The oneiric quality of the great tradition of the Hollywood musical had gradually faded over the years, while the stylisation of song and dance had by necessity remained. [Stanley] Donen and [Gene] Kelly’s work, and Singin’ in the Rain in particular, can be situated in this period of decline which, it should be noted, was not, or was not yet, a moment of crisis. Indeed, it is precisely between the 1940s and 1950s that MGM, the leading studio for the production of musicals, delivered a series of films that, if not consistently glorious, are nevertheless always glittering and enjoyable (and sometimes even lavish), and which did much to identify the genre with the studio. The MGM musicals, regardless of the director or the quality of the individual film, all display (without distinction) a precise and instantly recognisable look – a glossy, polished, colourful, shiny and cheerful character that no other production could boast. Look at a contemporary film by Columbia or Fox: none of them exhibits the captivating visual softness of an MGM musical. The colours are darker and grainier, or at least less clear and soft (Columbia); or they are decidedly intense, but with a realistic quality that not even the strongly flickering light can render pleasingly fantastic and oneiric… Singin’ in the Rain is, in its entirely, a powerful, eloquent metaphor for an entirely different critical situation facing Hollywood cinema. In short, in dealing with the great crisis caused by the transition to sound, the film alludes to an atmosphere and a set of problems related to a crisis of a different, but no less worrying, nature that would take place 20 years later… Singin’ in the Rain is therefore a nostalgic film, the revisiting of a past that is perhaps not too distant in time, but is light years away in terms of taste, mentality, fashion and, naturally, technology. So distant that the opening sequence, with its long shot from above of the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, has the feel of a scene lifted from an animated cartoon: the colours, the lights, the distant movements, the architectural lines don’t seem at all real (recreated), but instead seem to belong to a different imaginary order – that of a reality transfigured by a childish fantasy, sparkling and microscopically great.

Franco La Polla, Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly. Cantando sotto la pioggia, Lindau, Turin 1997