BFI Friday: Singin' in the Rain

All the way back in August, the British Film Institute, through Sight and Sound, published their new list of 50 top films. You may remember that after fifty years at the top, Citizen Kane gave way to Vertigo as the BFI's greatest film ever made. You may further remember that to mark the occasion, I wrote a retrospective review on Vertigo here. Given that I've only seen eighteen out of the top fifty films, it's high time that I made an effort to get through the lot. Accordingly, from today, every other week I'm going to write a review of every film on the list.

Since we've already seen top dog Vertigo, we're going to kick off BFI Friday in style, the all singing, all talking, all dancing classic, Singin' in the Rain at number 20. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly's 1952 classic tells the story of Don Lockwood, a Hollywood stuntman-turned-actor making his way to the Big Time. Set in the late 1920s, the film's characters must negotiate the challenges posed by the close of the silent era and the dawn of sound. They do this of course, by singing and dancing through elaborate routines on lavish sets, all in gloriously rich, intense technicolour. Even in the non-musical sequences, the camera is almost always in motion, swishing and zooming around the actors, and giving the whole affair a lightness of touch. The film, in short, is an unparalleled joy to watch. Where last year's The Artist, functioning as an extended and rather lovely homage to Singin' in the Rain, used black and white to depict its silent-era setting, Singin' in the Rain's cinematographer Harold Rosson saturates the picture in colour, joining films like The Wizard of Oz (also by Rosson), A Matter of Life and Death, and Vertigo as the one of the most accomplished uses of colour in cinema. The reds are deep and rich, the blues are iridescent, and the yellows glow with warmth. The visuals, like a rich chocolate cake after a meal, are sweet, profoundly satisfying and simply full of life. For a film that is about sound, it looks unspeakably gorgeous.

All singin', all dancin', pure joy

That's not to say the music is secondary to visuals, mind. All of the song and dance routines are beautifully choreographed by star Kelly, with the film's title song providing unadulterated joy, wit and charm. Other standouts include Gotta Dance, the movie's most elaborate set piece, featuring the vampish Cyd Charisse, the tongue twisting Moses Supposes and the delightful Good Morning. I could describe in depth these sequences but really, there's nothing like watching them for yourself. There are so many movies that try for what Singin' achieves, but so often fall into the categories of saccharine, overcooked, or simply irritating. But here, there's something utterly infectious about the whole affair; just as Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves draws us into the tragic lives of its two main characters, or Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity invites us down a path to destruction, Singin' in the Rain perfectly lifts us up, unquestioning, into colour, music, and vibrancy. Few films, except perhaps for the aforementioned The Wizard of Oz, are capable of having such an effect. But more than that, it's a film that transcends genre; I defy anyone who says they don't like musicals not to enjoy Singin' in the Rain.

Who could resist a dance with Cyd Charisse?

The whole thing is deliriously entertaining, a gigantic sweet shop for the eyes and ears, but what elevates Singin' in the Rain further is the story and characters, who epitomising the allure of Hollywood, take us on a romantic, thrilling journey through the ups and downs of golden-era stardom. Kelly and the delightful Debbie Reynolds provide incredibly likeable leads, in a beautiful-people-doing-wonderful-things heightened reality. Jean Hagen plays Lina Lamont, a Monroe-esque dumb blonde character who turns out to have a cripplingly annoying voice when the movies become talkies. Deluded and manipulative, she convinces the studio to let her remain a star, while Reynolds' character dubs her voice over the top. Intriguingly, it was actually Hagen who dubbed her voice over for Reynolds during post production. For a film about film-making, this lends another delightful layer of subtext. And indeed, much of Singin' in the Rain is about the inherent falsity of cinema: voice over, the exaggerated performances in silent films, and the deliberately fake-looking sets all acknowledge the manufacturedness of big studio productions. And yet, out of that surface deception springs genuine, authentic emotion: it's difficult, for example, not to feel sorry for Lina when she gets her just desserts at the film's close, but you're rooting so much for Kelly and Debbie to make it through that it hardly matters. In fairness, there's never any real sense of peril: we all know where this is going, but that doesn't diminish the climax's sense of triumph or warmth one bit. Instead, Singin' in the Rain gives us Great Big Emotions, served up with astonishing technical skill and passion; a lovely, rich dessert of a movie that never slips into the saccharine. It's an overused phrase, but they really don't make pictures like this anymore. A sparkling, magnificent treat.

The Tramp Reviews: Vertigo

Every decade since 1952, the film magazine Sight and Sound have published the definitive list of the fifty greatest films ever made. Definitive, supposedly, because almost a thousand critics, academics and industry bods are polled in order to construct the list. Orson Welles' Citizen Kane won the number one position in 1962, and has dominated the top spot ever since. Until yesterday, of course, when the 2012 was published, and Citizen Kane was finally toppled from its perch by Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Whether Vertigo is the greatest film ever made has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of days, but it is undoubtedly refreshing to finally see a different film at the the top of the list. More to the point, while I question the designation of ‘greatest film ever made’, Hitchcock’s tale of murder, obsession and acrophobia is arguably his fullest and most satisfying work, offering classic Hitchcockian intrigue, mystery and suspense, and is the subject of this week’s Tramp's Review.

Along with Rear Window (1954), Psycho (1960), and The Birds (1963), 1958's Vertigo is one of Hitchcock's great masterpieces, and in many ways epitomises his greatness as a master director. I would go as far as to say that Vertigo is Hitchcock’s most spectacular film, and one of the richest and most visually compelling films ever made. The plot involves John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson, played by James Stewart, a police detective who is forced into early retirement due to a severe bout of vertigo which results in the grisly death of one of his colleagues. Scottie’s friend, a wealthy businessman named Gavin Elster, hires him as a private detective to investigate his wife’s strange behaviour, whom he claims is the reincarnation of a woman who died in tragic circumstances. Ferguson is understandably sceptical, but agrees to investigate Elster’s wife, played by Kim Novak, anyway.

Spot the subtext: Vertigo plays with our desire to see the unseen.

What follows is a fascinating and disturbing examination of voyeurism, obsession, and an incredibly rich and complex deconstruction of the inherent fetishistic nature of cinema. After Scottie follows her to the foot of the Golden Gate bridge, Madeleine Elster, apparently in a trance, throws herself into the river. After rescuing her, Scottie becomes obsessed with Madeleine, engaging in an ill-advised affair with her, leading to a series of violent and surreal discoveries. Up to this point, Scottie has appeared as most of Stewart’s characters: calm, morally upstanding and heroic, but in the scene directly following Madeleine’s rescue this begins to change. When Madeleine wakes up, she finds herself in Scottie’s bed, nude. Presumably he removed her wet clothes before putting her to bed, but what exactly happened after he removed her clothes, or why he did so at all, remains conspicuously unspoken, and Scottie’s almost uncontrollable sexual attraction to Madeleine becomes extremely apparent. Hitchcock’s casting of Stewart here is inspired: Stewart typically played heroic everymen, and so casting him as a lecherous anti-hero both unbalances that sense of typecasting (a trick that Sergio Leone repeated to great effect by casting perennial good guy Henry Fonda as the villain in Once Upon a Time in the West), and for a time obscures the character’s more ignoble traits by manipulating the expectations of an audience familiar with Stewart’s more conventional heroic roles. Brilliantly, on a second viewing, the way that Scottie follows Madeleine before she jumps in to the river offers a far more sinister, predatory perspective on his behaviour, and the intense colours with which Hitchcock fills the frame emphasise Scottie’s dangerous sexual-visual obsession with Madeleine’s appearance.

One of the film’s high points happens before the film proper even begins, in a bravura opening-credits sequence designed by Saul Bass. Bass was the creative genius responsible for many of cinema’s most iconic poster and design campaigns, including the opening credits in Psycho and North by Northwest, and the poster designs for Otto Preminger’s 1955 The Man with the Golden Arm. In extreme close-up, the camera fixes on Kim Novak’s face, moving from her cheek, to her lips, and up to her nose, before settling on one eye, as disorienting music plays. The camera methodically dissects the face on screen, coldly examining each of her features. As we are directed to her eye, patterns swirl up and disorient us, mimicking the effect of vertigo that Stewart’s character experiences in the film. Vertigo’s credits aren’t just a stylish opening to the film: they’re integral to the way that Ferguson’s illness is used as a physical manifestation of his detached voyeurism: spectatorship that has become out of control and without perspective. It’s a triumph of the merging of theme and spectacle.

Indeed, visually, the film is a tour de force, and one of Hitchcock’s most beautiful and spectacularly arresting pictures. Where Psycho uses black and white photography, all sharp edges and stabbing lines, to emphasise its violence, Vertigo saturates the screen in lurid, gratuitous colour. When Scottie first sees Madeleine in a restaurant, her striking green and black dress and blonde hair are contrasted against the wallpaper that floods the screen with deep, violent red, and as the camera focusses on Madeleine, the screen visibly glows with luminescence. Similarly, in a brief dream sequence that rivals the Salvador Dali scene in Spellbound, colour flashes through Ferguson’s mind in a swirling, chaotic spectacle. The intense visuals of Vertigo reflect Scottie’s own obsession with the visual, and his equation of sexual desire with physical appearance. He compulsively fixates on Madeleine, frequently mistaking women with similar hairstyles or clothes for her. Later, when he meets and begins a relationship with Judie Barton, a woman with an unusually striking resemblance to Madeleine, he tries to remodel her in the former’s image. The fetishisation of spectacle is one of the defining elements of Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and nowhere is it more apparent, or more fully explored than in Vertigo. Moreover, Vertigo offers a commentary on the inherently voyeuristic nature of cinema, and is surely one of the best examples of Laura Mulvey’s theory of the ‘male gaze’, writ large in Jimmy Stewart’s fetishistic obsession with Kim Novak’s Madeleine.

Kim Novak as Madeleine Elster, in one of Vertigo's many painterly compositions.

Vertigo is Hitchcock at his most mature and assured. Psycho is undoubtedly a masterpiece in its own right, but as the marketing campaign for that film underlines, there is an almost puerile delight at the violence and perversion taking place on screen. By comparison, Vertigo engages in the same voyeurism and fetishising of violence as Pyscho, but goes further by offering an analysis of the nature of that voyeurism, to the point where it becomes the film’s central concern. Ironically, given the highly stylised, cinematic world of Vertigo, this film offers a far more psychologically nuanced, textured narrative than any other of Hitchcock’s pictures, presenting us with arguably the most complete vision of Hitchcock’s cinema. Hitchcock’s examination of the relationship between sexual desire, violence, and death, are present in most of his other works, but are never richer, even in the sexually rampant Psycho, than they are here. Strangers on a Train offers a vision of perversion and entrapment, The Birds, inexplicable, unknowable violence and panic, and Psycho, sexuality and transgression. But Vertigo presents us with everything Hitchcock could offer as a director and storyteller. It would be reductive to claim that Hitchcock distils everything about his narrative, visual and thematic concerns into one film. I do think, however, that Vertigo is his most thematically complex, and complete, film, offering us a definitive thesis on the nature of film, and securing Hitchcock’s position as one of cinema’s greatest directors.