Singin' in the Rain

This is the passage where the dignified past Don recounts to the reporters collides head-on with the vaudeville years shown on screen.

• Over Don's genteel narration, the two men saw away at violins and dance comically. This scene, where words and pictures clash, previews the theme of the whole film as a joke.
• Strictly speaking, this is not a Brown song. Written in 1932 with music by Al Hoffman and Al Goodhart and lyrics by Freed, it came from Freed's catalog.
• The routine of mixing tap dance with pretending to play the violin carries over intact the conventions of variety shows (vaudeville), where song, dance and gags were all performed at once on stage.
• On the official soundtrack LP it appears as a duet by Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor. The double act these two actors perform throughout the film first takes shape in this number.

A dance tune sung by Kathy, who claimed to dream of the stage, as she bursts out of a party cake, laying bare her pride and her reality at once.

• The song was first used in “Sadie McKee” (1934). Here it is turned into a quick, giddy arrangement to suit the Charleston of the 1920s new-woman dancers (flappers).
• As the short-skirted chorus girls kick up their heels in unison around the song, the fact that Kathy stands at the very heart of the show business she scorned becomes the joke.
• The official LP includes both Debbie Reynolds's version and Gene Kelly's version. The reprise of the song filmed for the movie was cut after a preview, and the footage is believed to be lost.

A one-man riot Cosmo stages to make his crestfallen friend laugh, and in effect the only song Freed and Brown wrote new for this film.

• The song breezily lays out the worldly wisdom of a man who sells laughter, but it keeps the eyes busier than the ears. Donald O'Connor runs up a wall and flips backward, wrestles with a mannequin, and pushes physical comedy (slapstick) to the limit.
• For this film O'Connor won the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical·comedy. The scene is regarded as his signature performance.
• It has long been pointed out that its melody and structure closely resemble Cole Porter's “Be a Clown” (“The Pirate,” 1948). Donen, the co-director, candidly acknowledged the similarity.
• On beat after beat, brass and percussion drop in like sound effects to match each fall and collision. It sounds as if the band were chasing O'Connor's every move.

A silent-film actor who needs the right setting to find his words builds his own stage for a confession from the lights, wind and mist of an empty soundstage.

• First sung in “The Broadway Melody” (1929), it was one of the signature love songs of the early talkies. Some twenty years later it was called back into a film about that very era.
• The opening of the song is a spoken-style introduction (verse). It flows along as he switches on the effects one by one, and only when it reaches the main melody, the refrain (chorus), does the confession truly begin.
• The irony of the number lies in the premise that sincerity emerges from within fake stagecraft such as an artificial breeze and sunset lighting. A gentle string accompaniment wraps around that artifice.
• The dance is calm, built on walking and turns rather than dazzling technique. It is the quietest moment among the film's numbers, setting off the commotion that follows.

A song of joy that bursts out at dawn from three people who have stayed up all night and found a way to save a failed costume drama by turning it into a musical.

• The song was originally sung by Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in “Babes in Arms” (1939). Here it is reborn as a song and tap dance for three.
• Moving from the kitchen to the living room, the three take turns mimicking a range of dances, from the Charleston to flamenco to the hula. Each time, the music briefly twists itself to follow that dance's rhythm.
• Debbie Reynolds, who was no dance specialist, had to hold her own between two dancers in this number. The story goes that shooting ran from morning until night.
• At the end, the music cuts off sharply just as the three of them topple backward over a sofa. The pleasure of sound and movement landing in exact unison answers the disastrous preview scene, in which the sound fell out of sync.

As a man in love folds his umbrella in the rain, the song grows from a murmur to himself into a festival of orchestra and dance.

• The song is unusual even in its form. Whereas most songs of the day opened with a speechlike introduction (the verse), here the 32-bar refrain (the chorus) comes first and the 24-bar introduction follows. In the film, too, the core melody flows in from the very first bar.
• The song, hummed low at first, swells with strings and brass all at once the moment he swings from the lamppost. From this point on, tap dancing rather than singing drives the rhythm.
• In 1929, in “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” Cliff Edwards sang it light and fast to ukulele accompaniment. Kelly's version slows the tempo and adds breathing room, turning the same song into something else entirely.
• Kelly's dance in the rain ranked 3rd on the American Film Institute (AFI) list of the 100 greatest movie songs. On January 1, 2025, the song's copyright term expired in the United States, and it entered the public domain.

Don's vision of a Broadway success story for the new film, a fantasy within the film that halts the story for more than ten minutes and flows on dance alone.

• Brown's newly written ballet music was spliced in between “Broadway Melody” (1929) and “Broadway Rhythm.” In effect, old songs and new music were sewn into a single piece.
• When Cyd Charisse appears, the bright show music turns into slow, sultry jazz. The hazy tones of saxophone and of trumpet fitted with a mute (muted trumpet) sound like a signature pointing to her.
• In the fantasy sequence of a white veil fluttering in the wind, the music passes into a dreamlike sound of long-sustained strings. It is worth listening for how the same character is painted with entirely different music in a glittering club and in a dream.
• The short melody that introduced the young dancer rings out again at the end, returning the story to its beginning. Within that repetition lies the sense that success and parting keep recurring.

A quiet duet after the commotion has passed, with which the film brings down the curtain in front of its own billboard.

• The song comes from “Broadway Melody of 1936.” After the commotion of the earlier numbers has died down, its gentle melody and string accompaniment slowly cool the film's fever.
• Earlier in the same film there was also a scene of Debbie Reynolds singing this song alone, but it was cut from the release print. The recording survived and appears, in her voice, as the final track of the official LP.
• Some of Reynolds's songs were sung in her place by the singer Betty Noyes. That a film about who owns a voice used a stand-in voice on its own set lends this final song a curious resonance.
• As the orchestra draws out its final chord, the picture comes to rest before the billboard. The close of the music and the close of the film arrive together in a single shot.