At Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in 1927, the latest silent swashbuckler from Monumental Pictures has its premiere. The film’s stars are Don Lockwood (Gene Kelly) and blonde bombshell Lina Lamount (Jean Hagen). Also introduced is Don’s best friend, studio pianist Cosmo Brown (Donald O’Connor).

Don recounts his rise to fame - rigorous musical training at the conservatory of the arts, etc. - but this contradicts what we see; flashbacks of Don and Cosmo as kids tap dancing in pool halls, or being booed off stage in a burlesque act. As for Lina, when she finally speaks, she’s revealed to have a shrill Brooklyn accent. Fans are unaware she has such a dumb voice, and Don is frustrated by a “cooked up romance” he has to endure with his prima donna co-star for the sake of publicity.

On the way to the after-party, Don is mobbed by fans. To escape, he climbs onto a parked car, jumps onto a trolley and leaps into the front seat of a jalopy driven by Kathy Selden (a perky, 19-year-old Debbie Reynolds). A policeman confirms for Kathy that her passenger is “a bona fide star” and she gives him a ride home. She’s real, and is not impressed by the Lockwood mystique, remarking that movie stars “just make a lot of dumb show.”

At the party, the studio head (Millard Mitchell) plays a demo reel of a “talking picture.” His guests are outraged by the display. No one thinks it will amount to anything. Meanwhile, a girl pops out of a giant cake and it turns out to be Kathy, who participates in a song and dance chorus. Don makes fun of her afterwards and she flings a cream pie at him in retaliation, which hits Lina. Cosmo dead pans that it’s the best she’s ever looked.

The studio head interrupts the filming of the latest Lockwood-Lamont starrer The Duelling Cavalier to announce that The Jazz Singer is a huge hit and they have to jump on the bandwagon by converting their movie into a talkie. Don, who has been searching for Kathy in vain since the party, finally finds her, on the lot. They enter an empty sound stage and share a terrific song and dance duet, “You Were Meant For Me.”

The talking version of The Duelling Cavalier is a disaster, with a test audience howling at Lina’s grating voice and the hilarious technical problems with the sound synchronization. Don fears his career his finished, but Kathy comes up with a solution: make The Duelling Cavalier into a musical! Cosmo demonstrates how they can dub Lina with Kathy’s singing voice instead.

After Don takes Kathy home for the night, what follows is one of the best known sequences in the movies, a nearly five minute performance of “Singin’ In The Rain.” Gene Kelly tap dances through puddles, stands under a drain pipe, swings around a lamppost, and romps across the MGM soundstage in fantastic Technicolor. The studio head endorses the idea of turning The Duelling Cavalier into a musical, but Lina - when she finds out Kathy is on the lot - has other ideas.

Directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, and written by Adolph Green & Betty Comden, who were hired by producer Arthur Freed to write a script around the song library Freed and songwriter Nacio Herb Brown had amassed in the 1920s and ’30s. Except for two songs, the music in the film had all been heard in other musicals, before Freed became a force at MGM, producing Meet Me In St. Louis and An American In Paris among many others.

Singin’ In The Rain performed well at the box office, but was virtually dismissed by the industry. After years of reissues, late show screenings on TV and belated critical accolades, it’s now one of the most celebrated Hollywood films ever made, up there with The Wizard Of Oz and Casablanca. Most consider it the best movie musical ever made, while the AFI recently ranked it #10 on its list of 100 greatest American movies of all time.

In most musicals, you have actors stopping to sing and dance for no apparent reason. In this film - aside from a 14 minute ballet sequence featuring Kelly and Cyd Charisse - the musical numbers move the story forward. The choreography by Gene Kelly is beyond peer, obviously, but somehow evokes such tremendous imagination and joy that anyone, across almost any culture, can enjoy it.

Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds have nice chemistry, with the former Miss Burbank 1948 refusing to let Kelly push her around in their scenes. There’s also a terrific amount of comedy throughout, courtesy Donald O’Connor, who memorably defies gravity as a dancer, running up and doing a backflip off a wall during his “Make ‘Em Laugh” number. This is also a great movie about the movies, satirizing the hysteria during Hollywood’s transition from silent film to talkies.

Perhaps because An American In Paris won Best Picture the year previous, Singin’ In The Rain was nominated for only two Academy Awards - for Jean Hagen’s supporting performance and for Lennie Hayton’s musical score - and won neither. But this is the film that should make anyone who thinks they hate musicals to offer up that, okay, when they’re done this well, they’re all right. Highly recommended.