Singin’ in the Rain is considered by many to be the greatest Hollywood musical of all time. When asked to cite the single most archetypal Hollywood movie musical of the last 100 years, most would cite Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's lavish film. Contemporary films like La La Land cite it as inspiration and seek to revive its wholesome charms for modern audiences. In order to understand Singin' in the Rain and its place in American film history, one must also delve into the history of the movie musical.
As Singin' in the Rain expertly shows, the invention of the talking picture made way not only for movies with recorded dialogue, but also the movie musical, which blended vaudeville traditions with movie magic. The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson and centered around a young jazz singer, is referenced in Singin' in the Rain, and can, in some ways, be called not only the first talkie, but the first movie musical. The form would not truly take off, however, until the 1930s. Many historians connect the rise of the movie musical in the 1930s to the Great Depression, during which audiences were desperate for a dose of optimism. An article in Rewire by Katie Moritz quotes the film historian Nancy West as saying, "Musicals presented an ideal genre for the escape because it made people leave the gloom and doom of poverty behind and see films that depicted people in joyous movement but had very lavish surroundings.” The heightened, over-the-top nature of movie musicals served as a kind of anti-depressant for the masses.
The movie musical subsequently waned in popularity, before coming back after WWII with a newfound vigor. With the invention of Technicolor in the 1950s, Gene Kelly, star of Singin' in the Rain, helped to revive the changing film genre. The genre, however, would never quite reach the heights it had reached in the 1930s, widely considered the "golden age" of the movie musical. By the 1960s, interest in musicals had dwindled, and its appeal has ebbed and flowed ever since. At the center of the musical genre is its investment in the tension between illusion and reality, a theme that is intrinsic to Singin' in the Rain. New Yorker film critic Richard Brody puts the movie musical on the opposite end of the spectrum from film noir, writing, "At the opposite pole [from noir] is the musical, which begins in the realm of the symbolic, because the genius who created the classic musical, Busby Berkeley, built the genre on the tension between artifice and authenticity."
