Welcome to Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's film is the 1952 MGM Musical, Singin' In the Rain, directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen.

The film stars Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds and Donald O'Connor, and features Jean Hagen, Millard Mitchell and Cyd Charisse.

The film begins with the gala 1927 premier of The Royal Rascal, the latest Monumental Films picture starring Don Lockwood and Lina Lamont.

Don and Lina are romantically linked in all the fan magazines, and Lina's imagination, but Don can barely tolerate his crass and conniving leading lady.

On his way to a party after the premier, Don finds himself attacked by a mob of adoring fans, but manages to escape, ending up in the car of Kathy Selden, a young aspiring actress.

When Don tries to ply her with his charm, she dismisses silent movie acting as dumb show and not worth comparing to acting on stage.

Don, thoroughly annoyed, mocks her pretentiousness and they part in mutual irritation.

Later at the party, Monumental Picture studio head, R.F.

Simpson, shows the guests a brief film demonstrating synchronized sound.

Most of the guests dismiss it as a novelty.

Don discovers Kathy as a nightclub chorus dancer when she performs at the party, and teases her mercilessly about it.

Furious, she throws a cake at him, but he ducks and it hits Lina in the face instead.

Kathy flees the party and Don, smitten, spends the next several weeks trying to find her.

It turns out Lina had her fired.

Don finally finds Kathy working in a movie on the Monumental Pictures lot, where they reconcile and confessed their mutual attraction.

In a response to the success of Warner Brothers, the jazz singer, R.F.

Simpson, announces Monumental is going to start making talkies, beginning with the latest Lockwood and Lamont film, The Dueling Cavalier.

But working with the new sound technology creates all sorts of problems, not the least of which is Lina's nasal Brooklyn accented speaking voice.

The film's premier is a disaster and it looks like the end of Don's career, just as his romance with Kathy is taking off.

Singin' In The Rain is generally regarded as the greatest film produced by MGM's renowned Freed Unit, the division of the studio that produced most of its musicals.

Its head, Arthur Freed, was born in Charleston, South Carolina in 1894.

He worked as a song plugger in Chicago, where he met Minnie Marx.

He was soon working in vaudeville with her sons, the Marx brothers, and contributing material to their act.

He was later hired by MGM to write songs, many of them with tunes by Nacio Herb Brown.

After working as an associate producer on The Wizard of Oz, Freed was made head of his own production unit and produced a series of musicals, starting with Babes in Arms with Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland in 1939.

Singin' In the Rain originated as what we might now call, a jukebox musical, since Arthur Freed wanted to make a film based on the catalog of songs he had written with Nacio Herb Brown.

He recruited Betty Comden and Adolph Green to create a story around the songs and write the screenplay.

Since much of Freed's and Brown's music was written around the time movies were making the transition to talking pictures, and because Comden and Green were living in the house of a former silent movie star whose career had died with the advent of talkies, they decided to use that era in Hollywood as the setting for the film.

They came up with the idea of an actor in romantic swashbuckling silent films who had a background in vaudeville as the song and dance man.

When Gene Kelly became available after he finished making An American in Paris, released in 1951, he was the perfect fit for the sort of film the screenwriters had in mind.

Kelly and director Stanley Donen were both enthusiastic about the script and worked with their friends, Comden and Green, to develop it further.

The result was a lighthearted but engaging look back at the early years of sound movies, punctuated by a number of memorable songs and dance numbers, delivered with an apparently effortless good cheer, by a stellar cast.

Apart from the three stars, the one performer who really stands out in Singin' in the Rain is Jean Hagen, as the silly, annoying Lina Lamont.

The film cleverly finds various ways to keep its audience from hearing Lina's voice until R.F.

Simpson says, Don, it'll be a sensation.

Lamont and Lockwood, they talk.

Lina replies, well, of course we talk, don't everybody?

And instantly the audience knows everything they need to know for the rest of the film to work.

Jean Hagen, in fact, had a beautiful, rich voice and based her voice for Lina on an exaggerated version of the nasal, Brooklynese voice employed by Judy Holliday in such films as 1950's, Born Yesterday.

If you're wondering what Hagen's real voice sounded like, in the scene where Kathy Selden is dubbing Lina's dialogue, it's actually Jean Hagen herself who is speaking.

So you hear Gene Hagen dubbing Debbie Reynolds, dubbing Gene Hagen.

Hollywood, it's wonderful.

It's hard to to believe that Debbie Reynolds was only 19 when she starred in Singin' in the Rain.

Born in El Paso, Texas on April Fool's Day in 1932, Reynolds had already appeared in five motion pictures before landing her first leading role in Singin' In the Rain.

She lived with her parents during the shoot and had to wake up at four o'clock in the morning and ride three different buses to get to the MGM studios on time.

Sometimes she would save herself the commute and just sleep on the set.

Reynolds had a background as a gymnast, not a dancer.

Gene Kelly was a perfectionist when it came to dancing and he made life very hard for his inexperienced partner.

One day when Fred Astaire was at the studio, he found Reynolds crying under a piano, hearing about the trouble she was having satisfying Kelly, Astaire offered to help her with her dancing.

Reynolds later said she had learned a lot from Kelly.

He is a perfectionist and a disciplinarian, she said.

The most exciting director I've ever worked for and he has a good temper.

Every so often, he would yell at me and make me cry, but it took a lot of patience for him to work with someone who had never danced before.

It's amazing that I could keep up with him and Donald O'Connor.

Kelly later expressed remorse for the way he had pushed Reynolds.

He said, fortunately, Debbie was as strong as an ox.

She could pick up the most complicated routine without too much difficulty, at the university of hard work and pain.

Donald O'Connor's Make 'Em Laugh sequence came about because Gene Kelly wanted O'Connor to have a solo number.

Make 'Em Laugh was a Freed/Brown song that bore a close resemblance to Cole Porter's Be a Clown, although no one involved mentioned the similarity.

O'Connor later said in an interview, Gene didn't have a clue to the kind of number it was meant to be.

The sequence was made up of a collection of funny bits O'Connor had developed over the years, some of them going back to his days in vaudeville.

The actual filming was grueling, however.

O'Connor later recalled, I was smoking four packs of cigarettes a day then and getting up those walls was murder.

We filmed that whole sequence in one day.

We did it on a concrete floor.

My body just had to absorb this tremendous shock.

I came back on the set three days later, Gene Kelly applauded, told me what a great number it was.

Then Gene said, do you think you could do that number again?

I said, sure, anytime!

He said, well, we're going to have to do it again tomorrow.

No one had checked the aperture of the camera and they fogged out all the film.

So the next day, I did it all again.

For many people, the highlight of the film is Gene Kelly singing the title song while spinning an umbrella, splashing in puddles and getting soaked with rain.

Studio technicians used tarps to cover two blocks of the city streets on the MGM back lot, to make them dark enough for a night scene, overhead sprays provided the rain.

There was a drought in Los Angeles that year.

When they first tried to film the sequence in the late afternoon, there was too little water pressure for the scene to work.

Homeowners in the area were coming home from work and turning on their sprinklers to keep their lawns from dying.

So the sequence was rescheduled to be shot the following day, early enough so everyone was at work and there would be enough water pressure.

The combination of water and heat, made Kelly's wool suit shrink during the filming, apart from the fact that he was ill and had a temperature of 103 degrees as well.

Both Kelly and O'Connor might have nodded in agreement when Debbie Reynolds said many years later, Singin' In the Rain and childbirth were the two hardest things I've ever had to do in my life.

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.