Summary
The “Broadway Melody” extravaganza continues as Lockwood’s hoofer character is led through a door advertising a burlesque show. A hobo clown dances amongst a number of chorus girls, as the scene transitions into yet another part of the “Broadway Melody” universe, a vaudeville show. There, Lockwood wears a patriotic red-white-and-blue costume, while similarly patriotically dressed chorus girls dance around him. Yet another sign transitions us into a number about the “Ziegfeld Follies,” and we see Lockwood in a tuxedo and a topcoat surrounded by feather-clad chorus girls. We then see applauding hands, then a close-up of a gambling table, which zooms out to reveal a lavish ballroom, where Lockwood waltzes and shakes the hands of his admirers. Suddenly, Lockwood’s hoofer character notices the flapper from the speakeasy standing in white in the ballroom.
Everyone in the ballroom stops moving, and Lockwood and the mysterious flapper walk towards one another as if in a dream. The flapper's white dress floats in the wind behind her, as the couple begin a romantic dance together on an empty stage. They run the length of the stage together and throw out their arms ceremoniously. He carries her as her train floats in a breeze, dips her and kisses her ceremoniously. She walks away from him, wrapping his body in her long white train, they throw up their arms and the dream ballet ends. It turns out that the entire dance was simply a figment of the hoofer’s imagination, and we are back in the ballroom, surrounded by partygoers. Lockwood approaches the flapper, who once again goes to the gangster she is with, as a hat check girl delivers Lockwood’s cane and hat to him. He leaves the ballroom/casino, and begins to sing, “Gotta dance!” Another dancer, dressed as the hoofer in his early days in New York, approaches Lockwood and sings “Gotta dance!” back at him. Crowds of dancers stream out of the surrounding doors and Lockwood leads them in a rousing group dance number.
The scene shifts and we are back in Simpson’s screening room; the entire “Broadway Melody” was part of Lockwood’s imagination, and we were just watching what he was pitching to his producer. “I can’t quite visualize it, I’ll have to see it on film first,” says Simpson, before sending Lockwood and Cosmo off to re-record Lina’s dialogue using Kathy’s voice, with the strong urging not to let Lina find out. In the recording studio, Kathy records Lina’s dialogue much more elegantly than Lina. The line she is recording is “Nothing can keep us apart. Our love will last till the stars turn cold.” As the recording ends and the lights come back up, Lockwood and Kathy look at one another lovingly and kiss one another. Kathy looks concerned as Lockwood assures her that after the movie comes out, he is going to go public about their romance. “Your fans will be bitterly disappointed,” Kathy says sadly, but Lockwood insists that Kathy is the only fan that he’s worried about.
Suddenly, the couple is interrupted by the shriek of Lina, who has been brought in to witness the romance by a dancer friend of hers named Zelda. “I want that girl off the lot at once!” Lina shrieks, scolding the couple for re-recording her voice and telling Kathy to stay away from Lockwood. Lockwood insists that he is in love with Kathy and tells Lina that he intends to marry Kathy. When Lina starts to go off and talk to Simpson, Cosmo swoops in and assures Lina that the picture is already finished and “if it weren’t for this girl [Kathy] you’d be finished too.” Lockwood and Cosmo tell Lina that Kathy is getting billed for her voice work on the film, which makes Lina even angrier. We see a headline that reads, “Lina Greatest Singing and Dancing Star, Simpson Says,” and are transported into Simpson’s office. As an assistant reads one of the articles, Simpson denies having ever promoted Lina’s talents. “I don’t know anything about this, I had nothing to do with it!” he tells his assistants, when Lina enters the room smugly and tells them that she gave “an exclusive story to every paper in town.”
When Simpson orders one of his assistants to call the paper and revoke the news stories, Lina informs him that she’s had one of her lawyers go over her contract and determine that the studio does not control her publicity, and if she does not like something printed about her, she can sue the studio. Seeing no other option, Simpson agrees that they ought to take Kathy out of the credits, exclaiming, “Let’s just get this premiere over with!” Before leaving, Lina tells Simpson that she wants Kathy to be her voice double in all subsequent pictures and not a film star in her own right. Simpson grows even more impatient, telling Lina that she cannot try and take away Kathy’s career from her. Lina doesn’t budge.
The scene shifts to the premiere of The Dancing Cavalier. We see a scene from the film, Kathy’s vocals dubbed in for Lina’s. In the audience, Kathy sits beside Cosmo and overhears a couple sitting in front of them praising Lina’s vocals. The film ends and the audience erupts into uproarious applause. Lockwood and Lina come out onstage and bow and Kathy and Cosmo go backstage to celebrate the success of the film. When Cosmo compliments Lina, she gloats about the fact that Kathy is going to dub all of her vocals from now on, which upsets Lockwood. He confronts her for her manipulation, insisting that “Kathy has a career of her own.” When Lina insists that she has the upper hand in this situation, Kathy confronts her herself and tells her she won’t accept, but Simpson is confused and doesn’t know what to do.
When Cosmo informs the group that the audience wants a speech, Lina volunteers to do it herself. Cosmo tries to stop her, but Lockwood gives him a look, knowing that her real voice will alienate the audience at the premiere, and they let Lina go onstage by herself. At the microphone, Lina thanks the audience for coming that evening. Shots of the audience reveal that they are not pleased to hear her actual voice. Disappointed, the audience shouts up at her that she sounds different and that they want to hear her sing. Anxiously, she runs off the stage and asks the producers what to do. Simpson tells her that she should mouth the words and orders Kathy to go to a microphone and do the singing behind a curtain for Lina. When Lockwood orders Kathy to dub Lina’s voice in front of the audience, she agrees, but tells him that she never wants to see him again, she is so disappointed by his request.
Lina goes back out onstage and takes her place at the microphone. When the conductor asks what she will be singing, she goes back to the curtain, where Kathy whispers that she will be singing, “Singin’ in the Rain.” When the conductor asks what key she wants to sing in, Lina nervously goes back to the curtain, where Kathy whispers, “A flat.” The orchestra begins to play and Lina starts dancing and mouthing the words as Kathy sings beautifully from backstage. Simpson looks to Cosmo and Lockwood and they begin to sing along and walking briskly around the ropes that control the curtains. On Simpson’s nod, the three men begin pulling the curtain open to reveal Kathy as the real singer. Upon seeing this, the audience in the theater bursts into laughter at the absurd spectacle. Cosmo rushes out and takes the microphone from Kathy, which causes Lina to realize she is being made a fool of. Lina rushes off the stage, embarrassed, and Kathy runs down the aisle trying to get out of the theater. As she does so, Lockwood runs onto the stage and tells the audience to stop her, revealing that she is the woman who did Lina’s vocals for the film. “She’s the real star of the picture: Kathy Selden!” he says, as the audience applauds and Kathy turns towards him weeping. Lockwood begins to sing “You Are My Lucky Star,” and Cosmo jumps off the stage to begin conducting the orchestra. Smiling through her tears, Kathy walks back up to the stage and begins to sing with him. They embrace as they sing the duet and we see a billboard of a film starring Don Lockwood and Kathy Selden called Singin’ in the Rain. Kathy and Lockwood stand in front of it on a grassy lawn and kiss.
Analysis
Singin’ in the Rain is about the movie musical, but it is also more broadly about the history of entertainment and film. This is encapsulated in the lengthy montage “Broadway Melody,” a collage of various performance aesthetics from the early 20th century. The montage follows the plight of an ambitious hoofer (Lockwood) who arrives in New York and dances through various performance styles. He begins in a speakeasy, where he dances with a seductive Cyd Charisse, a smoky-eyed flapper who is dining with three coin-tossing gangsters. He then travels into a burlesque show, then into vaudeville, then into the “Ziegfeld Follies,” then a lavish ballroom. The film evokes a sense of nostalgia by traveling through a variety of old performance styles in order to show the ways that dancing and music persist through these historical eras.
While Kathy Selden is Don Lockwood’s romantic match, in the fictional montage of “Broadway Melody” he adopts a new mate, the leggy dancer played by Cyd Charisse. Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse have a notably electric chemistry, as their entire relationship is articulated through virtuosic dancing. Their chemistry stands apart from the world of romantic love, and is completely about movement, gesture, and togetherness. While Lockwood and Kathy’s romantic dance moments move their love story along and bring them closer together, Lockwood and the mysterious dancer in “Broadway Melody” share a connection that is confined to the movements themselves. They dance for the sake of it, and they are both so good at dancing so elegantly, that their relationship blooms as if in a dream. If Lockwood and Kathy’s relationship is of the world and grounded in reality, Lockwood and the mysterious dancer’s relationship is a figment, a piece of Hollywood magic itself.
The dance between Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse is notable for its stylistic departure from much of the other dancing and musical numbers. While many of the other musical numbers in the film include quick, jerky choreography and mile-a-minute tap dance routines, this romantic dance is much slower, grander, and more gestural than the other dances. With Kelly in a tuxedo and Charisse in a white dress with a train, the couple looks like an exceedingly elegant couple on their wedding day, and the dance seems to symbolize nuptial union and idealized romantic love. The slow movements of the dance lend it gravity and elegance, heightening the drama of the relationship between them. While the technicolor, impressive visual aesthetic, and drama of the scene are consistent with the rest of the film, the style of dance and the tone of this particular dance marks a departure towards more serious themes, and brings the viewer into a dream-like reality. Kelly and Charisse’s dance takes itself much more seriously than other moments in the film, and is not simply a matter of greeting the morning, putting on a show, or singin’ in the rain. Kelly carries the elegant Charisse, dipping her to kiss her as dramatic music plays and a cymbal crashes. A kind of dream ballet, this dance seeks to lift the viewer’s understanding of romantic union to a higher, almost heavenly plane.
Adding to the many narrative layers of Singin’ in the Rain—a musical film about the musical film industry made in the 50s but set in the 20s—is the fact that the entire “Broadway Melody” number, as we see it, is a figment of Don Lockwood’s rich and expansive imagination. As the number ends, the audience believes that we are watching the film within the film, but when we are transported back to Simpson’s screening room, we realize that all of the extravagance and spectacle of “Broadway Melody” was just a representation of Lockwood’s description of the number to the producer. This shows yet again that the film is invested in the power of imagination, and the ability of the movie—particularly the movie musical—to act as a vehicle for the creative person’s most wild and imaginative fancies. Lockwood’s talent lies not only in his ability to sing and dance, but also in his ability to envision what he wants, and the Hollywood depicted in Singin’ in the Rain rewards those with the courage to follow their own visions.
While Lina Lamont initially seems like a huge threat not only to Kathy Selden’s career, but to Simpson’s studio at large, she stages her own undoing when she tries to speak and sing for the audience following the screening. Her positive reputation with fans relies on their impression that she has the voice of Kathy Selden, and she presumptuously believes that they admire her for her own voice. This is not the case, and when she shows fans her authentic self, they are immediately repelled. The film is all about the illusions of cinema and the manipulation of information to create a good story—for example, Lockwood’s skewed explanation of his autobiography at the start of the film—but here, the illusions are uncovered, and the audience feels nothing but betrayal and disappointment. Lina Lamont is not the elegant leading lady she appeared to be, and her unsavory personality is evident in her alienating and unrefined voice. The invention of sound in cinema dispels the allure of Lina. While there are plenty of people who have alienating voices who are not inherently repellant people, the ugliness of Lina Lamont’s voice is matched only by the ugliness and ruthlessness of her personality. Thus, her exposure as a greedy fraud comes as a great relief, and Lockwood stands up for Kathy’s artistic integrity, revealing her to be the real singer behind the musical virtues of the film. In the end, artistry and talent win out over deception and ambition.
