Sound off the Rain: talking as art and entertainment in “Singin’ in the Rain”

Singin’ in the Rain (1952), directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, is a musical comedy about the fictitious Monumental Studios’ attempt to copy Warner Bros’ successful “talkie” movie. The movie is, in almost every way, about sound: the film is the story of a studio converting to movies with sound, it is itself a musical, and the second half of the plot concerns the dubbing of sound in a film. Singin’ in the Rain is also unique in using sound as a double metaphor: it is both representative of entertainment, and representative of real art––even as these things are seemingly put into conflict with each other.

Sound as Entertainment

Upon hearing the news that The Jazz Singer is a smashing sensation, studio head R.F. Simpson rushes to turn his in-production movies into talkies. This obviously frustrates the director, whose artistic vision is presumably compromised by this choice. At the very least, he’s clearly not thrilled to be taking on this new challenge. Simpson states that every studio is “getting on the bandwagon”, not even allowing his current productions to finish before making the switch. In this exemplative scene, we see sound in films running directly counter to art. Here, sound is for entertainment. It is for business.

Sound as Art

But sound isn’t only for business. Early in the film, we see the interaction between Don and Kathy, where she insists that silent movies are basically artless––that “when you’ve seen one, you’ve seen ’em all”. This sentiment is echoed later by Don’s friend Cosmo. Kathy, apparently a theater actress, argues that the conventions of silent film make it inherently less artful then theater, because theater has lines––spoken word. Shakespeare, she mentions, was a master of the line, and his plays are definitionally art.

Don, at first, denies this––then quickly comes to accept it. Sound eventually brings the movies closer to theater. Don’s terrible improvising is replaced with more soliloquy-type dialogue. The sound of the talkie makes the film more into art.

So is sound––talking––a force for entertainment, for art, or both? For a film that seems to pit these two forces against each other, I think it’s principle plot topic points to art and entertainment being far more aligned than they seem. I’d be curious to see what other films say about the matter, and what the writers and directors of Singin’ in the Rain say too; this middle-ground, both-can-work approach is interesting, unexpected, and possibly completely based in unreality.