Singin' in the Rain is a 1952 American musical romantic comedy film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, starring Kelly, Donald O'Connor, and Debbie Reynolds and featuring Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchell, Rita Moreno, and Cyd Charisse in supporting roles. It offers a lighthearted depiction of Hollywood in the late 1920s, with the three stars portraying performers caught up in the transition from silent films to "talkies".
Arthur Freed conceived the idea of the film based on the back catalogs of songs written by himself and Nacio Herb Brown. Because many of the songs had been written during the transition from silent films to "talkies", writers Betty Comden and Adolph Green decided that was when the story should be set. When the story morphed into that of a romantic hero with a vaudevillian background surviving the transition period in Hollywood and falling back onto his old song-and-dance habits, Kelly was chosen for the lead, who along with Donen responded enthusiastically to it. The film released after a premiere at the Radio City Music Hall on April 11, 1952.
The film was only a modest hit when it was first released. O'Connor won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, and Comden and Green won the Writers Guild of America Award for their screenplay, while Jean Hagen and Lennie Hayton were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress and the Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, respectively.
However, it is now often regarded as the greatest musical film ever made and one of the greatest films ever made,[2] as well as the greatest film made in the "Freed Unit" at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. It topped the AFI's Greatest Movie Musicals list, ranked as the fifth-greatest American motion picture of all time in its updated list of the greatest American films in 2007, having ranked as the tenth-greatest in the original 1998 list, and Kelly's rendition of "Singin' in the Rain" ranked third in their list of the greatest film songs. In 1989, Singin' in the Rain was one of the first 25 films selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[3] In 2005, the British Film Institute included it in its list of the 50 films to be seen by the age of 14. In 2008, Empire magazine ranked it as the eighth-best film of all time. In Sight & Sound magazine's 2022 list of the greatest films of all time, Singin' in the Rain placed 10th.[4] Previously, it had ranked fourth in their 1982 list and tenth in their 2002 list.
