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How to follow Singin' in the Rain? Debbie Reynolds in pointy cap and pigskin-colored swimsuit as the football flung around by choreographed jocks across a painted gridiron, that's how. Portraying sports equipment is the reality of the Broadway starlet, in her reveries she's a Hollywood diva sparkling in lavender for tuxedoed suitors: "A lady loves her phobias / She has complexities, she will insist / It gives her things to talk about / With her psychiatrist." (Robert Taylor's cameo dissipates the moment she wakes up, "just gimme five minutes, maybe I can dream him back!") "Fine, steady employment," scoffs Dad (Allyn Joslyn) of show business, his ideal pick for his daughter's fiancé is a moneyed dullard (Richard Anderson). She instead falls for the humble apprentice photographer (Donald O'Connor) who's determined to slap her on the cover of Look magazine. "How did you get your shoes so enthusiastic? / I seem to flip when you trip the light fantastic." Beginning with the titles scribbled with lipstick on a backstage mirror, a bountiful burst of bliss from Don Weis. The artist deals in poses but thinks in motion, with roller-skates on tap-dancing feet he whirls in the gazebo to the delight of his beloved's tiny sister (Noreen Corcoran), a variation of "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off" (Shall We Dance) right ahead of "I Like Myself" (It's Always Fair Weather). Reynolds swathed in gold out of an Oscar statuette sashays among fantasy danseurs in Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly masks, O'Connor given a dress-up trunk in a deserted studio promptly whips it with cyclonic pantomime. "Now, sir, from the ridiculous to the sublime..." The two troupers end happily twined on location in Central Park, the sort of fusion of artifice and documentary that flows in the veins of euphoric cinema. With Una Merkel, Jim Backus, Les Tremayne, and Barbara Ruick.
--- Fernando F. Croce |