and cannot be rendered in noncinematic terms.”

This theory has had a lasting impact on film studies, encouraging a deeper appreciation
of the director's creative imprint on the cinematic art. However, it doesn’t seem suitable
to the methods implemented in the Hollywood studios. Even as the French critics
praised the American cinema for its originality, its methods of production just seemed
unharbouring for any selection of auteurs. For, as Sikov (2020) puts it “[the] studio system
operated under a mass-production model in which films were made and distributed like
sausages or boxes of cereal, and there was not a lot of room for individual directors to
put their personal stamp on the films they made.” However, “[it] was all the more
remarkable, then, for Sarris to discern elements of personal style in the work of two
hundred Hollywood directors, many of whom worked in a variety of genres over the
course of twenty or thirty years.” Still, this theory seems to favour repetition over risk-
taking for, as Sarris (1996) admitted “[how] do you tell the genuine director from the
quasichimpanzee? After a given number of films, a pattern is established.” So, only a
select group of Hollywood filmmakers would be deemed auteurs, Gene Kelly wasn’t
exactly one of them. However, by looking into Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and the other two
Kelly/Donen collaborations (1949’s On the Town and 1955’s It’s Always Fair Weather),
also produced by Freed and written by Comden and Green, one can spot glimpses of an
auteur in Kelly, both on and behind the camera. Firstly, when thinking of Kelly one, it’s
impossible not to think of his three talents, directing, choreographing, and acting. To
make the case for him, one must think of these three aspects.

Gene Kelly was certainly a highly technical director, marrying this required technicality
with his choreography on camera. Kelly did what Truffaut so highly praised, the director
that translated a script into the film. There’s no better example of this than the titular
number. The following comes from a draft dating from May of 1951: “Don brings Kathy
home in a taxi, they kiss, she tells him to be careful not to get too wet, he’s a big star now...
As Kathy goes in Don looks up at the rain, motions the cab to drive off, closes his
umbrella, starts strolling and singing. Don dances in the wet street. Then he notices a
policeman eyeing him with suspicion, collects himself and strolls off.” These are the key
words, “Don dances in the wet street.” Kelly translates these six words into four
wonderful minutes of song and dance that define himself and the whole genre of the
Hollywood musical. This dance: so easy, so relaxed, so happy and emotional, so simple.
Kelly clearly used the art of cinema as his pen, writing into the frame that ‘glorious feeling’
that Don (his character) so brazenly sang. But that ‘glorious feeling’ that the audience
shares with him owes both to the song itself and to Kelly’s contagious elation. When
dissecting Kelly as a filmmaker, it’s inevitable not to refer to Kelly the actor, or what I call
the ‘Kelly persona.’ Throughout his acting career, whether as a love-sick sailor or a
painter in Paris, Kelly captured the All-American average man of almost un-deterred
optimism. An epitomizing quality of post-war America, and perhaps the reason why he
couldn’t find much success in the 1960s onwards, as the nation’s hopes had weakened
after President’s Kennedy assassination and the Vietnam War. The US was no longer a
place for blind optimism, prone to bursting into joyous numbers of song and dance.

Still, Gene Kelly’s style would be framed on celluloid forever. The Kelly touch, as I’d refer
to it, could exude suaveness and lust in certain numbers, even progressing between joy
and woe (e.g. ‘The Broadway Melody’ sequence in Singin’ in the Rain), all with certain
movements that would become his trademark, marking his storytelling style in the same
way as Bob Fosse’s, another great director/choreographer. Chabrol (1953) asserted that
Singin’ in the Rain “is unquestionably the work of a filmmaker from beginning to end.
[Kelly] does not possess a new instrument [dance], but he perceives new applications
that allow him to express the most fleeting yet most wonderful source of the soul with
captivating precision.”

Perhaps the reason why Kelly’s work isn’t perceived as the one of an auteur is because
of his attachment to the musical, a genre known for its frivolity and lack of meaning.
However, when going through Kelly’s oeuvre, one can find great outpours of his
personality, that aforementioned optimism, that buoyancy that transposed from film to
film. As Chabrol (1953) noted: “at the turn of an image, without warning, one finds oneself
facing perhaps the subtlest expression of joy. In the rain, a man sings and dances. (…)
The spectator, his accomplice, sings and dances with him, under the astonished gaze of
a policeman. And when the man on the screen, umbrella pointed to the sky, climbs
exuberantly onto a lamppost, his companion in the darkness of the theatre tries to
imitate him. This can only be explained by the introduction of an artist blessed with a
miraculously gentle spirit, whose camera, flexible and light like him, knows how to make
us feel the delicate purity of things and the profound emotion contained in all
happiness.”

In these terms, Gene Kelly was a true metteur-en-scène, and there was none like him in
the musical genre. Aided by Stanley Donen, he made something that could, in the most
beautiful and electrifying way, speak to this “companion in the darkness.” Much to my
chagrin, this alchemy would never be repeated in his career, as Sarris (1996) pointed:
“The charm and brilliance of Gene Kelly’s dancing has not carried over to his direction
since the dissolution of his partnership with Donen. If Donen has since diminished, Kelly
has completely disintegrated. (...) Yet, Singin’ in the Rain can never be tarnished by the
subsequent derelictions of its participants.”

What makes Singin’ in the Rain a special relic is not that it’s greater than the some of its
parts, but that it is the sum of its parts. It’s a film of great artistic value with something
that many tend to ignore, a great level of communication between filmmaker and viewer.
But we mustn’t forget that the film wouldn’t laugh if not for Comden and Green, it
wouldn’t sing if not for Freed and Brown, and lest we forget Stanley Donen, the final
product could have been quite different. There are too many people to thank for gifting
the cinema one of its greatest crowning jewels. As Powdermaker (1950) wittily pointed
out “everyone in Hollywood, from front-office executive to script girl, [joined] in a refrain
about how movie making is a collaborative industry.” These workers had one thing in
mind, they were there to service the film and the Freed Unit in creating one singular
vision, which would then service Freed, who in turn would service MGM. Hollywood
shouldn’t be seen as a system inhospitable to authors, but a collective of them who all
strived to make their mark onscreen and in doing so, cemented their studio as the auteur
itself, making the MGM musical the ultimate movie musical. The auteur theory is an
elitist, almost adolescent way of perceiving a film’s merit, completely shutting down any
film that is deemed as “mere entertainment.” There is something far greater to admire in
this art form, a magical alchemy, as Pauline Kael (1974) said: “Extraordinary movies are
the result of the ‘right’ people’s getting together on the ‘right’ project at the ‘right’ time.
(…) And I would argue that what redeems movies in general, what makes them so much
easier to take than the other arts, is that many talents in interaction in a work can produce
something more enjoyable than one talent that is not of the highest.”
 BIBLIOGRAPHY
(Some of the following material has not been referenced
but was crucial to the research of this paper)

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