Singin' in the rain 1952 - One of the greatest Hollywood musicals ever made

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IMDB rating: 8,4

Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Main Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Cyd Charisse

"Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain is usually lumped together with the other MGM "songbook" musicals of its era, An American In Paris and The Band Wagon. In contrast to those two outstanding works of music and motion, however, Singin' In The Rain had an additional layer of importance and appeal as one of Hollywood's relatively rare feature films about itself. The Arthur Freed/Nacio Herb Brown songbook is on one level the center of the movie, but it's also a backdrop for a humorous and delightfully stylized look back at the crisis that engulfed the movie mecca and its inhabitants once synchronized sound came to films. The musical was made in 1952, only 25 years after the beginning of the series of events depicted and satirized in the script, so recent in time that there were still plenty of old studio hands (including sound department head Douglas Shearer) who had firsthand memories of the actual events.The film is full of delightful in-jokes about its subject and the people who lived through the era: Jean Hagen's Lina Lamont is a burlesque of silent-movie sex symbol Clara Bow, whose decidedly urban style of diction never really fit her image or what the public wanted, while Millard Mitchell's R.F. Simpson was a gently jocular satire of Freed himself, who could never quite visualize the elaborate musical numbers whose scripts and budgets he was approving as producer. Donald O'Connor's Cosmo Brown was an onscreen stand-in for men like Franz Waxman and dozens of other musicians, who moved from writing arrangements or conducting the major theater orchestras to heading the music departments of the studios. The resulting musical, in addition to offering a brace of memorable songs and performances (with a startlingly sultry featured spot for Cyd Charisse in the "Broadway Melody" sequence, as a bonus), gave audiences a short-course pop-history lesson about how the movies learned to talk, sing, and dance." - www.allmovie.com

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An American in Paris 1951 - The musical that set new standards

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IMDB rating: 7,3

Director: Vincente Minnelli
Main Cast: Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, Oscar Levant, Nina Foch, Georges Guetary

"Vincente Minnelli's An American in Paris set a new standard for the subgenre known as the 'songbook' musical. Since the dawn of sound, producers had been attracted to films built around the published output of composers as different as Johann Strauss (The Great Waltz, Waltzes From Vienna), Jerome Kern (Till the Clouds Roll By), Cole Porter (Night and Day), and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (Words and Music). Mostly, the material was strung together, sometimes hooked around a fanciful pseudo-biography of the composer in question, and audiences grinned and bore the plot elements while delighting to the music. An American in Paris was freed of any need to embrace composer George Gershwin as an onscreen figure by virtue of the 1945 screen biography Rhapsody in Blue, in which Robert Alda had portrayed the composer. Rather, Minnelli, Gene Kelly, and screenwriter Alan Jay Lerner simply used the title and the substance of the title work as a jumping-off point for a screen fantasy that happened to utilize much of the major Gershwin song catalog. Some of the inspiration for the film's 16-minute ballet finale came from the Red Shoes ballet sequence from Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's 1948 The Red Shoes. Whatever its inspirations and imitations, An American in Paris won seven Academy Awards and box-office success. The overall film (especially the non-musical elements) hasn't worn quite so well over the years, but it was a vital piece of cinema in its time, stretching the envelope of the level of sophistication that a major studio would pursue, and ripping that envelope to shreds with the climactic ballet sequence, which became the model for still more daring sequences in such Hollywood films as Singin' in the Rain and The Band Wagon and such European imitators as Black Tights and Kelly's own dance extravaganza, Invitation to the Dance." - www.allmovie.com

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On the town 1949 - One of MGM's brightest musicals

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly
Main Cast: Gene Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Betty Garrett, Ann Miller, Jules Munshin, Vera-Ellen

"Three sailors on a 24-hour pass - Gabey (Gene Kelly), Chip (Frank Sinatra), and Ozzie (Jules Munshin) - decide to soak up the sights and sounds of New York. Each one finds romance within those 24 hours: Gabey with aspiring dancer Ivy Smith (Vera-Ellen), Chip with lady cabbie Hildy Esterhazy (Betty Garrett), and Ozzie with paleontology student Claire Huddesten (Ann Miller).
Adapted from the Broadway musical by Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Leonard Bernstein, On the Town is one of the freshest, most exhilarating musicals turned out by the old MGM regime. The stars' verve and camaraderie are contagious, and the songs are staged by legendary musical director Stanley Donen and Kelly himself with wit and innovation. Highlights include the opening 'New York, New York' number, shot on location and flat-cutting from one image to another at a dizzying pace, and Gene Kelly and Vera-Ellen's 'Miss Turnstyles Ballet'." - www.allmovie.com

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