SINGIN’ IN THE RAIN
Singin’ in the Rain is a 1952 American musical-romantic comedy film directed and choreographed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, starring Kelly, Donald O’Connor, and Debbie Reynolds. It offers a lighthearted depiction of Hollywood in the late 1920s, with the three stars portraying performers caught up in the transition from silent films to “talkies”. The film was only a modest hit when first released, but it has since been accorded legendary status by contemporary critics, and it is frequently regarded as the best movie musical ever made. It topped the AFI’s Greatest Movie Musicals list and is ranked as the fifth-greatest American motion picture of all time in its updated list of the greatest American films in 2007. In 1989, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry. (More from Wikipedia)
Kim Fowley is the child of two relatively obscure actors; his father Douglas Fowley is a character actor who (as Wikipedia says) “is probably best remembered for his role as the frustrated movie director Roscoe Dexter in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)”. As Kim put it, his mother Shelby Payne “was one of the two cigarette girls in The Big Sleep with [Humphrey] Bogart and [Lauren] Bacall”.
(January 2015/1)
