Everyone talks about Orson Welles making his dazzling movie directing debut at 25 years old; but really we should also be talking about Stanley Donen doing the same thing: co-directing the musical On the Town in 1949 at the same age with Gene Kelly. And when they together made Singin’ in the Rain – and film history – Donen was still only 28.
There is a real link between directing and choreography, controlling camera positioning and movement, and those of the actors themselves. Donen was a director, Broadway dancer and choreographer, and also a radical innovator who brought new life and form to the movie musical, embedding its musical and dance conventions into the imagined action and making it work as cinema. And it is no accident that this masterpiece is specifically about cinema re-inventing itself: emerging from the silent era to a new world of sound – that innovation which allowed the musical to exist. He was at the very centre of that magical period of the MGM musical, a part of cinema history which rests so materially on his special creative relationship with Kelly.
He also had a special relationship with his childhood idol Fred Astaire, and with the great bluebloods of the Hollywood aristocracy of which Donen himself was one of the very last survivors, including Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Quite aside from his gargantuan achievement in musicals, Donen would prove himself a master of the elegant Hitchcockian caper, and also an experimentalist in storytelling with his underrated portrait-of-a-marriage film, scripted by Frederic Raphael from Donen’s own idea: Two for the Road in 1967, with Hepburn and Albert Finney.
But it’s Singin’ in the Rain that we always return to: it bursts at every seam with light and colour and joy, and Donen and Kelly shape and guide its irresistible energy with inspired grace. The story of an established star (Kelly) who falls for a young up-and-comer (Debbie Reynolds) just as the industry is in crisis, is a counter-tragic version of A Star Is Born: this is A Genre Is Born, or A Medium Is Re-Born.
In some ways, my favourite scene is the Moses Supposes song from Kelly and Donald O’Connor, playing Kelly’s musical director and pal, when they gleefully start singing about the silliness of the studio’s elocution instruction. It looks as if the song itself is improvised, made up on the spot, out of pure excitement, pure well-being, pure love of life. The same goes for Kelly’s astonished delight at seeing Reynolds jump out of the cake at the swanky Hollywood party and starting to hoof and belt out All I Do Is Dream of You - having haughtily told Kelly that as a theatre person she disapproves of the silly business of movies. “If it isn’t Ethel Barrymore!” grins Kelly – the greatest double meet-cute of all time. The same supercharged energy drives O’Connor’s staggering tour de force Make Em Laugh and of course Kelly’s centrepiece “singing in the rain” dance sequence. Donen and Kelly’s direction, and Kelly’s dancing, was athletic, stylish and an example of non-toxic masculinity. It was generous and strong, a vivid, almost evangelical statement of postwar American optimism.
Before that, Kelly and Donen had collaborated on On the Town, a shore-leave adventure which boldly used real city locations. Donen had an instinctive grasp of how the musical worked when it was muscular and forthright and uninhibited, but also within its own world of mannered artifice. Maybe that was never truer than in Royal Wedding (1951) with Fred Astaire, whose own miraculous lighter-than-air style was different from Kelly’s more visceral approach. This was the movie with Astaire’s dancing-up-the-walls-and-on-to-ceiling scene, a trick shot achieved with a camera fixed into a set within a rotating drum: it was not Donen’s own idea, but he carried it off with aplomb.
Seven Brides For Seven Brothers (1954) was Donen’s other great MGM hit, a film in which Donen’s direction worked well with the ingenuous, unreflective masculinity of Howard Keel. Later in that staggeringly productive decade, Donen would re-unite with Astaire on Funny Face (1957) - this time for Paramount, not MGM. It’s a slightly uneasy May-to-September romance between Astaire and Audrey Hepburn (30 years his junior) and it doesn’t quite age as well, but Donen brings to it charm and a lightness of touch.
Donen’s remarkably prolific career carried on into the 1960s outside the studio system that gave birth to him, and partly in the UK as a kind of exile from its various tensions and discontents. This was a period in which he demonstrated his knack for the dapper romantic comedy-thriller, beginning a new relationship with Cary Grant in films like Charade and Indiscreet. It was also a decade in which Donen was eager to be in touch with the new creative currents and he plugged into the British satire boom, creating a cult comedy in Bedazzled (1967) with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - perhaps the nearest anyone came to capturing Cook’s comic inspiration on film.
Two for the Road is a late gem, in which he elicited great performances from Hepburn and Finney; they are the deeply unhappy married couple on holiday in the south of France, in scenes interspersing their disillusionment with their earlier happiness in the same locations. This was a measured, naturalistic character piece: intelligent, sympathetic and accessible - and notable in that it was the first time Hepburn had worked with a leading man younger than she was. It was emblematic of the old coming to terms with the new, which was what Donen was trying to do.
In the end of course, it is the sheer gorgeousness of Singin’ in the Rain for which he will be most immediately remembered and treasured: certainly in my heart. It’s a film which distills happiness and hope.
