Classics Film Marathon Budapest: Singin’ in the Rain

Director: Gene Kelly

Screenplay by Betty Comden, Adolph Green, Director of photography: Harold Rosson, Music by Lennie Hayton

Cast: Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds, Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchel, Cyd Chariess

If there is a single scene in film art that is purely about happiness and that encapsulates happiness and its elusive feeling, then it is the iconic scene in Singing in the Rain where Gene Kelly, umbrella spinning, strolls through the downpour generated by rain machines, tap dancing in the puddles and wildly rotating around a lamppost. Singing in the Rain is not primarily a love film, but a light comedy marking a turning point in film, extolling the art of film and creators, in fact, one that the Hungarian author Ferenc Molnár could have written, and yet it has a mood like the pleasant afternoon of love fulfilled, it exudes a sense of wellbeing that perhaps no other film to come ever achieved. The light-heartedness and charm of the actors, as they perform even the most difficult of dance routines with a bewitching composure and the most natural of attitudes: perhaps this is one of the vital secrets that keeps this film so fresh even today.

More programmes of the Budapest Classics Film Marathon 2019 in Urania National Filmtheatre.